How to get traffic to your eBay listing
publication date: Aug 8, 2007
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- Editorial
- How to Use a WYSIWYG HTML Editor to Make Stunning
eBay Auction Listings
- Taming the eBay Search Engine
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Hello,
'Blogging', 'Podcasting', just two of many recent buzzwords
designed to help encourage social interactivity between online
buyers and sellers and representing great ways to market your
products and services without having to pay. Anything that
promotes your business effectively, not just on eBay, has to be
worth considering and today I'll show very briefly how to attract
heavy traffic to your eBay listings, completely free of charge.
Blogging and podcasting work very well, but nowhere near as
well as the latest buzzword marketing concept. SOCIAL
NETWORKING. Social networking simply means corresponding
with people online via various sites that attract millions of visitors
daily and give you your own private space from which to talk
about yourself, your hobbies, less blatantly about your products.
Sites like My Space, You Tube, Squidoo, and others provide a
valuable personal forum type experience where you can post
comments about anything and everything, legal of course, and
sign off with your name and web site details. Some private
postings are viewed millions of times including one on You Tube,
showing a man demonstrating a simple dance routine which has
been viewed four million times in approximately four months.
These signature files, also video clips and other communication
vehicles, not only prompt people to check out your site but they
also create active links back to your site which in turn gets your
site lifted higher in search engine rankings. Imagine four million
back links to your site from a dance step routine that continues
outside the social networking site and maybe includes a product
teaching more dance steps!! Just fictitious - that bloke with the
dance routine has my mind spinning with ideas!
I won't go into detail about why search engines like Google will
favour your site in search listings over others with fewer or no
incoming links, just be aware that it happens, subject to no rules
being broken. 'Black Hat' search engine optimisation, the stuff
that does sometimes break the rules, must be avoided at all
costs, and can get your site banned altogether from search
engine listings and even get you expelled from the social
networking site. A simple signature file and offer to help fellow
members in social networking sites is completely acceptable and
can generate hundreds or thousands of incoming links to your
web sites, including your eBay listings.
Be careful though, and remember most auction listings are short
term and should not be used for incoming links. Instead link your
posts to your About Me page or your eBay shop or a specific
indefinitely listed eBay Shop product.
So what are you going to say in these postings? Well naturally
that depends on which social networking site you place your
postings and what products you hope might interest fellow
members. You can offer advice about specific topics, such as
selling on eBay, dating, cooking, virtually anything about which
people converse with each other on these popular sites. And
which fit whatever products you are selling on eBay.
Research shows that visits to My Space grew by a staggering
107 per cent in the year ending February 2007, with many others
running closely behind. It just doesn't make sense to ignore
these social networking sites for promoting your eBay business.
And if you think all these people are juveniles without cash to
spend, think again, because research company Hitwise reports
that 60 per cent of My Space members are now aged 25 and
older, compared to 45 per cent in 2004.
I can't give you operating details in this short eLetter but I can
give you a great book to help you understand how to profit from
SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES. It's called THE
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FREE ONLINE ADVERTISING and I've
just uploaded it to:
You'll find it at the very bottom of the page, out of site from
unauthorised users and I'll download it in a few weeks so as not
to confuse visitors to that site. For now, go get it, you won't
regret it, and there's no knowing how high your profits will grow
from promoting your eBay business to millions of people,
completely free of charge.
Until next time,
Avril
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How to Use a WYSIWYG HTML Editor to Make Stunning
eBay Auction Listings by Thomas Haselhorst
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What kind of browser are you using for online surfing? Explorer,
Netscape, Firefox, Opera?? Sure, all are good programs but I
want to talk about an excellent program called Netscape. If you
use Netscape, do you know that you also get an amazing
WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) web design program
called Netscape Composer for free? Basically you don't need
expensive HTML editors anymore. The list of commercially
available HTML editor software is endless - and the price tags
are enormous. Most people don't want to spend a lot of money to
get started with their eBay business. Fair enough, since the goal
is to make money and not to spend money. So it makes perfect
sense to use a program to design auction listings which is
available for free. And such a program is Netscape Composer.
It has the same professional features like FrontPage or any other
similar program. To design stunning and professional looking
eBay auction sites with Netscape Composer you need to
download Netscape first. If you start up the program, select File-
>New Composer Page and basically you can start immediately
to design your auction listings. You can make you letters in any
colour, bold, italics, use background colours (or even images)
etc. The options are endless. You can save this file on your local
hard drive as html file. I used to have one file for every listing I
generate. The best thing is that once you have got a nice and
professional looking eBay auction listing, you can use it for ever.
Just open your last listing in Netscape Composer and edit
according to your new item. Amazingly, this takes only a couple
of minutes.
But how do you transfer your listing saved as an html file on your
local hard drive to eBay? The answer is simple. Once you have
logged in into your eBay account and selected your category and
starting price you have to type in your "item description". Did you
see that eBay allows HTML format? Have a look when you
launch your next listing. That's the time where you go back to
your new listing you just have created with Netscape Composer.
Down the bottom of your Netscape Composer page you'll see a
button called: SOURCE - the source code of your listing. Click on
that and highlight and copy the entire text. Select then the eBay
site and paste this text into the "Item description box". Make sure
that all links are working and that all photos are uploaded to the
internet.
When you have finalised your listing you will be surprised. A
stunning and professional looking "DIY-listing". You can always
use "ready-to-go" auction templates and edit these according to
your item. You'll see that with an professional auction design you
can easily attract more buyers and get higher bids. It's worth the
effort. Keep in mind that professional web design software is
highly expensive and does the same job. Alternatively, you can
choose from a huge variety of third party auction services doing
the job for you. But hey, there are incredibly expensive too. Don't
you think that the eBay fees are high enough and you can easily
do it yourself without spending any additional dollars. It's really
simple!
Thomas Haselhorst is webmaster of
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Taming the eBay Search Engine by Kirsten Hawkins
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If you know what you're doing, you can quickly find what you're
looking for on eBay - and the more you know about how buyers
find you, the easier you'll be found. Here are a few golden
searching rules.
Be specific: If you're searching for the first edition of the original
Harry Potter book, you'll get further searching for 'harry potter
rowling philosopher's stone first edition' than you will searching
for 'harry potter'. You'll get fewer results, but the ones you do get
will be far more relevant.
Spell wrongly: It's a sad fact that many of the sellers on eBay just
can't spell. Whatever you're looking for, try thinking of a few
common misspellings - you might find a few items here that
have slipped through the cracks.
Get a thesaurus: You should try to search for all the different
words that someone might use to describe an item, for example
searching for both 'TV' and 'television', or for 'phone', 'mobile'
and 'cellphone'. Where you can, though, leave off the type of
item altogether and search by things like brand and model.
Use the categories: Whenever you search, you'll notice a list of
categories at the side of your search results. If you just searched
for the name of a CD, you should click the 'CDs' category to look
at results in that category only. Why bother looking through a
load of results that you don't care about?
Don't be afraid to browse: Once you've found the category that
items you like seem to be in, why not click 'Browse' and take a
look through the whole category? You might be surprised by
what you find.
Few people realise just how powerful eBay's search engine is -
a few symbols here and there and it'll work wonders for you.
Wildcard searches: You can put an asterisk (*) into a search
phrase when you want to say 'anything can go here'. For
example, if you wanted to search for a 1950s car, you could
search for 'car 195*'. 195* will show results from any year in the
1950s.
In this order: If you put words in quotes ("") then the only results
shown will be ones that have all of the words between the quote
marks. For example, searching for "Lord of the Rings" won't give
you any results that say, for example "Lord Robert Rings".
Exclude words: Put a minus, and then put any words in brackets
that you don't want to appear in your search results. For
example: "Pulp Fiction" -(poster,photo) will find items related to
Pulp Fiction but not posters or photos.
Either/or: If you want to search for lots of words at once, just put
them in brackets: the TV example from earlier could become
'(TV,television)', which would find items with either word.
Don't get too tied up learning the ways of the search engine,
though: a surprising number of eBay users don't search at all,
preferring to look through eBay's category system and save their
favourites in their browser.
Kirsten Hawkins is an eBay and internet auction enthusiast from
Nashville, TN. Visit http://www.auctionseller411.com for more
great tips on how to make the most from eBay and other online
auctions.
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