Online Charity Fundraising | PTO Fundraising as an eBay Affiliate

PTO Fundraising as an eBay Affiliate

Posted on August 22, 2010
Filed Under eBay, eBay Affiliate Marketing, Fundraise Ideas, Make Money Online, PayPal, Website Fundraising | Leave a Comment

PTO (Parent Teacher Organization) or PTA (Parent Teacher Association) fundraising can be as simple as a bowling fundraiser or candle fundraiser and as complicated as website publishing.  If you’ve followed this website’s previous articles on creating and publishing a PTO or PTA Fundraising website and installing a PayPal Donate Button on your 501(c)3 nonprofit club fundraising website, you may be ready to bump your efforts to the next level, with eBay affiliate marketing.  First, let’s recap what we’ve previously covered, so we can all get caught up!  Here are the links to the articles reviewing the basic steps.

How to Add a PayPal Donate Button to Your NonProfit Website

  1. First Register with eBay
  2. How to Hold Charity Auctions on eBay
  3. Add a PayPal Donate Button to Your NonProfit Website
  4. PayPal InformationRead about placing a PayPal donate button on your website.
  5. Make Money for Charity with PayPal

How to Earn Money Online as an eBay Affiliate

If you’re ready for the next step with fun fundraising online for your PTO, follow along with me here for the explanations and step by step instructions on how to start making money online as an eBay affiliate.  At the time of this article writing, eBay is using a “value click” system.  It’s a hybrid between pay-per-click like Google Adsense, and pay-per-action like Commission Junction.  They’ve changed their affiliate payouts within the last year, they used to be commission based with commissions for referrals to open a new eBay account as well.  To sum up the current situation, eBay uses a value click program.  They use a formula which includes how many clicks you sent them by which keywords, to which page you sent your visitors, if they bought something, if that something was what they originally searched for and was referred by your site for, etc.  Pretty complicated.  You can go for days sending thousands of clicks and earning zero per click only to see it jump to one dollar each click for several days, then back to five cents a click for several months.  You can use the reports to see exactly what people bought….  In theory, if you had a website about “buy expensive porshe”, sent your visitors to eBay where they bought expensive porshe’s you could make a big pot of money as an eBay affiliate.  You can also make money sending a ton of visitors there to buy ear plugs, and if the traffic and purchases are steady you can make a steady income…  But I digress…  Feel free to purchase an expensive porshe on eBay through my affiliate link!  Find a great deal on a Porsche on eBay! Cha-ching!

  1.  Choose your publish location the same way you did using the articles above for an eBay Donate button.  In that step you opened an eBay account and a PayPal account.  Now it’s time to open one additional account, with eBayPartnerNetwork, which is their affiliate marketing program.
  2. Plan your web page that will use eBay ads.  For this article we have selected an example to show you of how an article idea was developed with eBay in mind.  It’s a brief article about vw’s, which you can most certainly find on eBay.  Review the article here:  Used Volkswagen  You’ll notice that the concept of eBay as a great place to find a used volkswagen beetle and vw camper vans for sale is developed, and links to those pages on the eBay Motors website are given.  We’re going to do these steps next.
  3. Write your article and describe the product your are marketing, and explain the benefits of purchasing the items on eBay.  In your draft, explain that you can “click here” to see these exact listings on the eBay site.  You’re going to create the text link, and insert it right into the sentance, and cutting out the words you’ve written as your link anchor text.  (eBay includes your link anchor text in it’s html code for you.)
  4. Next log into your ebay account and find the items you’d like to market.  Dial your search in as specifically as possible.  Don’t link to the eBay home page, link to an internal page that displays accurate search results.  Take a few minutes and play on the eBay site to find the best product descriptions.  Once you’re on the exact page, copy the url to your clipboard.  (I use “control C” but it may be different for you.)
  5. Now log into your eBay affiliate account.  We’re going to begin the process now to obtain the html (or javascript) affiliate code, so that when someone clicks on our ad and visits eBay, there is the potential for income for us.  We’re going to create the link for the used volkswagen on eBay we mentioned above.
  6. I’ve located the used volkswagen page on eBay motors.  Try to find it too, this will be on your eBay page, not your affiliate page.  If you’re going to show current listings you don’t need to be logged into eBay.  If you’re going to talk about the past sales prices of used volkswagens on eBay, you’ll need to be logged into your eBay account.  (That’s how you can see the advances search paramaters, which show completed listings.)
  7. Now I’ve copied the url that’s in my browser window, the page for the used volkswagen on eBay.  Take a moment and copy that url also.  Don’t try to write it down, it could be about 50 characters long!
  8. Go to the eBay Partner Network site, and once logged in, click on the “Tools” tab.
  9. Now click on the “Link Generator” icon.
  10. Select the drop down link for “eBay”.
  11. Click the drop down link for ‘Select a Program”.  (If you haven’t already applied to any country sites on eBay, you’ll need to do that.  There’s no commission for sending traffic to one of the eBay sites you’re not registered for…)
  12. I’ve selected eBay US for the United States.  Underneath that select the link type.  Don’t send traffic to the Home Page, eBay doesn’t consider that “targeted” and you won’t make any money.  Select the button for “Custom URL.”
  13. Paste your link (the page we found on eBay Motors for the used volkswagen for sale) into the box.  Since they already have the beginning part of the link there, erase that before you paste yours.
  14. Click the “Create New Campaign” button.  You should see a pop up box with a yellow line across the top.  Sometimes you have to click a couple of times to see it.  If you don’t see it you may have a browser problem or need java or something frustrating like that.  (good luck, I should have mentioned the step of having a slice of chocolate cake nearby for this particular problem…)
  15. Type in something that describes where you will place your ad…  When you make any sales down the road, you can look back at the data.
  16. Do the same thing with Custom Id.  I usually write the website an post where the ad is placed.  Remember, and this is really really important!  ONLY PLACE YOUR ADS ON SITES YOU OWN!  I interpret this to mean don’t spam on Twitter, etc.  You can research this more and let us know….
  17. The link text is where you’re going to type in your anchor text.  So if your ad is the first word of a sentence, capitalize the first letter.  If you’re going to place it in the middle of a sentance, you may not need to capitalize it.
  18. Now click on “Generate Link” and you’re almost done…
  19. At this point it shows you in pale blue what your text link will look like.  You also have the choice of javascript and html.  I don’t know why, but I select html…  Picked that up somewhere along the line, right or wrong it’s what I do… 
  20. Highlight and copy the code, and paste it in your html editor on your webpage in the sentance where you want the anchor text.   (If that doesn’t make sense to you grab someone that publishes websites, and have them do it for you…)  Publish your page, and take a look.  Find a used volkswagen on eBay, take a look!
  21. OK, that’s it for the steps, did it work for you, or did you need that chocolate cake?  Please post a comment and let me know.  Feel free to use html code to display the url in the comment box, we’re not that fancy here.  Then we can all visit and admire your work.  Once you’ve completed the text anchor link assignment for eBay affiliate marketing, please let me know.  We still have to cover banners and widgets!

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