Who among you like and use eBay for an affiliate partner. For me, eBay has been very good to me with concerns to affiliate marketing. They have been consistent and have proved themselves as being very reliable. The problem that I have found in using the program is that when using a blog format, they just did not have many tools that would transpose live auctions into a format that would fit into a blog post.
This kind of bugged me for a while, and a one time I thought about writing a plugin that would solve this problem. But as I have said many of times, I am very lazy when it comes to writing new code. I just don’t want to spend the time to code anything new. One of my downfalls…
Well, last weeks my prayers were answered with a slick little plugin called AuctionThumbs. This little plugin allows the user to pull in live auctions into blog posts. The plugin works off of tag-based matching randomly selects tags from your post and matches the tags against Ebay inventory.
One other great thing about this plugin is Very Easy Setup
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Drop the files in the plugin directory
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Activate it from within the Wordpress plugin page
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Use the AuctionThumbs admin page to add your Ebay tracking numbers (campaigns), default search criteria, size and count of thumbnail images, etc.
You’re Done!
Get Auction Thumbs Now And See What It Can Do For You!”
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October 20th, 2008 at 4:51 am
Is this similar to PHPBay? Its not free, but they have the lite version for free. can be found at http://www.phpbay.com/products.html
October 20th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
AC, it is conceptually similar, but PHPbay appears to be a great tool for creating “stores” where significant amounts of blog real estate is dedicated to the product display. It is probably configurable to be flexible in screen real estate use, but by the looks of their sample sites from customers, stores are what it looks like it is usually used for.
Auction Thumbs was designed for a different purpose. It is usually used to display a single row of thumbnails in the post footer or column of thumbnails in the sidebar as a complement to your blog content.
I designed it to accompany quality blog posts and be relevant to the content but not be too in-your-face with the shopping aspect. 65% of my traffic on my main blog is from search, so the site visitors clicked from the SERPS based on my content being exactly what they’re looking for. They read quality content and see products related to it in the footer and sidebar. Your *new* site visitors are your best affiliate customers – they’re in shopping mode, actively searching via the engines. Why not show them related products when they land in your content?
PHPbay can be used within a blog, too, but I wanted a solution that didn’t make my blog look too much like I’m forcing shopping on the readers. There is no text accompanying the thumbnails unless the user mouses over the image. This makes it conservative on real estate and reduces blog clutter.
I also designed it for two types of site admins:
1) The blog admin who wants to set it up and forget it – put it on autopilot by having Auction Thumbs chose Ebay items for a particular post based on your post tags.
2) The blog admin who wants to tune the relevancy of the thumbnails at the post level with powerful search criteria control.
Both are possible with Auction Thumbs and can be done on a post-by-post basis. One approach is to set it on automatic for the bulk of your site, but fine-tune the posts where your heaviest traffic lands.
Hope that helps.
John
January 11th, 2009 at 10:23 am
Thank you John for the information about Auction Thumb It is ust what I am looking for to add to my blogs.
May 24th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
I dont normally post comments to blogs but I have to say this is a great post and a big thanks for this blog post.
August 11th, 2009 at 10:44 am
nice info sharing. Thank’s for informatif posting ^_^
May 8th, 2010 at 4:50 am
Success in any business will not happen overnight. It still needs time and work to get your affiliate marketing strategy up and running. However, if you are determined, decided and prepared to give it your all, affiliate marketing will be the perfect career chance for you.