To really benefit from the sheer power that eBay has to offer, you need to make sure you have a regular presence on the site. You can start small and build up slowly, but you should always aim to have some listings live on the site at all times.
We’ve already discussed the fact that you are basically advertising your business through listing items on eBay – selling something to break even or even make a loss, just so you can get more people to visit your website or sign up for your email list or newsletter.
It’s a well known fact that in the world of advertising, a person has to see an advert several times before they will act on it. This doesn’t always apply, of course, but in general we all need to be reminded that something is out there before we will buy it. In short, we need to get into the subconscious of our customers and remind them of what we sell.
So in short we need to apply this same logic to eBay. Just because you have a one cent e-book up for sale, doesn’t mean someone will buy it the first time it’s listed. They may well do, but if it doesn’t sell the first time around don’t give up hope. There have been countless cases of someone listing an item on eBay two or three times and not getting a single bite, and then the next time it’s listed, there is a bidding war which drives up the price tenfold.
Now let’s look at an example of how big an audience you could potentially reach on eBay – and let’s not forget that with your About Me page, your links to it from each and every auction, and the other techniques we have already covered, you don’t necessarily need to have a winning buyer to increase the traffic to your website. Everyone who visits one of your auctions and clicks through to your About Me page could then visit your website or sign up for your free newsletter.
So let’s suppose that for every item you list, you get ten visitors to that auction. That’s a very conservative number. So it follows that when you list ten auctions, you can expect to get a hundred visitors in total. List a hundred items and you’ll get a thousand visitors, several of whom will no doubt end up on your website. This is why it’s a good idea to make sure you have plenty of ten day auctions running, as you know you will get the maximum amount of exposure for your money.
MAINTAIN YOUR PRESENCE AND CUT YOUR LISTINGS FEES
You would be forgiven at this point for beginning to wonder how much all this business promotion on eBay is going to cost you. Don’t forget the need to set a budget for this side of your business, as this will determine how many listings you can reasonably expect to put on eBay in any given period of time.
But there is one way which will enable you to reduce your listings fees by more than 75% – so long as you have plenty of items to list.
The solution is to open an eBay store. This currently costs $15.95 per month, with an insertion fee of just five cents per item – and that is good for 30 days, not just ten.
It’s not an option to take if you are just starting out listing cheap items or e-books, but when you realise the huge potential that eBay has to offer and you start to see the results of the extra traffic your website will be getting (not to mention the extra sales you will see from the new customers on your emailing lists), you’ll be first in the queue to open a new store.
An eBay store is like a slow burner – it takes time to really see the results it can bring. After it’s been open for a while your listings will start to show up in Google, Yahoo and other major search engine results. This alone will get you even more traffic, and it’s another reason why you should word your listings titles very carefully, in order to appeal to your target niche audience in the best way possible.
Having an eBay store also sets you apart from the majority of other sellers, and it enables you to brand your store in a similar fashion to your website. Whatever colors you use on your website, make sure your eBay store uses the same ones. You can also upload your website logo, and of course eBay helpfully provides a link for people to subscribe to your newsletter (which in turn will have a link to your website, right?).
An eBay store raises your visibility both immediately and over time; in short it’s a selling tool not to be missed.
HOW DO YOU COMPETE WITH SELLERS WHO ARE ALREADY WELL ESTABLISHED?
It’s very easy to become disillusioned when you are doing your research on eBay and you come across other sellers whose feedback is in the thousands, and who not only have an eBay store, but it’s stuffed full of listings for e-books and countless other items which run well into three figures.
These people are clearly well established, but there is no reason why you can’t join them. EBay is such a huge site with millions of users worldwide, it would in fact be very difficult to saturate this market. The keys to succeeding at what you want to do lie in four areas:
- learn from those who are already successful at what you want to do
- establish your own excellent reputation
- keep your customers happy and wanting to come back for more
- offer your own unique blend of products
This list is not exhaustive, but it does illustrate the main points that will make you successful at generating the traffic and customers you are looking for. It doesn’t matter if you are starting from zero feedback, or you have already started to make some sales. We can all learn from what others are doing – and in time you might even find that what you learn from other sellers leads to you enjoying even more success than they are. It’s all about finding your own feet, and establishing a regular and familiar presence that people will become acquainted with.
Part of the process of driving traffic from eBay onto your own website is to attract that traffic in the first place. You should have a clearly defined idea from the word go as to what niche audience you want to attract.
Once you have that angle, you can then set to work on building up your own little corner of eBay that people will recognise as being yours and yours alone. How exactly do you manage that? Well, it’s very much a case of taking a look at what those other already successful sellers are doing, and adding a portion of your own ideas into the mix. By doing plenty of research (which is the cornerstone of every successful eBay venture, whether you use the auction site as your main business or as a way to find new customers to drive traffic to your website), you will be able to get a clearer picture of the reasons why those successful sellers you envy so much at the moment became so successful in the first place.
In short, the old saying ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ does hold true on eBay. Take a look at the items which these sellers seem to do very well with, and make a note of them. Ideally you should build up a picture of several successful sellers – sellers you would want to emulate and look up to for guidance (without actually getting in touch with them; you can get all the information you need from the way they design and promote their listings, and the items they sell).
Over time you will get an idea of what has made this handful of sellers as successful as they are. You will find quite naturally that your own ideas and outlook will add a further spin on this, and you will be able to create your own formula for selling success.
And as we have seen, every listing and every experiment you try on eBay will lead to more people following the links you set up to your About Me page… and from there, they can go to any number of other places to find out more about you and your business.
THINK ABOUT TRAFFIC COMING IN…
We’ve talked at length about how to get the traffic to flow from your eBay listings and onto your website. But there’s certainly no harm in getting more people to visit your eBay listings in the first place – particularly if you have a shop, although steering people towards your About Me page is equally desirable, for the reasons we talked about earlier.
Consider having a signature in all your outgoing emails, which directs people to your About Me page to find out about signing up for your email newsletter (for a more in depth look at newsletters and what to include in them, keep reading to get all the answers in Chapter Eight).
If you are active in forums, you can include a similar signature after all your posts too. And for the ultimate in traffic steering opportunities, why not start your own blog? These are almost essential for everyone who wants to build an internet business, as you can include links to your website, your eBay shop, your About Me page, and any number of other relevant links to your products or newsletters.
The moral of the story is to take every opportunity to make the most of promoting your listings on eBay.
AND FINALLY – THINK OF A SPIDER’S WEB
A strange sub title, but an appropriate one when we are discussing how to establish a regular presence for yourself on eBay.
In short, think of the links you are creating every time you list a new item on the auction site. Each listing has a link to your About Me page, plus at least one link to your shop if you have one. From any one item, a potential buyer could visit several of your items and also browse around your About Me page. The more items you put up for sale, the more chances you have not only of selling something, but of reaching more people who could end up finding the link to your website and signing up for your newsletter.
You can indeed weave yourself a huge web on eBay, and if you make it attractive enough you can catch many new customers in it.
One final thought to end this chapter on. The more time you spend on eBay, the more you will notice that certain sellers keep popping up again and again in certain categories. That kind of reach doesn’t happen overnight; it can take months to penetrate a niche category and reach your target audience effectively. But the sooner you start the sooner you will begin to get the results you are looking for.
And you could start getting those results much sooner than you think.
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