Section 10.2. eBay Affiliates | eBay[c] The Missing Manual

10.2. eBay Affiliates

You love eBay. If you're not bragging to your friends , relatives, and colleagues about the great deals you got on eBay (from your vintage '70s necktie to your hula-girl bedside lamp), then you're bragging about the money you made selling off the junk in your garage. If only you had a nickel for every time you told someone how great eBay is .

If you have a Web site or email newsletter, you can get a lot more than a nickel for putting out the good word. When you become an eBay Affiliate , eBay pays you when visitors to your Web site click a link, register with eBay, and buy or bid on at least one item within 30 days. These referrals earn you from $20 to $45 each, depending on how many people you've referred. In addition, you get paid 10 to 25 cents every time someone coming to eBay through your link makes a bid or uses Buy It Now. Figure 10-11 shows the payment structure.

Figure 10-11. As an eBay Affiliate, the more people you refer, the more you get paid for each referral. In addition, if people bid on or buy items they found from a referral on your site, you get paid for that buyer activity. Bottom line: the more buyers you send to eBay, the more you get paid.

The eBay Affiliate Program is free to join. On the navigation bar, click Services. Under Tools, click the eBay Affiliate Program link. The Join Now link gets you started. After you've read the Affiliate agreement, and given information about your Web site and how to contact you, you get an email with your password and instructions on how to sign in to eBay's affiliates-only site. When you sign in, you'll find banners, links, and search boxes to put on your Web site and direct visitors to eBay.

Note: There are also Affiliate programs for eBay Stores (Section 7.3) and Half.com (Section 8.1.1). Look for them at the bottom of the Join the Program page (http://affiliates.ebay.com/join-program).

As an eBay Affiliate, you can use several different strategies to refer your site visitors to eBay:

Content sites . If you have a Web site, put up eBay links, banners, buttons , and even links to currently running auctions. For best results, display auctions related to your site's content, like auctions for DVDs if you have a movie review site. If you have a merchant site where you sell any kind of product, eBay gives you the tools you need to link to your own eBay auctions.
Newsletters . Editors of email newsletters can include links and banners promoting eBay. Make sure the newsletter is by subscription, though; eBay doesn't let its Affiliates send spam.
Natural search . When Web surfers use a search engine like Google, Yahoo!, AltaVista, and so on, they look first, naturally enough, at the results that appear at the top of their search list. Some eBay affiliates build their Web sites with the specific intention of coming out on top of the search pile. When Web surfers check out one of these sites, they find prominent, tempting links to eBay and eBay auctions.
Paid search . If you've ever used a search engine, you've seen the Sponsored Links set off in a colored box at the top and sometimes to one side of the results list. Those links are ads, and they're there because people have bid on search keywords, paying the search-engine company every time someone clicks their Sponsored Link. You can bid on keywords to direct searchers to your Web site; and then, when thousands of surfers show up at your site, you can pass them off to eBay. Even if you don't have a Web site of your own, you can still pay for an ad to send searchers directly to eBay (and get paid Affiliate bucks for your trouble).

Tip: To learn more about Sponsored Links on Google, or to help boost your Web site in the search engine's rankings, or even to get a full-blown tutorial on Google Groups ( next section), check out Google: The Missing Manual .