Guide: Averaging $100/day Promoting Ebay/phpBay Blogs through Craigslist

I've found reviews and discussion of the phpBay plug-in on DP, but I thought I'd share my specific method for funneling Craigslist.org buyers to Ebay auctions using phpBay Pro blogs.

What you need to get started:
• Web hosting – I use Hostgator and I’ve been very happy with them. Whatever you already have will work just as well.
• A registered domain that has something to do with your product promotion. In this example, I’ll be using www.nintendowiistuff.com as I’m promoting Nintendo Wii console systems, games, and accessories.
• The latest install of WordPress
• A copy of the phpBay Pro WP plug-in
• An affiliate account with eBay, which is run through Commission Junction (which you probably already have an account with)
• Some type of auto-responder (*optional – only if you want to automate responding to your Craigslist ads, or you could just respond to them manually). I use the Easy Auto Responder from www.ezadsuite.com
• An idea of products that are sold on eBay that you want to promote. In my example I’ll be using Nintendo Wii consoles, games, and accessories

First steps – Building the blogs and filling them with affiliate-link auctions:

1. Since I want to use just one domain to promote eBay auctions in multiple cities, I create sub-directories for those cities. So if my domain is www.nintendowiistuff.com, I’ll create subdirectories for Chicago (www.nintendowiistuff.com/chicago), Seattle (www.nintendowiistuff.com/seattle) and so on. However many cities you want to advertise your ebay auctions in…create that many subdirectories of your top domain.
2. Here’s where the initial labor comes in. Since phpBay Pro can only use 1 zipcode per WordPress install…you’ll have to actually install a full copy of WordPress and the phpBay Pro plug-in for each subdirectory (city). So, go ahead & upload/install WP in each subdirectory. Also upload the phpBay Pro plug-in to each subdirectory in the plugins folder.
3. Once you’ve got WordPress uploaded and installed in every subdirectory…then it’s time to start customizing and populating each subdirectory blog with your eBay auctions using phpBay Pro.
a. Let’s say your first city was Chicago. You’ll want to title your blog appropriately (“Nintendo Wii Stuff in the Chicago area” for example). This is in the “Options” section of WordPress.
b. Now what I have done with NintendoWiiStuff.com is to create separate pages for each product category. I have a “Console Systems/Bundles” page (which is my default page), a “Skins/Faceplates” page, a “Controllers” page, an “Adapters” page, and a “Games” page. I find it more clear to organize your blogs into product sections using pages instead of just using posts/categories. You can do it either way, but for this example it will be using pages.
c. Once you have your pages created (which correspond to your different product categories), then you need to populate each of them accordingly through phpBay Pro. The instructions provided with the phpBay Pro plug-in walk you through finding the category code from the eBay URL and using that (along with the other post options) to narrow down the listings that will appear on your page.

As an example for Nintendowiistuff.com – for the “Console Systems/Bundles” page, this is what my phpBay Pro tag looks like:

[phpbay]Nintendo wii, 100, 62054, “”[/phpbay]​

Explanation:
• [phpbay] and [/phpbay] – encapsulate the options for the phpBay listings
• Nintendo wii – keywords that the auction title has to contain
• 100 – the # of auctions I want to list on that page
• 62054 – the specific eBay category # for Nintendo Wii systems (optional, but I would try to find it out as it helps to narrow down your listings and keep you from using a bunch of keywords to filter with)
• “” – this 4th field is also optional. Here you would put keywords that cannot be in the auction title. It’s a way to filter out auctions you don’t want from this category, basically. But since eBay has a specific category # for Nintendo Wii systems (62054) then I didn’t need to use filtering keywords here

Another example would be the “Games” page ,which has this phpBay tag:

[phpbay]wii, 100, 62053, xbox 360 nes snes gamecube gameboy ps3 ps2 playstation ds[/phpbay]​

Explanation:
• [phpbay] and [/phpbay] – encapsulating tags
• Wii – the auction title has to have this keyword in it
• 100 – the # of auctions I want to list on this page
• 62053 – the eBay category # (however, this is not specific to Wii games so I have to specify filtering keywords in the 4th field)
• Nes snes gamecube gameboy (etc) – these are my filtering keywords. If the auction title has any of these in it, then it won’t be included in my listing

Your pages should now be populated with auctions based on your phpBay tag options.
d. phpBay Pro requires that you put in your PID (from Commission Junction) and it automatically takes care of formatting the links to the auctions with your affiliate ID. You don’t have to do much of anything, really. Also in the phpBay options page within WordPress will be where you specify other options, one being the proximity to a certain zip code. This allows you to limit your auctions to ones within, say, 50 miles of the metro Chicago zip code.

**This is important because once we start posting ads on Craigslist and auto-responding with these blogs…they need to correspond to the city in which you’re posting on Craigslist. Otherwise you’ll have your ads flagged/deleted and your accounts banned very quickly. There’s a good chance of people still getting annoyed with this approach and reporting your ads to admins or just flagging them themselves. But at least by taking these extra steps…you’re offering up products in the correct city and people are less likely to think you’re just spamming nationwide with eBay auctions and that you’re an actual seller**.


Start posting your ads to Craigslist:

Now that you have these blogs set-up and filled with city-specific eBay ads, you need to start getting interested buyers to look at them. I’ve found that Craigslist.org (with all of its problems and over zealous users) is a great place for this. Here’s what I do…

1. Create a Gmail account that has something to do with your domain and the specific city. For the Nintendowiistuff.com domain and the Chicago subdirectory/blog, I might create chicagonintendowiistuff@gmail.com perhaps. Whatever you want to do here.
2. Create a Craiglist account using that email for the account. There are tools/scripts out there to create Craigslist accounts quickly by just typing in the CAPTCHA, so you can use those if you want to bulk up for this step. I’m not going to cover that here.
3. Open up your specific city blog (www.nintendowiistuff.com/chicago for example) and find some auctions that are ending within a day or 2. You don’t, obviously, want to waste time creating an ad on Craigslist for an auction that’s going to end within the hour. Although it technically doesn’t matter (since you’re going to email them the link to the main blog, not to a specific auction)…they may get pissed that the specific product/auction isn’t available when they follow your link and (again) flag your ad(s) on Craigslist. So you’ve found an auction that’s ending in, say, a day and it’s got some nice pictures…descriptive text…etc. You’re basically just going to copy/paste that into the Craigslist ad. You can save some of the pictures from the eBay auction and upload them into the Craigslist ad if you like (if you think pictures will help – which I find they generally do).
4. Make sure that the only form of communication for them to use is the hidden, random Craigslist email address that’s assigned to that post (which will be sent to your Gmail account you created the account with). Obviously you just want all email for the ads in this city being directed to 1 Gmail account that you can either (a) manually respond to or (b) set-up an autoresponder for.
5. Post the ad.
6. DON’T IMMEDIATELY POST ANOTHER AD FOR THE SAME PRODUCT IN THE SAME CITY.
7. DON’T POST THE SAME EXACT AD ANYWHERE ELSE (another city)
8. Wait for at least 10 minutes (or longer) and then post another ad. This is where you just sort of have to experiment because posting massive amounts of ads on Craigslist has gotten tricky. Some things you can do if you’re really wanting to churn out the ads in a hurry:
a. Rotate through several different email accounts per city that you post ads in
b. Renew your IP address between each post (this is excessive, but some say that doing this in combination with using different accounts is a fool proof way to do mass posting without getting your ads flagged/deleted). You can get a broadband cellular card to do this with. Or a cheap dial-up account which you disconnect/reconnect between each posting. Yes, I know that sounds ridiculous. That’s honestly more of a solution if you have an auto-dialer program and an auto-posting program (like Easy Ad Poster Deluxe from www.ezadsuite.com)


Responding to emails about your ads and redirecting them to your phpBay blogs:

So you’ve got your blogs setup and you’ve made posts to Craigslist with auctions pertaining to those cities. Now you’ve got to respond to inquiries about your Craigslist ads.

Doing it manually as they come in
If you’re doing this on a relatively small scale, then responding to emails about your ads by hand is fine. It’s actually preferable since you can address specific questions about the ad that might come in while also providing your blog link. If you were to use an auto-responder, then you have no ability to respond to specific questions. You just blast out a canned response to each email along with the link to your blog.

Using an auto-responder (such as Easy Auto Responder)
If you’re doing this on a larger scale (or if you’re really gung-ho and use an auto-posting tool to blast out ads to multiple cities), then it makes more sense to set-up an auto-responder. I’m not gonna go into too much detail, but the basic idea that I have for it is:
1. For each city/blog, you setup your Gmail account in your auto-responder to respond with something like, “Hey thanks for your interest in the >your product/auction here<. I’ve actually got a website that I set-up with a lot more detailed information about it, if you wanna check that out. The site is >your domain/blog<.” This sounds personal enough and links them to your (city-specific) blog.
2. Use filters in your auto-responder to only reply to the first email and not subsequent emails from the same address. If an interested buyer gets your first email and then shoots you another question…and then gets the same initial email response a 2nd time…he/she will probably suspect it’s automated and “spammy”. However if you just don’t respond a 2nd (or 3rd/4th/etc) time…then they may just decide to go ahead with a purchase or at least they won’t go after you on Craigslist for being spammy.

I actually made a PDF version of this guide, too, if you want to download it. It's available here: http://www.mediafire.com/?ddxm0miev3j

 

thanks man....i'll download the ebook one

 

Great info,thanks for sharing.

 

Cheers for sharing!

 

Great guide, I will definitely check this out.

 

Nice of you to share and I am sure some people will find this extremely useful.

 

This has opened my eyes. I made money with EPN for the first time ever after reading this post last week. Now I just have to make a schedule for myself to post ads everyday. It's like guaranteed money as long as you post ads and respond. Thanks for the info!