There is a ton of noise out there about how difficult it is to get accepted as an eBay affiliate.  The problem I see with new people trying to get into the eBay affiliate program is that they are trying to do it with niche sites that are clearly built for Adsense.  First of all, there isn’t anything wrong with sites made for Adsense.  I have plenty of sites made for the specific purpose of drawing search engine traffic in the hopes that visitors will click my adsense ad and go away!  Like I said, nothing wrong with that.

Having said that there are plenty of niches out there that call for a different way of making money.  Adsense is by far the easiest way of making money online but that doesn’t mean it’s the best (most profitable) way.  The eBay Partner Network offers a different avenue for earning affiliate revenue similar to Amazon’s affiliate program, the difference being that many find ePN to be more profitable.  But to earn money with ePN we first need to get approved as an affiliate!

When you are signing up for ePN you are asked to include a website that will be manually reviewed before you are accepted.  This means that before you even think about applying you need to have a niche that you have determined to be profitable, you need to have purchased a domain name, you need to have installed the CMS of your choice, (ahem… WordPress.. ahem…) and you also need to have content on that site.  The other important factor is whether or not there are actual eBay listings for the niche/product this site is targeting.  If your niche is about home loans but there aren’t any relevant eBay listings for home loans, then why on earth would eBay want you promoting their listings?  It has to make sense.

Now, we are talking about your first ePN site here.  This is the one eBay will actually be looking at to judge whether or not they want you promoting their listings, so the site  needs to be tip top.  This site should have a theme installed that has something to do with the topic, the posts should have pictures, and the topic should be very broad.  If you have a niche that is too specific then you will not have enough topics to discuss and thus you will have less pages/posts on the site.  These pages/posts should have review style content that is unique and helpful.  The kind that search engines and, *GASP*, visitors love.  A good 300 words or more per page/post should suffice if you have fifty or so posts.  Sounds like a lot of work right?  Again, you can count on being reviewed by a real live person who is going to base your approval on your website so it needs to be an engaging site that a visitor would want to visit more than once.  I am not saying all of my own sites are like this (even ones that display eBay ads) but the website I included in my application was.  After I was approved to use eBay ads I could throw them up on whatever site I pleased.

I hope this post helps you get approved soon so you can start getting paid from eBay too!  In my next post I will talk about the best way to not only convert visitors to clicks but, more importantly, how to make those clicks earn you a good epc (earnings per click.)