Well kids, it’s about time for another episode of DIY Dollars. Yes - here is where you will find Action! Adventure! and instructions on how to make some money online.

This week: how to use your WordPress blog to make money with eBay auctions, and do it almost automatically.

What you will need to begin:

1. A hosted WordPress site. (If you have a good webhost with an up-to-date Fantastico, it’s basically as easy as clicking “Install” and your WordPress site it ready for use.) You need to have the capability to use plugins and the freedom to fully customize your site and I don’t believe you can do this with a wordpress.com site.

2. An eBay affiliate account. You can become an eBay affiliate by signing up with CommissionJunction and then joining their affiliate program.

3. A good niche. Your niche should obviously be something that has a lot of eBay auctions that relate to it.

4. Some time. (You can thank me for saving you some time by laying out the plan for ya already - but I ain’t gonna do everything!) This’ll take a bit of work so you want to escape to a place of solitude, grab a supply of snacks, and get to work…after reading how I did it of course.

I decided that I wanted to make a new website this week, and I wanted to do something different. And I wanted it to provide me some income.

Since the eBay affiliate program seems to be not only lucrative but also full of endless possibilities, it got me to thinking: why don’t I just make a blog out of eBay items - with each item linked with my aff ID?

I had experimented with this a bit on one of my other sites, Vargas Pinups. That site was an experiment that resulted in tons of unexpected traffic (like 2000 to 4000 visitors a day right off the bat). Since I was getting so much traffic, I tried different affiliate programs - one of which was eBay. It was perfect: Vargas calendars and playing cards and related items are being sold on eBay, they’re interesting to look at, and not only would my visitors not mind looking at these auctions - they’re likely to bid.

So in some of my posts I put a link to an auction. I even made one post out of an auction. These auctions got a goodly amount of clicks, and a week and a half later I was ecstatic to have made a grand total of $0.54 because it so happened someone bid on an item and won it - after having gotten to the auction via my aff link.

You know what I thought next: “How can I multiply these results?” and the answer I came up with was two-fold - 1) Do this on a larger scale and 2) Automate it as much as possible.

Which brings us here. I had a few domain names laying around, so I picked one up off the floor and dusted it off. It was kind of neglected, but hey if a .info can get at least 2000 visits a day, why not this forgotten old .com? So I took vintagehalloweencostume.com and turned it into my next site.

First, I went to one of my Lunarpages accounts (my personal favorite webhost) and in the cPanel I created a new “Addon Domain” and put in vintagehalloweencostume.com. I also went to my registrar account and changed the nameservers to my Lunarpages account.

Next, I clicked on Fantastico in my cPanel and created a new WordPress installation for vintagehalloweencostume.com. You might want to know the next steps I take when I make a new blog, because I know you’re bored at home tonight with nothing to do and you love my writing, so here’s what I do pretty much standard:

• Change the permalink structure to /%category%/%postname%/
• Turn off the WYSWYG editor
• Enable Akismet
• Delete hello.php
• Install Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin
• Install XML Sitemap builder plugin
• Install WPAds

On this particular site I’m not using WPAds, because I’m trying out an AdSense-centric template called ProSense (get it from DoshDosh) and it just puts the ads everywhere automatically.

I then wrote an article about Halloween costumes, and I scraped an article or two from a defunct site as well as another site I found. I posted them up as pages.

Then, the real work began: I needed to accomplish two tasks which weren’t exactly easy at first. I needed to create an RSS feed of eBay listings that all relate to my niche of 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s Halloween costumes, and I needed that feed to include my affiliate ID in each link. “Wow! What a challenge! How’d you do that???”

Well it’s kinda like that scene in one of the Indiana Jones movies where the bad guy comes at Indy and he’s a master sword warrior who’s got two swords and he’s twirling them around like crazy. You think Indiana Jones is gonna have a real challenge, but he just takes out a gun and shoots the guy dead. That’s what happened here, too.

Here’s what I did (you can too!!). I went to eBay and selected the Advanced Search. In the keywords I entered “ben cooper costume” since Ben Cooper was the main purveyor of cheesy cheap plastic costumes back in the day. At the very bottom of the page is the option to show Affiliate Tracking Information. I did that, selected Commission Junction, and entered the PID associated with my new site. Then, by the power of Grayskull…SEARCH!

And…we’re not done yet. This ordinary-looking search does nothing for anyone. So what I did (shhh…here’s the secret) is I went to the bottom of the page (where secret goodies are often found) and I clicked on the RSS button. Guess what happens when you do that? You get an RSS feed that now had your aff ID embedded in all the links! So I right-clicked on that long feed URL, used FeedBurner to shorten it…and saved it for my next phase. (Make as many feeds as you want for specific keywords by the way. You want to separate the searches for placing them in post categories.)

The next phase is getting WordPress to take a feed as input for a series of posts. There are a few ways to (supposedly) accomplish this feat, but guess what? There are some retard plugin writers out there, and there are also some good plugin writers but they charge money. I don’t wanna pay money - especially not without knowing if this will work yet. So I searched, found a bunch of free solutions, tried them all, hacked with a couple of them, and ended up finding only one that works to my liking - FeedWordPress.

No you babies I’m not gonna give you all the instructions on how to set it up (haha) - just do what the man says on the FeedWordPress site, and it’ll work. It’s almost painless, in fact. You then need to setup categories for the feeds you set up. So in my case I have a Ben Cooper category and a Collegeville category, because these are two costume companies. Add your feeds, place them in the appropriate category, and set your options which should include “Publish Syndicated Posts Immediately” and “Don’t Create New Categories”. (For permalinks, I’m not sure which option is best: experiment. I still am.) Oh yeah, each feed should be set to update on schedule.

Now, you almost have an automated blog - with one thing left to do: set a cron job so that it hits the update URL on a regular basis (I have mine for every 12 hours). You can do this via your cPanel as well - just do exactly what it says on the FeedWordPress site for instructions on what to do in your cron job.

So, what’s left? Well I’ve already talked about various SEO stuff in other posts - so I’m not gonna beat a dead horse. But you need to get the word out and get traffic to your site now that it’s being updated daily with new auctions (in the form of posts).

Here are some tips/plans of mine for this site:

• Add to the description of the more interesting auctions’ posts. This will make it seem more like a “real” blog and probably engage readers.
• Make a nice header graphic.
• Periodically make regular blog posts to supplement the daily updated auction posts. Again, this will turn this into a real blog.

This site is less than four days old, but already a few pages are indexed in Google.
The day after launch I had 154 unique visitors and a couple dozen clicks. Will those clicks make any money? It’s going to take a few days to see due to the nature of eBay. But there are collectors out there who bid on items like this, and my site helps them find what they want. So we’ll see.

There are a LOT of niches to explore - find one, and try this. I hope this post has provided you a useful guide on how to do this, and I’d love to hear how you approach it and how much success you find.

Stumble it!