Posts Tagged ‘affiliate links’
Linking to eBay Store Items
To people that have owned eBay stores, it is no secret that eBay is making it more difficult to promote your store on eBay. I’m not going to go into a ton of background because this blog is about Squidoo and not eBay.
If you use RSS feeds direct from eBay or even the eBay module available to you on Squidoo, you may have noticed something peculiar; eBay does not allow store items to be included in RSS feeds, even if you state “store inventory only” in your search. Take this search for example: “Driver Infant Packers Jersey“. 
When you search for this item you’ll see two items available for sale, now go to the RSS feed for this eBay search and you’ll notice that nothing is available.
This is extremely frustrating when building a niche lens; it’s so niche that eBay sellers do not list these in core listings very often. However, this could still be a good item to feature on your lens; if it’s hard to find find there’s a good chance that Google may pull up your lens in a search for this item. On my NFL Infant Jerseys lens I decided to experiment a little bit by hard linking to store items like this. It takes a couple of extra steps, but I think it is well worth it for a couple of reasons:
- This could be a hard to find item and offering it for sale on your lens could set you apart from the rest of the crowd.
- eBay store sellers work hard and eBay is making it more difficult for store sellers to have their items found. Hardlinking may not only get me a commissions, but it could lead to a sale for a fellow eBay store owner.
- Google spiders do not read RSS feeds or the items for sale in the Squidoo eBay module, they should read your hard linked items though. Of course, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here.
- I am forced to check these links once in a while to see if they are still valid and add links to new store items as needed. Doing this will force me to edit the lens and re-publish which will help my lensrank and keep my content fresh for Google.
Like I said earlier, this takes a couple of extra steps, but it’s not difficult.
- Login to Squidoo and edit the lens you’d like to work on.
- Login to the eBay Partner Network, go to “Tools”, and then “Link Generator”.
- Search for the item you are looking for on eBay. Click on the item title and right next to the title you will see a 12 digit number. Copy this number.
- Go back to the eBay Partner Network, choose “link type” as “Item Number”. Use the program you are applying (mine are 99.9% eBay US). Choose your campaign name or ID and then “generate link”. Since Squidoo does not allow Javascript, you will need to copy the URL and create a Hyperlink for your item. I won’t go into detail on this here, but this Basic HTML for Squidoo lens explains this process quite well. Feel free to add a comment if you have a question.
- Save your module and publish; Whew you’re done !!!!!!!
Of course, this post is written under the assumption that you are a member of the eBay Partner Network. If you are not, you should be; what do you have to lose by trying to become a member?
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