Since yesterday was the official pre-launch of Ebay Crusher, I’d thought I’d blog a bit about why I wrote this book.  There are two primary reasons.

First, over the last few years, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend on Ebay.  Each new year becomes exponentially more difficult to start up a profitable Ebay business.  Most wholesale sources these days can’t even compete with Ebay’s pricing.  I recently had a conversation with one of my old suppliers and he revealed that his company doesn’t even accept new wholesale accounts from people that intend to sell on Ebay.  When I asked him why, he responded that it was because he couldn’t compete from a price standpoint.  In other words, his wholesale prices are higher than the average ending auction prices on Ebay!

This leaves little hope for those aspiring entrepreneurs that don’t have top-of-the-chain supply sources or mounds of cash to buy inventory.  Unfortuneately, these folks are simply shut out of the Ebay “Sellers Club”.  And there is no reason to believe that this current trend of “survival of the fittest” will abate anytime soon.

The second reason for writing Ebay Crusher stems from my own learning curve with affiliate marketing.  When I first realized that affiliate marketing was a much more simple business model and that the potential profitability and scalability of the operation was huge as well, I dove in head first.  Reading everything I could, buying almost every guide that came out, I needed to immerse myself in learning this new profession.

Visiting forums and blogs for hours on end, I noticed a recurring theme.  Most people have trouble with many of the same issues with affiliate marketing.

First, they struggle to build websites and landing pages.  Most of us (I am included here) would like to at least try to do it ourselves before we realize that we suck at it and that we should hire professionals.  

A bigger issue, however, is that almost everyone has difficulty getting traffic.  So then we read up on SEO, optimize our sites, work on getting backlinks, do press releases, comment on blogs and forums, do social bookmarking, and even create parasite feeder sites.  This takes an inordinate amount of time and energy to accomplish these things.  Then it takes even longer to see results - if you do at all!

To speed the process along we decide to just “buy” traffic.  It seems pretty simple to just chuck an ad up on Adwords and have traffic flooding your site.  But it doesn’t actually work that way.  Sure you’ll get the flood of traffic, but you might go broke in the process.  With PPC, you have a new set of rules, processes and techniques to learn.  Market research, keyword research, conversion tracking, setting up tight adgroups, bidding techniques, testing and so on.  Pay-per-click is a complete profession unto itself!

While I was in the midst of learning and doing all of this stuff, there were many times that I thought to myself:

“What would affiliate marketing be like if you didn’t have to worry about web design, SEO, or PPC?  Wouldn’t it make the job of selling or converting traffic so much easier if you could simply concentrate on gaining that visitor as loyal customer?”

And then it hit me… Ebay already provides all of those things - a website and traffic.  Why not fully utilize those features?  When I first explored this notion, there were very very few affiliate marketers doing Ebay.  Since then, I’ve streamlined the process and have made excellent returns with Ebay.

The name of the game is to make money.  That’s it.  That’s all.  It doesn’t matter if you want to sell physical products or do affiliate marketing.  If you can’t find a product to make a profit on or you have trouble conquering SEO and PPC, you need to try a different tactic.  And that’s what Ebay Crusher is all about.

You can check out Ebay Crusher here.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 1:19 pm and is filed under BUSINESS OPPS, EBAY, ONLINE MARKETING, AFFILIATE MARKETING. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.