Christmas... already?
publication date: Sep 13, 2006
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- Editorial
- Discriminating Taste: Using eBay Buyer
Requirements To Avoid Unpaid Items
- Get Your Free Traffic To Your Auction
Listings With eBay Blogs
- eBay Data Research
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Editorial
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Hello,
With summer ending and kids back at school
thoughts will turn to Christmas and for us
that means looking for ways to make big
money on eBay without paying most of our
profits back to the company in the shape of
hefty eBay listing and final selling fees.
Last year I doubled my normal takings on
eBay in the few weeks before Christmas
without working harder, not having to stock
more products, and I even cut my normal
eBay selling fees in the process.
I did it by putting one or two items on auction
listings and directing visitors to my shop for
similar items available 'Buy It Now' and I
offered a discount if they bought two or more
items together, saving them postage, making
me even more money.
To make sure people spotted my Christmas
listings from amongst other listings I used the
same gallery picture for every listing, and it
had nothing to do with my products. My
illustration was a Christmas Cracker
overprinted with BUY ONE GET ONE
FREE or BIG DISCOUNTS AVAILABLE
IN MY SHOP. It worked like a dream and I
even had people entering my shop who
weren't the slightest bit interested in
whatever product listing had originally
attracted them.
In the next few eLetters I'll treat you to a big
bundle of ideas to help you make great profits
this Christmas on eBay.
I'll also be updating my website
http://www.powerselleracademy.com. Join today
and you'l be the first to read my eBay articles,
news and profit making ideas!
Remember if you are an existing eBay Confidential
subscriber, membership is just £315 with this promotion
code: ec2408mem
Just go to http://www.powerselleracademy.com/subscribe
Happy eBaying!
Avril
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Discriminating Taste: Using eBay Buyer
Requirements To Avoid Unpaid Items
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(Read more articles like this at
What are Buyer Requirements?
They're the controls you use to limit your
exposure to questionable buyers. If you've
never had trouble with unpaid items and
aren't worried, you may elect not to use them
at all. But if you're concerned about selling
something, you can turn up your
Requirements Protection and potentially
block people that might not pay for the item.
What Kind of Control Do I Have?
According to ClaytonKunz, eBay's Trust and
Safety policy manager, 'There are different
behavior patterns you, as a seller, might not
want to take on.' You can set your controls to
allow or block buyers that fall into numerous
categories:
*Buyers with negative feedback.
*Buyers who have too many unpaid item
strikes recently.
*Buyers from places to which you don't ship.
*Buyers who've bought too many of your
items recently. (This is for purchases you fear
are fraudulent, such as someone maliciously
trying to take down your listings.)
*Buyers who aren't registered with PayPal.
(This doesn't mean you can't offer other
options. It's designed to limit bids to buyers
who've been verified by PayPal's extensive
registration process.)
Can I Make My Selections Listing-Specific?
You can set your buyer requirements in My
eBay, and those settings are automatically
applied to all your listings. But you can turn
those requirements up, down, or off as you
make each listing. For example, if you're
selling a rare antique and want to ensure
you'll be paid, you can turn the protection
levels up in your Sell Your Item 3 form as
you're creating the listing. Or if you're
getting rid of a small trinket of little value,
you can opt to turn off all buyer requirements
for that listing.
How Do I Know If It's Working?
You can monitor the effect your protection
selections are having on your eBay business.
An activity log shows you how many bids
your settings have blocked. You can also see
why bids were blocked, which allows you to
determine if your settings in an area are too
high or too low. And you can see who is
bidding on your site. If you see buyers you
feel would be reliable, you can add them to
your Buyer-Requirements Exemption List,
and they won't be blocked from any future
auctions. Explains Kunz, 'Buyer
requirements are a powerful tool... You need
to make sure you know what you're doing.'
Read more great articles at:
***
Get Your Free Traffic To Your Auction
Listings With eBay Blogs
***
(Read more articles like this at
eBay is the #1 auction site on the internet.
eBay is the fifth most visited site on the
Internet. Now, eBay jumped on the blog
bandwagon. They have opened a brand new
section of their site called eBay blogs. This
area allows a registered eBay user to sign up
for, and maintain an eBay blog.
Blogs are here to stay. So, if you're serious
about growing your eBay business then you
should definitely consider signing up for, and
creating your very own eBay blog. eBay has
done a great job of making the process simple
and easy so that almost anyone can navigate
through the steps and easily set up their own
blog. You do not have to have any
programming experience or special html
knowledge. Just visit the following url:
http://blogs.ebay.com/ and click on the large
button that says 'Start Blogging'.
What Are Blogs?
In the simplest of terms, a blog is basically an
online journal. Blogs provide a place where
you can easily write news and information
about yourself and your auction sales on a
daily basis. The word blog is a combination
of web and log combined together to make
the word blog. Blogs are a hot internet craze
because they allow anyone to easily publish
their own thoughts and content online -
instantly.
Blogs are also wonderful for creating a ton of
extra traffic and visitors to your auction
listings. If you frequently post great content
to your blog it will quickly be picked up by
the search engines which will create more
visitors to your blog and your auction listings
for free.
What Should You Blog About?
In this day and age, it's hard to imagine being
an eBay seller and not immediately see the
benefit of having a blog. It provides an easy
way to interact with your customers. You can
provide updated information about your
auctions, the products you sell and general
info about your business. Once you get used
to blogging, you should consider making
posts to your blog on a daily basis.
To get the most from your blog you want to
think about writing content that is useful to
your customers. eBay sellers should use their
blog to provide more information about what
they sell. For example, a seller who
specializes in model cars might take some
time to write a few articles or create posts
about 'tips for building model cars'. Another
seller who sells wedding related goods might
write blog posts about 'effective wedding
planning on a shoestring budget'. The point
is this: you want to make the content useful to
your customers so they will come back often.
The more you write good quality content and
inform your customers, the more they will
want to purchase products from you. Another
benefit is that you can quickly establish
yourself as an authority on the subject.
If you're not sure what content to post in your
blogs, simply do a google search for your
subject and see what comes up. Use this
information to create your product content.
Caution: stay away from having a blog with
very little useful content and a lot of sales ads
for your auctions. It's good to occasionally
write a blog post to promote a new item you
have up for auction, but if that is all you do
then you'll get very few repeat visitors to
your blog. eBay is a very community oriented
platform and the more community friendly
information you provide, the more potential
you have for repeat customers to come back
to your blog... and hopefully visit your eBay
auction listings.
How do you Promote Your Blog?
Like any other site on the internet, your blog
will have its own unique url or website
address. You will want to make sure that you
keep this hand and start promoting your blog.
There are a variety of ways that you can
promote a blog. Some of these would include
submitting your website to major search
engines, and blog/website directories. You
can easily further promote your blog by
taking the content or articles that you write
on the blog and submitting them to some of
the major article directories. You can also
create your own domain name and then
forward it to your blog, so that you have a
link that is easy for people to remember. In
the past, I have used
http://www.highfivedomains to secure my
url's for blog promotion.
What about Blog Comments?
Another great way to promote your blog and
build traffic to it is to comment on other
people's blog. As a general rule, you should
only post to other related blogs and post
meaningful comments. If you start leaving a
bunch of random comments that have nothing
to do with the blog, or the blog post in
general, then people will see this as 'blog
spam' also known as 'splog content'.
Does eBay have Blog Tags?
Another useful feature that eBay has included
is blog tags. When you first set up your blog,
there are some important fields to fill out
including the selection of the tags that people
will use to find your blog. These tags are
basically keywords that people might use to
search for your blog. If we continue with
'wedding' example above, a seller of
wedding related items would want to use
common wedding keywords in their tags
section. This could include tags like wedding,
invitations, cake toppers, and wedding
planning. Now, when another eBay user
searches for wedding related blogs this blog
will show up in the listing and again bring
some free traffic to the blog.
In the not too distance future, eBay blogs will
be commonplace. It is now that you have the
opportunity to set yourself apart from your
competition by setting up your blog - and
using your blog to get free traffic to your
eBay listings!
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eBay Data Research by J.BrianKeith
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If you have even a passing interest in the
topic of eBay, then you should take a look at
the following information. This short but
enlightening article presents some of the
latest news on the subject of eBay.
eBay is a business anyway you look at it.
Sure, it is a great deal of fun for both the
buyers and sellers, but when you look at it
from another view point, you will see that it
is a business from the seller's point of view,
the buyer's point of view, and eBay's point of
view.
40 million dollars a day travels through eBay.
Selling items on eBay successfully is an art,
and eBay offers many different forms of Data
and Research to ensure that you are selling
the right items, to the right people, in the
right way.
Some of the data and research is not free, but
much of it is. The available resources include
hot items by category, eBay Pulse,
merchandising calendar, sales reports,
marketplace research, buyer behavioral
report, and the eBay solutions directory.
These tools are quite easy to use, and the
information that can be gleaned from them is
extremely valuable.
The Data and Research tools are all
accessible through your seller's account, by
clicking on the Advance Selling link. Learn
to use those tools, and get your piece of that
$40 million eBay revenue each day.
Of course, it's impossible to put everything
about eBay into just one article. But you can't
deny that you've just added to your
understanding about eBay, and that's time
well spent.
If you base what you do on inaccurate
information, you might be unpleasantly
surprised by the consequences. Make sure
you get the whole eBay story from informed
sources.
Read similar articles at