This month (this year, actually) has been off to a great start. Since returning from vacation less than 2 weeks ago, I’ve written 3 guest posts (2 are coming soon!) and started 2 new made for eBay websites. This is all in addition to being a full time grad student and full time IT guy!

Needless to say, I’ve been up late doing all kinds of research for class and working on websites that could help me make some money in the long run. I decided to go ahead and work on these 2 new sites because my first 2 websites have been working well for me so far. Nothing stellar considering that I haven’t spent more than $15 on advertising, but enough to make me want to make more websites. If things work out for these 2 new websites and my extrapolations and calculations go as planned, I could stand to make between $300 or more per month without spending a dime on advertising. I know that’s not retirement money, but it certainly is enough money that I could splurge on some geek things like a new monitor or some fancy website reviews or maybe even go to a blogger conference one of these days.

If things proceed as planned, I will of course spend money on advertising in the hopes of getting more visitors to my sites. As we all know, “traffic is the new gold” so the more people visit my sites the more chances I have that they’ll like what they see and will buy something.

I’m sure you’re wondering how I am making my money on eBay, and I’m going to say that I’ve already told you how I do it. In case you missed class that day (shame on you! Sign up for the RSS feed!), here’s a link to my previous post about making money with eBay. I’m sticking to my plan and the plan is panning out so far. I will continue to work on the SEO of my websites and hope that they get more and more organic traffic each day.

Sign up to my RSS feed and stay tuned!

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If you’ve ever had an income stream online, you’ve probably thought to yourself at one point or another that you really should have more than one way to make money, just in case something would happen to your site. These are 5 reasons to do it now:

1. Trends Change

It should be no surprise to learn that we live in a fickle, materialistic society. People want the latest and greatest things at a moment’s notice, especially when it comes to technology. If you have a website that revolves around technology, you’d better be prepared to act quickly and serve those people who may no longer be interested in your product line.

The same goes with many other niches; health, fashion, automotive, etc. If you are sitting still in an ever changing business environment, a new trend will come up and your site will be left in the dust.

2. Competition Changes

Remember the old way we used to obtain music? Going to the store, shopping the aisles, finding the right genre, looking at shrink wrapped packages (On a side note, why do they have to make CD’s so hard to open? I wonder if a music exec has ever had to open one. I doubt it, else they’d realize how dumb that packaging is.), opening up the CD and popping it in to our CD players or portable Discman’s.

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, comes iTunes and revolutionizes how we listen to music. Now we can buy individual songs or entire albums with the click of a button. Music executives didn’t believe in iTunes or digital delivery, now they’re crying foul and wondering why they’re not selling any more CD’s.

The same can be applied to your website. Things could be going along just fine, then all of a sudden a new competitor arises. You can do one of two things: Prepare your business to tackle the opponent or sit there like a lame duck and blame others when thinss start to go wrong. I suggest the first option.

3. Google Changes

Google is a business baromter of sorts. They claim that the good stuff shows up first and the bad stuff is not displayed at all. Many web business live and die by the rankings given to them by Google.

If you currently just have one site for one product, then you’d better be prepared for a rocky road ahead. Google’s algorithm changes occasionally and if you are not prepared to take the hit, then you’ll be in trouble when changes head your way.

Google search rankings mean everything to some businesses, and unless you’re really good at obtaining one of the top spots, you’ll have to rely on luck and little else to make money online. Prepare yourself, make good websiteS and have a solid business plan to make you money for the long run

4. Stuff Happens

Another reason to have more than one income plan is that, in all honesty, things happen out there that are beyond your control. For example, if you had a site that was somehow making money selling Enron gear, the day they went out of business you too would have been out of business. If you sell health products and the FDA changes stance on them, you’d better be prepared to take a hit.

5. More is Better

If you’ve manage to stay out of trouble, either through luck or preparation, you should diversify your net portfolio because in all honesty, we’re in this for the money. More income streams = more earning potential. More earning potential = more money in the long run.

Prepare yourself, make GOOD QUALITY websites about your niche products, and stick to your guns. Always grow and learn in order to position yourself ahead of your competitors.

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The problem is, what if you don’t have any goods to sell? What if you don’t have a wholesale account with anyone? What if you’re just an average Joe wanting to make a buck off of eBay? Although this seems like a hard question to answer, it’s really not. If you’re like me and are not a manufacturer and you don’t have any inventory to liquidate, then the best option available is to start a niche website made for eBay.

What is a Niche Website?

Do you know what a niche is? Merriam-Webster defines the word niche as: “a specialized market”. In other words, a niche is something very specific tailored to a particular group of people. For example, a niche could be “resistance exercise bands”. This niche is very specific in that it targets those people looking to buy resistance exercise bands and nothing else. The type of people looking at these items could be gyms or individuals looking for resistance bands for home or travel. This specific niche could have an eBay store made for it that would sell various kinds of resistance bands.

The first step in creating a niche website is, obviously, to define your niche. You need to think about what sells well on eBay, what people are looking for on the search engines, and how much money you could stand to make on certain items.

In order to find out what sells on eBay, you can do one of several things. You could use your intuition, you could read the news about hot products, or…you could take the easy way out and check out eBay Pulse. Ebay Pulse lists several of eBay’s most sought after items in addition to providing you with trends of what has been selling well over certain periods.

Set Up Your Affiliate Account

After looking at eBay Pulse and deciding on a product, you need to establish an affiliate account with eBay. With an affilaite account you can earn money by either having people sign up for eBay or by having people buy stuff from your eBay store. We’ll stick to the second thing, but once in a while you’ll have people sign up for eBay through you for an added bonus.

eBay’s payout is pretty generous, I receive 50% of eBay’s cut for the first $99 you sell through your website, and the percentage grows from there. Check out eBay’s payout schedule for more details.

Build Your Website

Now comes the fun part. You already have a winning product selected. You already have your eBay affiliate account ready to roll. At this point, you can start making a website that will maximize your earnings on eBay. But how do you build a winning website? There are several options, of course.

Firstly, you need a good domain name. Domain names are so cheap that you can get one for about $6. Check out Godaddy.com to sign up for a new domain and start earning. Think of domain names relevant to your niche. If you’re doing exercise bands, try to get exercisebands.com or some variation. Use your imagination and do your best to lock in a .com domain name.

Next thing you need to do is to have your own web host. Whatever you do, don’t use a free hosting service. In addition to hurting your rankings on the search engines, free hosting services are often unreliable and give your site less credibility. Sign up for a solid web host like Hostgator.com where you can have unlimited domains, unlimited databases, super easy software installation through Fantastico and much more for as little as $4.95 per month. I use Hostgator.com and have not yet been let down! Their support is incredibly fast and the service is excellent. If you don’t have a host yet, sign up for Hostgator.com right now!

Once you have a domain name and a web host, you can build your website. The easiest way to accomplish this is by automatically pulling in live auctions from eBay to your website. Not only does this give your website a ring of authenticity, but it also provides your customers with relevant auctions where they can buy goods straight from your website and generate your commissions. Believe it or now, this is MUCH easier than it sounds! With Hostgator.com, you can install Wordpress in under 2 minutes. All you need after Wordpress is a nifty plugin called PHPBay Pro. PHPBay Pro plugs in to eBay and pulls in live auctions automatically. For only $39, you can start building your eBay empire.

PHPBay Pro is extremely easy to use and set up. Wade, PHPBay Pro’s developer is very helpful and responsive through email and helps you through any questions you may have.

Check out one of my made for eBay stores. This store is targeted to those looking for cheap digital frames. I found a domain name, have it hosted at Hostgator.com and am now making a few bucks every day with the help of PHPBay Pro. If you haven’t purchased yourself a Christmas gift, this is the package that I recommend. It will pay you back in dividends if you do your homework and work the system.

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This month I changed the title from “Income Report” to “Report” because, well, this site didn’t make any money and my other sites only brought in a combined total of $28. That’s a lot less than I was expecting considering that my previous two months I had been earning around $250 a month.

The cause for this decline in income is mostly due to my Google Dance. On Monday, my top earning site was ranking in at 773 for a given keyword. Yesterday when I checked it was up to 35. Hopefully it means that my site is earning its stripes, but I really don’t know what causes it to be on the top 10 and then to drop off the face of the planet. I’ve checked the supplemental index for my site in early November and the site was doing very badly with roughly 90% of the site in the supplemental index. I’m still not sure how to make the site have more content in the “real” index, but I’ve spruced up my robots.txt file and changed some things around with the site and now it’s at 87% in the supplemental index.

I am still not happy with this 87% and would like to achieve 40% or less in the supplemental index and will focus my efforts this month into making provisions for this. Additionally, this month I want to start monetizing this site by selling ad space or by including more affiliate links on my nearly daily posts.

Traffic

Even though this month I brought in less than 30 bones, I would have say that this month has been a success. That’s not the optimist in me, but the fact that while working full time and working on a dual master’s degree and doing all kinds of other things, I still managed to write nearly daily for this site and saw traffic grow by leaps and bounds. For the month of November, traffic for this site nearly doubled from 297 unique views in October to 540 uniques for November. Growth is good and I must say that December is already off to a rockin’ start.

From this month on, I will include a snapshot of my traffic in order to compare growth on different metrics. Here is a quick snapshot of my statistics, according to http://www.xinureturns.com/:

As you can see, this site has a Google Pagerank of 2, not bad for a site that is less than 3 months old! . Secondly, this site has a Technorati authority of 10 which I think means that there are 10 other blogs who have “favorited” me and added to my street cred.

I submitted my site to DMOZ at the time of inception, but I still have not been indexed nor do I expect to be indexed. Apparently you have to pay money to be included in DMOZ although it’s supposed to be a free site.

The rest of these stats deal with how different search engines index and track this website’s progress. Yahoo! gives me a whole lot of backlinks while Google only gives me one. Strange that there’s such a big difference but I guess that’s just the way it is. None of the other stats really matter all that much other than the Technorati number so I’ll conclude this section at that.

Future (i.e. December’s) Plans

This month has already been busy. I’m in the midst of finals at school (my last one is due Monday by 5pm on “Categorization and Organization”…if you know anything about facets leave me a comment! ) so after then I’ll be able to focus on my 3 new websites that I’ve launched! These sites are eBay stores, but I am going to be branching them out to include non-eBay items. I won’t give anything away yet, but these sites have been fun to make and I hope that promoting them will be easier than my health site.

Conclusion

After it’s all said and done, I think November has been good. Visits to the site nearly doubled, I got 3 new sites ready to roll, purchased a few domain names and made nice progress on figuring out how to monetize this site. John Chow continues to be a rockstar but I guess I can be one too if I had 297,000 visitors per month. I’m chasing you John, and I hope that next year I can be closer to you in terms of traffic and income!

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