If you’re involved as an affiliate for any product, you’ve probably struggled with how to sell the product on eBay.

After all, eBay offers you a massive potential audience of 168 million members. And people reading about your product are likely to have found it by doing a search, indicating that they are interested in the product area in which your product resides.

The bad news, however, is that there is no easy way to market affiliate products on eBay.

First off, if you haven’t heard of affiliate selling, here’s a very brief description of how it works.

Fundamentally, selling an affiliate product requires interested buyers to click on a special link. This link takes the person to the product owner’s sales page. More importantly, the link also contains your unique affiliate code. It is this code that ensures that sales made from your submissions are posted to your affiliate account. Finally, if your prospect buys the product, it is the owner who handles the delivery of the product and who also pays you your sales commission payment.

On eBay, you can easily set up an auction to say how awesome your affiliate product is. It will certainly attract a number of people who would be interested in buying. The problem is that you don’t have a legitimate way to sell it to eBay members!

This is because it is against eBay’s rules to have a link on your auction page that takes your readers to another website to make a sale. So you can’t just create a sales page with your affiliate link.

Plus, if you think about it, you don’t even have the affiliate product to deliver. There is no mechanism for you to make the sale on eBay and deliver the product. If you remember, this is handled automatically by the product owner.

So here are two ways you can take advantage of the eBay marketplace with your affiliate products.

1. The simple system

You create an auction that explains the benefits of the affiliate product you are promoting. This would be the normal sales page for the product you are promoting.

But what do you offer in your eBay auction?

What you sell is the information on where to get this magnificent product. And you “sell” this knowledge for just a penny.

Whenever someone “buys” your information, it sends them an email thanking them for the purchase. Then you explain to them that they don’t really need to send you a dime and you give them the link to the great product they’ve expressed interest in.

Of course, the link is YOUR affiliate link.

By the way, on your auction description page, think of a new angle for the product. You will find that almost all affiliates for any popular product will use the suggested sales collateral provided by the product owner.

If you use the standard sales pitch, it will only appear to be one of many. Your interested buyer has probably already seen some of these. Why should they notice you?

Add personal and credible product information to your auction description, and you’ll get some of those potential buyers to tag along.

By the way, eBay may be removing its penny auctions. After all, a penny auction doesn’t bring much to eBay in terms of listing or final value fee.

If this happens to you, you can try system 2 below, and you can also place your penny auction on other auction sites like Yahoo, Amazon, QXL, etc.

2. The not so simple system

With this system, you need to do some research before launching your eBay auction for your affiliate product.

The goal here is to create a bundle of items that are related to your affiliate products that you auction off for 99 cents or 99 pence.

First of all, you need to create a 2-3 page report about your affiliate product. Ideally this should be based on your personal experience with the product. Failing that, it should be written in your own personal style. The key points are that these are your own words and the report includes your affiliate link to the product.

The next step is to find other items for your “package”. To do this, use Google search to locate related free products.

Let’s say you’re affiliated with an e-book that teaches painting and figure drawing. On Google, I would search for something like: free figure drawing.

It took me less than 10 minutes to find the following gifts:

Photographing Your Artwork (Free eBook)

3D Figure Drawing Studio Software (Free Trial)

How to sell your art (free newsletter)

And there are many more that you could discover with a little more research time. Be a little careful in your selection – you don’t want to give away something that competes with your affiliate ebook.

Once you’ve found your items, what you need to do now is group them together and add them to your 2/3 page report. Then create an auction that offers the entire package for 99 cents or pence.

There is no way eBay can object to this auction.

As you can see, all it really takes to get your affiliate product in front of the huge eBay marketplace is a little bit of creativity.