How To Make Online Money

I made $100 this week from eBay, and I haven’t sold a thing.

Short version (for the details behind it, keep reading after the outline):

1. Become eBay affiliate. (Free)
2. Keyword Research on Hot Niches
3. Create Squidoo Lens for your Niched Keyword Phrase. (Also Free)
4. Add an RSS module to the Squidoo lens with the product.
5. Normal traffic-driving methods for the lens.
6. Profit!

First, become an eBay affiliate. eBay wants traffic, and if you drive traffic to their site, they give you a part of their profit (fees) on the completion of any sale. AND they pay $25 for people who signup for eBay if they came from you. Signup for the affiliate program at: http://www.ebaypartnernetwork.com

Next, research a product. Ebay itself can be a great resource for this. Visit the Pulse section of eBay at http://pulse.ebay.com to sift through most popular searches in a given category. Then use the Keyword Research tools like SEOPro and Google from the Tools section of this website to find related keyword phrases with high searches and low competition.  For example, Pulse shows that “webkinz” is a popular search term.  Entering “webkinz sale” into Google’s tool (without synonyms) shows how many searches there are…then hop over to Google for a given phrase (like “webkinz for sale cheap”) to find out how much competition there is for that phrase.  I like to have a thousand searches or more per month, with under 10,000 competition for exact match.

Go over to Squidoo and create a lens with the name of the lens being the keyword phrase.  Use dashes or underscores between words.  Choose “do your own thing” for the type of lens, and use some hot related keywords to start with when asked, based on the research you did.  When setting up your Squidoo lens, haven an Intro paragraph.  Do a quick Google Image search for a picture of what it is your lens is about, save the image to your computer, and upload it to your lens.  Then add a ‘My Favorite Link’ module (with the big arrows), and an RSS module, and a YouTube video module.  Go to eBay’s Partner Network site, login, and use their tools to generate a link for the ‘My Favorite Link’, and the RSS generator to create a feed to display in the RSS module (include all the details).  Have the YouTube module pick a video related to your keyword (helps with visitor likability, Squidoo ranking, and bulks up your content with related keywords).

Do your normal traffic driving methods (social bookmarking, forum posts, blog comments, even other squidoo comments, comments on social bookmarking sites, etc.).  Squidoo gets indexed quickly with Google.  If you have other blogs, etc., make sure you link to your new lens.

Squidoo has built-in traffic tools, so no need for Google Analytics.  (I wish I could, though…GA is better…but still, at least you can do SOME tracking!)  Watch visitors hit the site…then those visitors go to eBay and eventually bid/buy/subscribe, and you get a check from eBay (or direct deposit into your PayPal account).

I know this tutorial was very ‘light’ as far as the details, but I’m thinking that you’ll be able to figure it out from here.  Try it out on a few lenses.  Soon you’ll be able to throw a lens together in about 10 minutes or less, and you can try multiple ones.

I’m all about cheap…this could be one of the methods you use to generate some cash without having to lay any money out.

Note: for an example of what a squidoo lens should look like when you’re done: Webkinz Polar Bear
. Admittedly I could have done better on the keywords (like gone for “Buy Webkinz Polar Bear”), but I only did this while I was typing up the post to provide an example, so I didn’t do all the research I would normally do.