Some of you may recall that some time ago I did a post about Making Money with YouTube, Blogger,and Adsense. This method will be somewhat similar.

First of all, this is not a seminar on how to sell things on eBay. If you’re looking for one of those, check out the late night infomercials on TV!

Being a seller on eBay is not the only way to make money with the site. Did you know that eBay also has an affiliate program? Ebay Partner Network (aka EPN) allows you to earn money by sending traffic to eBay auctions and search results. Depending on which site you’re sending traffic to (eBay US, eBay UK, eBay AU, etc), the commission structure will be different. For US, the bottom tier is 50% commission on the final value fee of any auction won by someone you referred to the site. The tracking cookie lasts for 7 days, as far as the window of time in which your referrals can make a purchase and you will still receive a credit. There is also a commission structure for referring new members to eBay. If one of your referrals happens to be new to eBay and they sign up and make a winning bid (or execute a “buy it now”), then it is called an ACRU. The value of the ACRU will vary, and I’m not going to get into all that right now! But it can be anywhere between $1-$50. ACRU tracking lasts for a whole 30 days.

Getting Approved
Not everyone will be approved for eBay Partner Network, since they’re a bit selective about who they approve. If you have an established website and you detail how you’re going to drive traffic to their site in your application, you’ll have a better chance of being approved. I definitely do NOT recommend you mention that you’re planning to use YouTube (although it may not be expressly against their terms, it’s not something they would look favorably upon in an application).

Get Ready to Redirect
Since we’re being selective about how much we reveal about our traffic methods, obviously we’re going to want to disguise the YouTube traffic. You could do this with a service like Tiny URL, but that alone isn’t the cleanest way to go about it. Your best bet is to use your own domain for redirects. If you have hosting for your domain, even better. Some domain registrars will allow you to redirect domains you have registered with them without the need to purchase hosting, but then you’re limited to just one URL you can redirect to. If you have hosting setup, then you could have several portals for redirects. For instance, if your site was “items.com”, you could redirect different things by using sub-directories: “items.com/coffeemugs”, “items.com/mp3players”, etc. If you’re planning on promoting a few different things, this way will be much cheaper than buying a new domain for every product you want to sell!

Note: If you want to take an extra step to be super cautious, you could always use Tiny URL to redirect to your redirect, or vice versa, but that may get a bit complicated.

Promote Something!
This is where your creativeness comes into play. You’re going to need to think of a physical product that you can promote (something for sale on eBay). You don’t need to go and make a whole elaborate video on your own. If you’ve read the other articles on this site you know how to rip videos and edit them, to some degree. Find a video that can be used to promote whatever it is you want to promote. Tweak it if necessary with music or text, drop your redirecting link in the description box, add an annotation that points to that link, and you’re good to go!

The video is obviously a crucial element. If it doesn’t get views, you don’t get clicks, and you won’t make any $. The best way to go about it is to look at which videos are currently very popular or rising to popularity and think of how you could use that video to promote something. If it’s a popular music video, that’s easy. Let’s say Green Day just released a new video. You could link to “Green Day Autographs!” If you click that link you’ll see you’re taken to a list of search results for autographed green day memorabilia (note the redirect). Your customized links can be created from within your EPN account. Think outside the box and see what you can come up with.

A Little Proof
I know that you guys like to see proof of results, so I took a screenshot for you. I’m not going to reveal the video or even the nature of the video, as it is still a growing niche for me. But rest assured, there are still countless ways to game YouTube, and this one has all sorts of possibilities.

The stats you see below are for this month, the campaign that is not blurred out is the one in question. It’s not a ton of money just yet, but the link has only been there for a little over a week. Of course, the video it’s on is doing very well, getting around 8,000 views a day at the moment. We can’t expect every video to perform that well, but if you follow the trends closely and keep at it then you’ll see it’s not that hard to pull off.

Not bad for a video that only took a couple hours to create. If my current ACRU payout was higher, it would obviously be better. The views will of course slow down and taper off soon enough, but I don’t think this particular one has reached its full potential yet. Keep in mind that every time someone clicks through, a cookie is placed in their browser that lasts for 30 days (7 days for auction commissions, 30 days for ACRU’s).

Hopefully you can see the potential. Now get those creative juices flowing and make some money!

One and one last thing…this site has been getting hit pretty hard with spam comments lately. I moderate everything by hand, so sometims I goof up. Earlier I accidentally marked a legitimate comment as spam, and I have no idea who it was from. For all I know there is a way to retreive it but I can’t figure it out…my expertise remains on YouTube! But if you know who you are, please don’t be offended. And please feel free to comment once again!

Tags: internet marketing, make money with ebay, make money with youtube

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 8th, 2009 at 5:27 am and is filed under YouTube Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.