Black Hat Experimental: Ebay – Want it now
Sunday, June 28th, 2009Ebay has a little feature called “want it now”. It’s a place where people who want something can list what they want. You can also contact them.
Now I’m not suggesting that you sell folks things from there – and spamming is wrong. Cough Cough. Ebay doesn’t like it, but you could probably find a few bucks this way (or the safe way – I’ll get there in a minute).
BUT let’s say you have a free afternoon, and all these affiliate programs you belong to. Between C.J. and Linkshare you can probably find lot’s of things that people are looking for. Throw up a blog real fast, and start listing what you see people looking for. Direct those ebay searchers to the page where you put the product.
I’ve used this feature only as a research tool in the past. Let’s say I’m thinking about something to create a “ebay site” on. I like to find little niches that don’t have much competition outside of strange people searching for them – and then direct them to ebay to make the purchase. I’ll build a site that’s only going to make 200 a year if it only takes me 30 minutes. 400 dollars an hour is usually worth it in anyones book right?
Here is the ebay “want it now” page:
http://pages.ebay.com/wantitnow/index.html
If you’ve got ideas, or have used this feature on ebay a little further – speak up.
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Edgar says:
July 3rd, 2009
3:03 am
Great Tip!
Noobs should pay attention to how long those longtails are. That’s how normal people search for stuff online.
I don’t know exactly how I am going to leverage this idea yet but it definitely has some great potential. My first thought is to take a blog that get instant indexing, like a google trends type blog, and just start making posts using the ‘want it now’ keywords as titles.
Same could be done on any kind of blog but I think a blog with instant indexing is the way to go. In my experience those have been google trends blogs. You would already have to have one set up and somewhat current though.
Another idea, and this could well coincide with the trends blog thing, is to bookmark those ‘want it now’ keywords with bmd and ping the profiles for quick indexing.
But that would only work if those same people who listed their ‘want it now’ items also search google with the exact same phrase. I think it’s likely but who knows. You got me thinking with this one.