Well… I’ve been experimenting with eBay ads on Wordpress blogs for the past few months.

Believe it or not, the eBay affiliate program might be the most under rated affiliate program on the planet. I won’t get into the details of why that is, as I want to focus on how you can actually display their ads on your website and give you a brief overview of the tools needed to accomplish this.

However, there’s some good money to be made with this method (particularly if you already have content sites with traffic) using PPC and/or free advertising methods such as: article submissions (to directories), US FreeAds, Craigslist ads, Squidoo lens building (and leveraging other Web 2.0 sites as well).

Note: Before you do anything, you need to sign up for ebay’s affiliate program at Commission Junction.

As with most people getting involved with ebay’s affiliate program. I started by using the eBay Editor Kit… It is a simple web-based program that allows you to put together auction listings to publish on your site. Needless to say it is quite limiting and the look of the ads were not what I was looking for (at all).

In any event, I went ahead and purchased a script called eBay Listing Generator. It’s a relatively simple program that allows you to use eBay RSS feeds on your site by adding some lines of code, and uploading a few files to your host. Very simple to use, inexpensive and there’s no database setup necessary for this program which makes setup a cinch. Having said all of this, I have stopped using this script as it has some limitations (particularly in terms of tracking).

Several weeks ago I picked up  a software called Auction Affiliate (developed by the same people who brought us Auto Social Poster for Wordpress).

I know, I should stop spending money on these things… but I can’t help myself <grin>.

In any event, I got it because it allows me to quickly generate Adsense type ads that I can integrate into all of my content (Wordpress) sites.

Auction Affiliate is a server side software, which means it will require you to set it up on one of your hosting accounts (and you will need to set up a MySQL database as well). The setup instructions are pretty decent so there’s no need to worry about it being too complex.

Once set up, you just get your eBay RSS feeds and plug them into the software. It will generate the codes for you and all you need to do is to plug it into your pages (or your post). I use an AdManager for wordpress to insert it into my pages and it’s a breeze.

The great thing about this software is that it also has a companion software called JSClickTracker that can track your ads (even though it’s an RSS feed), which by the way also installs into a seperate MySQL database…

If you’d like to see how the ads appear on the site, check out the following pages on my test site:

Example of a 460×90 Banner Ad Unit

Example of a 300×250 Medium Rectangle Ad Unit

The downside of this program, which many won’t see as a negative, is that since the ads displayed are javascript codes they are not "SEO friendly".

Because of this very reason I started looking at two different programs. One called Affiliate Success: eBay (also know as AS:e in various forums), and another called  Build a Niche Store (often called BANS). The former allowed for the flexibility that I was looking for, while the latter was a much more automated approach to building Niche eBay affiliate sites.

They both had advantages and disadvantages, but after careful deliberation and based on several recommendations I decided to purchase "Affiliate Success: eBay!".

It is quite a bit more complex than Auction Affiliate and as a new owner do not find it terribly easy to use… yet. However, the benefits of this program outweighs the pain in setting it up and learning it (in my opinion). Some of the immediate benefits I see are: it allows for SEO friendly content (the bots will spider the auctions as new content); relatively painless Wordpress integration and also allows for SID tracking (so you know where your clicks are coming from).

AS:e also allows you to create very targeted pages for niche websites and also create niche  ebay stores (using your ebay affiliate code). I’ve yet to implement this into any Wordpress sites, but will start testing it in the next few days…

Needless to say, it’s a bit too early to report on my findings. And as I uncover pros and cons I will report them here… In the future, I  will also offer a more complete review of Auction Affiliate as well as AS:e.

I’m sure there are other tools and scripts that are cheaper, easier, more powerful or what not; but all I can say is that the tools I describe here will allow you to do most of the things that you will require as an affiliate marketer.

Tags: ebay editor kit, as:e, ebay, ebay affiliate, affiliate marketing, ebay listing generator, ebay affiliate program, auction affiliate, affiliate success ebay, affiliate program