NB. I originally wrote this article about Viglink, however this will also work for other similar systems such as Slimlinks. This info is based on my many years of experience running a very large forum. This works for vBulletin 3 and 4.
About Viglink
For those of you that aren't already using Viglink - the service essentially turns any links people post within your vBulletin forums into commission links for many of the major online retailers including eBay and Amazon. All you need to do is sign-up and post the code they give you to the bottom of your footer template. Users won't notice any change at all, but you will start earning. I used this on my site and was impressed with the earnings and service. Click here to sign up now if you don't already have a Viglink account.
How to Install Viglink
If you don?t already have Viglink installed, it takes only minutes and full Instructions are on the Viglink website. This is a quick rundown of the process:
Log in and find your unique code - it will be a few lines of HTML. Go to your forums Admin CP and paste your code at the bottom of the footer template. If you have multiple templates, make sure the parent template is modified or each separate template dependant on how you have set it up.
Log into the Viglink site to track your earnings.
Viglink will pay out at the end of each month by PayPal, regardless of how much or how little you earn.
You will earn money when people click on links on your site and purchase/bid on products. The more links to these sites you have, the more potential there is to earn. In my experience, eBay is the largest earner when using Viglink. Therefore, in order to maximise your income, I strongly recommend doing the following simple things.
Set up an eBay forum
Add a new forum to your site called something like "eBay Links". Do this in the forum manager in the vBulletin Admin CP.
Add a forum description along the lines of 'Post whatever you have for sale on eBay in here - or anything else you spot on eBay that you feel would be of interest to our community".
This way, people will be encouraged to post not only their own items, but other items they see on eBay - maximising the number of links posted in your forums. This works especially well for forums which deal with items you can buy - for example, cars, computers, phones, gaming, hifi etc.
Set up an auto posting RSS Feed from eBay
If your site does have a specific theme, for example a specific brand of car, you can create an additional forum titled 'Cars for Sale on eBay' where new items on eBay can be posted automatically using the vBulletin RSS posting system.
Create the new forum and set it so that nobody can post in there apart from admin or staff.
Create a dummy user called 'eBay' which has sufficient privileges to post in this new forum.
In your Admin CP, setup an RSS feed to post in this forum automatically (see here for instructions) - select the new user you just created as the username to post under.
To get your RSS link, all you have to do is search in eBay and copy the RSS link address at the bottom of the results page to those search results. Use this in the RSS feed posting settings. You can create complicated searches for multiple items using the ?+? and ?-? symbols to search for multiple words together and even exclude some results.
Read this page for more info on using the eBay search system to its maximum potential.
Keep in mind that if the items you are automatically posting to your new forum are very common, you could annoy users by posting too many of these links. Adjust your settings to post only 2 or 3 new items each hour or so. Keep an eye on things and make further adjustments as you get a feel for the number of items appearing in the forum.
Where a high number of results are being posted, consider removing the forum from search results (but only if your users express concern!).
Depending of the subject matter of your forum, people may have varying degrees of success using Viglink. In many cases, income from Viglink can greatly exceed AdSense income on the same site.
I really want to try this. I signed up for viglink and I created an ebay forum in my shopping section. I feel really dumb (and frustrated) but I am trying to do the next step in entering my keywords in ebay search and get the rss feed url I need to use the rss feed manager on my forum. But the "subscribe" icon is not active in my toolbar when I am on ebay. On a seller page, on search page, not on any page... I also looked "copy the RSS link address at the bottom of the results page" and nothing is there. What am I doing wrong?
Sorry Guys, not been here for a while. I'll double check ebay as they may have changed the way you obtain feed urls. I'll try and update the text when I figure it out.
I've worked this out now. It seems ebay have removed the RSS link on the search results page, however if you do you custom search, just add "&_rss=1" (without quotes) to the end of the resulting URL at the top of your browser. Use this address for you RSS feed address. I hope that helps.
03-08-2012, 11:00 PM
03-24-2012, 07:41 PM
