One of the more time consuming tasks of maintaining a website is having continuously to update it with new products and other relevant content. Wouldn't it be nice therefore if you had a website that was self maintaining with automatically renewing content and the possibility of it earning a nice income for you?

There are a lot of savvy netpreneurs who are quietly raking in thousands of dollars each month by joining the ebay affiliate program and building niche websites based on the hottest selling products presently listed on ebay. Others add permanently updating content to their existing website to create more interest.

The first thing to do is to sign up to the ebay affiliate program, by going to Commission Junction.com who administer ebay's affiliate program in America and the UK. You will be sent a user name and password. An important point here is never disclose your log in details to ebay or Commission Junction. Scam emails are still doing their rounds on the web purporting to be from ebay and asking you to confirm your log in details. Always ignore these emails and delete them straight away.

What you will receive from ebay is a welcoming email with links to the various tools and resources that will allow you to build an ebay listing of your chosen subject. The three main tools to create listings are the flexible destination tool, the ebay editor kit and the API Tool.

The flexible destination tool allows you to create links to specific pages on ebay. Simply enter your Commission Junction PID (do not get this mixed up with your Commission Junction account number), the ebay page you want to link to, give your link a title and then generate your link to copy and paste into your web page.

By using the ebay editor kit you can build a whole page of listings of your chosen niche, anything from 1 to 200 listings, although 15 to 25 is a good size page to have. Let's say that you want an ebay page that deals with cars, you could generate a whole page of cars of any make or model or you could narrow it down to a particular make and model, the options are there for you to choose from.

The API Tool is designed for the more adventurous webmaster and allows you to take the ebay affiliate program to greater heights. Unless you have a penchant for developing it is best avoided and left to those that have the necessary experience to use it.

If you cannot think of a subject to build a website about, just visit any ebay home page and click "Advanced Search" at the top right of the page and choose a category from the menu to the right of the search box. From here tick "Completed Listings Only" and press to continue. If you want to be more specific and narrow down your search, add a description into the box. On the next page select "Price, Highest First" from the menu and you will get all the highest ticket items sold in the past few weeks. This is an excellent exercise to conduct if you are not too sure what you want to promote from ebay.

So there you have it, the above process will add updated clickable links to eBay auction listings for whatever you decide to promote. The process makes it simple for you to add future and updated content on your site relating to whatever your site is about and you can add as many pages of auction listings as you like. For more information about starting your own ebay business please visit http://www.deals4-u.com.

Ian Simpson reviews software and informational products on the internet for their value and usefulness. Subscribe to his free tips newsletter at http://www.information4income.com


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