How To Add Ebay Rss Feeds To A Wordpress Blog
Adding ebay affiliate rss feeds into Wordpress blog posts has been one method I have used to increase my ebay commissions since April.
April Ebay Earnings: $93.10
May Ebay Earnings: $193.80
June Ebay Earnings: $401.48
July 1 – 10th Ebay Earnings: $$238.98 (on track for over $650)
While I also use and recommend BANS (build a niche store) my wordpress method offers a handful of advantages over BANS.
Several members from the BANS forum have asked me just how I did this. So I wanted to create this video post to tell you exactly how I manage this and what advantages this method offers. This method involves combining carp (an rss parser) with wordpress and ebay rss feeds.
First lets look at the advantages of using a wordpress blog combined with rss feeds over BANS.
Advantages Of Your Own Wordpress + Ebay Site:
- Customized Site: Bans strength (and weakness to a degree) is it’s ability to “complete” websites within minutes. With the latest edition users can add their own text, change the header, change anchor text, and modify the heck out of their site. However you can bet that most people are NOT changing the content and their not creating their own unique pages.By using wordpress your forced to create something that is unique to the internet, something that has not already been indexed by the search engines. This fact alone gives you a huge advantage over BANS. Your wordpress site will have it’s own look, feel, navigation, content and images. This is huge in ranking well today.
Wordpress offers TONS of great plugins that can help you to further boost your sites rankings, does not mean that it is any easier just that these tools exist within the wordpress system.
Method:
- The first step in creating your own ebay rss powered blog is to install carp or a similar tool such as the just released PHPBay script. This will do the work of “pulling in the rss feed” and converting it over to html.
- Once you install carp your given a “snipet” of code to include when you want to place an rss feed in a web page. I have added some customizations to that code that you can find below, my code will remove the rss “channel link” and will also format the images properly if you have purchased the paid version of carp (cheap). You will want to save the code for inclusion in your blog posts or pages for use later.
- The second step is to install a wordpress plugin that allows you to run php code in a post or page. Out of the box your not able to execute any type of code within a wordpress page or post (php, java, ect). I have been using “run php” with success (link below). Simply follow the install directions with the plugin and your up and running.
- Once you have installed the plugin you can simply add the carp php code right into your post or page, add your custom rss feed address (with your affiliate id of course) and your page will update itself with current ebay offers!
My Modified Carp Code, And Plugin Information:
<?php
replace this line with the install location of your carp install path!!
// Add any desired configuration settings before CarpCacheShow
// using “CarpConf” and other functions
CarpConf(’maxitems’,8);
CarpConf(’poweredby’,');
CarpConf(’encodingout’,'UTF-8′);
carpconf(’cborder’,');
CarpConfAdd(’descriptiontags’,'|a|/a|i|/i|img|’);
CarpCacheShow(’http://xxx.com’);
?>
To Your Success …
Brian Johnson
I agree with using the ebay feeds in wordpress. I started using it back in the 2nd quarter or maybe earlier of 2006 and my ebay earnings skyrocketed. I hadn’t really earned anything before adding it to my wordpress blogs. Its a great money maker and easy when you have the feed that updates.
I used it with RSSTOBLOG personally but I’m sure there are cheaper options. I was fortunate to get rsstoblog when it was in beta for 47 back in the day.
Everyone should incorporate as soon as you can. Like brian said there are a million products in ebay. Its enough room for everyone!
Is it very difficult to learn Carp? I like your tips, the only problem is that I would like to see some sample-site to visualize your tips. I understand you do not want to disclose your ebay sites which brings you some money. I want to create websites with BANS, but what type of content you put there? Are they all eBay related, buyer/seller tips? Or something else? I would also like to hear about your tips for driving targeted traffic to these sites. Thanks…
Hello Quamrul,
No carp is not really that difficult, you can take a look at this site that is based on this same wordpress theme and carp.
http://www.narutoinfo.com
Traffic tips and ideas coming soon ….
Brian
Hi,
I’d like to add the ebay listings to my Wordpress Blogs. I understand from the video that hiding the ebay links from the search engines is is very important and phpeBay Pro does this while carp does not. With phpeBay pro do you still need run php? How do you postion the ads? Is it done by categories like BANS or by keyword?
I also read the comment above that Guffster got it to work using RSSTOBLOG How was that done? I’m really interested in that for two reasons
1. A lot of the RSS to Blog software uses the php fopen call. I’m on a shared host and a lot of shared hosts vendors have disabled that function so it has to be rewritten to use the curl library
2. I already have it.
So please let me know how to get this going. Thanks in advance for your help.
All the best,
Ted Sudol
thanks for this posting! really clear advice which i’ll be be experimenting with asap! have set up a few BANS shops over the last couple of months but am excited about your combination of wordpress & eBay together. thanks for sharing so generously…
all best
debs
Hey Brian -
Nice work, we appreciate it. Can you comment on http://www.auction-affiliate.com/ as a tool for those of us not as technical as you? Looks like it might do something similar, without all the coding…
Hey Tiger,
I have some additional info on the various ebay tools listed here:
http://www.my-affiliate-programs.com/making-money-with-the-ebay-affiliate-program/50/
Probably the best tool I have used so far is PHPbay -
It is a plugin for wordpress, is easy to set up and use and pulls in spiderable feeds from ebay. What I like is that once you know the ebay “category numbers” that make sense for your site you can easily add ebay products quickly without heading back to ebay and creating the feeds from scratch. This saves time, as mentioned the tool produces straight html (which search engines can read).
Phpbay is fairly easy to install as well, the main folder goes into your plugins section and you also add one php file to the root of your site.
Tiger, all these tools are good and work fine. I would not get too hung up on thinking you got the wrong tool. What is more important is adding good content and getting quality back links to a site.
That being said if your able to install your own plugins and can stand spending another $40 on PHPbay I would get that tool. Best on the market to date in my book.
Brian
Hi Brian, great site which is being bookmarked as I type.
I created my site http://www.pda-now.co.uk using freeway as I’m on a mac and not massively tech savvie.
I struggled a lot with php (generally I need to ‘understand’ something and php is ????) so I used the Editor Kit from eBay themselves which, if I understand it correctly, generated javascript.
My question is, is this as SEO friendly as BANS or using php?
Many thanks
Rodney
- idlehippy, go on, Google it! -
Hey Rodney,
Great to have you on the site, I hope you find it helpful.
About the editor kits, as you mention they are based on javascript which the search engines can not read. So the answer is no - you might want to pick up wordpress (free download at http://www.wordpress.org) and play with it abit.
I struggled with php when I first started (still do - however by using template based site creation like wordpress I am ok) but am now comfortable with editing “snippets of code”.
Also, PHPbay which is reviewed on one of the pages here is a simple to use plugin that pulls in ebay rss feeds AND ads your affiliate id.
Good luck.
Brian
Brian I hope your ebay earnings are steady moving up. I found a script that everyone might enjoy there is a free version and pro. I fiddled with those you mentioned in the post but this is so much easier.
http://www.wiredstudios.com/category/phpbay
Both are listed at that link. For $39 its great.
Here is an example of a site done that is incredible but based of the oscommerce script
http://www.jeepgarage.com/
Hi Brian,
It’s Melissa from the BANS forum. I’ve been wanting to try this ever since you mentioned it over there and finally have some time to devote to giving it a whirl.
Got a question for you. Have you had any trouble getting the runphp plugin to work on any of the newer versions of Wordpress? I’m probably doing something wrong, but I followed the instructions on the page and after I upload it, the whole code shows up as the plugin as well as in the description area. As expected, it doesn’t work when I try to activate it either.
I know it’s not your job in regards to support for the plugin, but I thought maybe since you had experience with it, you might know where I could’ve gone wrong. I also thought asking the question might benefit your readers in case any of them had the same problem.
Leave it to me to take something that should be very simple and turn it into something complicated.
Thanks and btw, I love your blog. It’s obvious you’ve put a lot of time and effort into it. So nice to see quality for a change. Have a good one!
Hey Melissa,
I have a plugin I have switched over that makes instalation AND using the feeds from ebay a snap.
Cost $39 and well worth it:
http://www.wiredstudios.com/phpbay/phpbay-pro-ebay-software-to-display-auctions.html
I don’t use carp anymore since this plugin has come out - it rocks.
Brian
Hi Brian,
Thanks for the quick reply. Yeah, I was going to purchase that based upon your recommendation, but for some reason I was thinking that I needed the runphp plugin in order to make it work.
I probably tried to soak up too much information at once and got things confused. (Not surprising, is it? lol) If phpbay is all I need to get the feeds to show up, then I’m off to purchase and play around with it for a while.
Thanks again and congrats on your August stats.
Melissa
Hey Melissa,
PHPBay is all you need
Brian
[...] Source [...]
Melissa, go into your profile and click off the “Rich Text Editor”. Keep this option disabled when using runphp which includes editing a page or post using runphp. This should get your php scripts running on wordpress.
Cliff,
Thanks for the tip. Much appreciated.
Brian,
Wow! That’s all I have to say about phpbay. You were right.
I wanted to use something like that on a site I’d had in mind for a while. I live 100 miles from Kansas City and people here are always wanting to know what is going on in that area. After looking around for a while, I noticed there is not one site in the area that lists all of the events taking place.
So my thinking was to create my own. Wordpress was the obvious platform and I thought one day I could turn it into a community driven site. It’s now less than a month old and has been blogged about by some of the area’s top popular bloggers. All without me asking. If you want to take a peek at what I did with it, here you go:
http://www.getkctickets.com
Thanks again for the tips and the help. You rock!
Melissa
Hey Melissa,
Yep - phpbay rocks, stick around lots of goodies here
I really like your site idea, you should do well. Try tweaking out the titles a bit to go after other terms people may be using when search for those events. All in all the site looks great.
Brian
Hey Brian,
Couldn’t think of a better way to get in touch with you, so thought I’d do it this way. Doesn’t matter if you post the comment or not.
Thanks for the nice comments on the ticket site. It has done really well. Just love it.
Anyway, didn’t know if you knew it or not, but phpBayPro now has an affiliate program. Thought you might want to join and update the links you have posted.
Hope all is going well for you.
Melissa Eaton
I’ve recently released a WordPress plugin that makes it even easier to interface with CaRP to either display feeds (like the eBay feeds you’re discussing) or Amazon affiliate links. Details and download at http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/CaRP-WP/