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Discover more about your Omniture Stats
publication date: Mar 12, 2008
eBay Confidential eZine
12th March 2008 *** - Editorial - Understanding Your Omniture Stats - Tips to Enhance Your eBay eBook Auctions - How eBay Reviews Can Help Your Store - 8 Tips for Making a Consistent Income on eBay *** Hi, I have a challenge for you this week and basically I need to ask a special favour of you. I really love sitting here writing all day, showing others how to get started making money on eBay, and knowing that everything I write actually does work because I've researched reliable sources or I have experienced some of my advice first hand. But put yourself in my shoes, imagine how awful it might be if, sitting here writing, enjoying my day, it transpires that people are not actually putting all this valuable research into practice. You see, the fact is, very few people come back to tell me how well my research and writing works for them. I could be telling you all the wrong things, or not telling you enough about specific subjects, I need you to help me understand where I am going wrong and, more importantly exactly what I am doing right. I need you to tell me your own eBay stories, I would love to know what you are doing and how you are doing it, and whether it is making money for you. For anyone willing to help me in my time of need I have a special report reserved purely for you. It's called 'Turn Resell Rights Titles into Your Own Unique eBooks on eBay' and you can have it by sending your eBay story to avril@clippingsfactory.com. You must put 'Special Story' in the subject box or your email may go unnoticed amongst a wealth of spam arriving in my box these days. Once you email I'll tell you how to download your special report. ************************* Fancy Making £600 a Week Running a Family History Research Business? ************************* If you're after an easy to start-up, well-paid, interesting and fun home business, this could be perfect for you . . . For the last 6 months I've worked very closely with a successful family researcher to develop the ONLY complete business blueprint to show you exactly how to start your own home-based ancestry business. What's more I am absolutely convinced you can make £600 a week - that's around £30,000 a year! Check it out here: http://www.canonburypublishing And it gets better: you can set this up as a home business quickly... for next to nothing... there's a ready made market... it can be completely self-financing... and you don't need any previous experience or qualifications... *** Understanding Your Omniture Stats *** We've talked about making full use of your Omniture stats in earlier articles, but there is plenty more to discover so let's dive back in right now. 1. What Are Your Most Popular Listings? It's obvious that you'd want to know this, because the answers can give you a much better understanding of what people are after. Now in an ideal world your most popular listings would be bringing in the lion's share of the sales... but in actual fact this isn't always the case. If your 'most popular listings' page on Omniture reveals that your top few items actually aren't selling many - if any - items at all, then you need to ask yourself why. They must be popular otherwise you wouldn't have so many people looking at them. So why aren't you converting some of those visitors into buyers? This is where you need to look at the pricing of your items. Do a completed search on the product and see how other people are doing. It could just be that it's a flat market at the moment and everyone is window shopping without buying. But if other people are happily selling theirs you need to figure out why. It could be that you've priced yours too highly or your listing description needs spicing up a bit. If the reason isn't obvious do some experimenting to see if you can get to the bottom of it. 2. What Are Your Most Popular Store Items? You can find out the answer to this question by clicking on the custom reports button and then selecting the most popular listings option. Not only does this report give you the actual number of times each item has been viewed within your shop, it also gives you the relevant percentage. This can be quite an eye opener, and it can certainly influence your choice of which stock items to buy in the future. It's common to focus your attention on those items which appear at the top of the list because they are the ones people are looking for the most. But you should also take a look at the ones they aren't interested in, because if your sales on those items are quite low, you may want to think twice about restocking them. This is one area where access to your Omniture reports can actually save you a lot of money - both in buying stock that doesn't sell, and in paying unnecessary listings fees. 3. Find Out Where To Link From to Get More Traffic. We touched on the 'referring domains' report last time, but it's worth revisiting it here for the simple reason that if you start making a concerted effort to drive traffic to your eBay shop yourself, you can use this report to help you maximise your efforts. I mentioned this briefly before but it's worth going into it in more detail. Lots of people who have an eBay store don't bother to advertise it too much. They simply sit back and let eBay do all the work. But there are lots of ways that you can promote your business very easily - by including a link to your store in your signature at every forum you are a member of (check their terms to make sure they allow it), putting a link in every email you send out, and by taking advantage of social and business networking sites to get more traffic from there too. Without your Omniture stats page you wouldn't have any idea of which methods were working and which ones weren't. You can track the URLs quite easily with your Omniture pages, meaning that you'll know at a glance which advertising methods you should continue with - and which ones you are wasting time on. You may also be able to identify a pattern of the type of sites people are arriving from. You may find forums bring you more visitors than the articles you write for directories. Anything which doesn't cost you any time or money once it's set up is worth hanging onto - but anything else needs to be looked at carefully to see whether it's worth carrying on with or not. 4. How Many Page Views Are You Getting? This might not seem like the most important piece of information to be looking at, but in actual fact it can be extremely useful in the early days of your shop. It can also give you a long term view once your shop has been open for a few months, and particularly after a year or so. This feature gives you an opportunity to view one month at a time, and as I mentioned in my previous article once you've had your shop for over a year you will see a green line appear to indicate how many pages views you were getting twelve months ago. You can also look back over previous months and get a good idea of which months are your busiest and which ones are quieter. Obviously you will find that certain months, such as November and December, get more page views in total than other months, but you will be able to use this data to plan your stock buying missions more efficiently. In this way even the negative data can be put to good use. Our own page views were well down in January but they have picked up remarkably in February. Luckily we knew January would be quiet and we took the time to start organising some fresh stock orders and simply look through all the trade catalogues that had arrived to mark the start of the New Year. In short, taking the time to check on your Omniture stats every now and again has multiple benefits. Not only does it highlight what you should and shouldn't be selling, it also points out the times when you can take a step back and plan for the future. Happy eBaying! Until next time, Avril *** Tips to Enhance Your eBay eBook Auctions by John Thornhill *** It may sound cliché, but eBay is by far the most lucrative auctioning site on the Internet. It attracts thousands of online users across the globe. eBay provides excellent opportunities to sellers who can virtually sell all possible products ranging from electronic goods and home appliances, to health products and cosmetics and a chance to earn good money. These days, there is lot of demand for info products as most sellers are realizing the profit potential of this underestimated market. As a seller, you can shop around for latest content and buy resale rights in order to create an info product that can be sold again and again. Thus, with this small initial investment, you can earn huge profits by listing your information products with a series of auctions. Among all the information products available on eBay, eBooks are the most popular of the lot. The biggest advantage of selling information products in the downloadable format is that you can dodge the hassles of shipping and handling. All said and done, it is important that your eBook auctions look tempting enough to lure buyers. A website as busy as eBay requires sellers to look different to be noticed. It is very easy to get lost in the crowd, as there are thousands of sellers out there selling the same kind of products. All your efforts and money will go down the drain if no one buys your products. Listed below are some tips that you can use to draw buyers to your eBook auctions. Pay Attention To Display Most eBay offers look the same as sellers avoid spending time and money on a different look. Don't just blindly follow the herd and use some interesting graphics that can set you apart from the crowd. Also, it is important to have a good title, to invoke the interest of buyers. Having seen hundreds of eBooks on the same topics, they are likely to ignore yours, unless the title grabs their attention. Develop A Unique Sales Pitch Most product descriptions on eBay auctions are so similar that they almost seem like carbon copies of one another. You need to make an extra effort to create a sales pitch that's unique. Give Something Extra With Your eBook As sellers continue to fight for same market niche, it has become important to use sound strategies that can help you survive competition. If the same kinds of eBooks are being offered on sale, there has to be something unique in your eBook auction that can motivate eBay communities to buy it from you. Everyone loves free gifts so offer something extra with your eBook that would make your offer SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE; an additional report or an extra eBook for the price of one. John Thornhill trades on eBay under the username planetsms and earns over $1000 per week on eBay on autopilot. To see how he does it visit his eBay store at http://stores.ebay.com/PlanetS *** How eBay Reviews Can Help Your Store by Ray Johnson *** Traffic, traffic, traffic are the three most important things in maximizing your eBay sales. Those are also the hardest things to accomplish. Driving traffic to your auctions and your store takes a combination of all the tools available to you. One of those tools is the eBay review system. There is a part of eBay known as Guides and Reviews. Most people understand the concept of Guides but few know how Reviews work and how they can benefit sellers. So we'll focus on Reviews today. Reviews are similar to guides in terms of how they can help you drive traffic to your store. Reviews and guides are also similar to each other in how you set them up. You go to the Review and Guides area of eBay and there will be links to click to start writing a review. If you already have written reviews, you can edit and find the status of those reviews from your 'My eBay' page. Over on the left side of the page listed among all the navigation links you will see a link for my Reviews and Guides. Click that and you will get to your edit page. That's where the similarity ends between guides and reviews. With a guide, you can pretty much write about any subject you want as long as you write a basic how to manual about a specific subject. With reviews, it is a little different. There are only certain categories that you can write reviews for. Unfortunately information products, i.e. eBooks are not one of those categories. So how do you utilize reviews to promote your eBook business if you can't write reviews on eBooks? Look at the categories you are allowed to write reviews on. One of them is books. Now, say you have a large collection of recipe eBooks or those that teach cooking. You can do a search on eBay for a cookbook. When you find one you want to review, click the 'asked' link next to the description. Write an honest review on the cookbook. In the review you can do a few things to reference your eBook store. You may indicate that you sell many cooking instruction eBooks at your store, slipping the URL to your store in there, and because of that you are considered an expert on cookbooks and that is why you are qualified to review the cookbook. Alternately, you may state at the end of the review, after you wrote your honest opinion, something like, 'If you enjoyed reading this asked of xyz cookbook, you may be interested in the dozens of cookbooks available at my digital store'. Again, you put your store URL in the text so that the reader can click on it to get to your store. I hope you get the idea and know that although you cannot do a Review on an eBook but you can do a Review on a related product and still reference back to your store. This is just one more tool in your traffic generating strategy. Make sure you utilize all the tools available when creating your marketing strategy. To find out how you can INSTANTLY receive your own product, your own eBook sets and follow a successful and highly profitable system to making money online, talk with Ray Johnson - Google.com No.1 Ranked eSeller: http://www.ezsellebooks.com *** 8 Tips for Making a Consistent Income on eBay by Lisa Suttora *** On eBay, it is very common to have good sales days with a particular product and then see sales drop off for a couple of days. After a while you will notice patterns in your customers' buying habits, and you may find, for example, that weekends may be busier than certain weekdays for example. The problem with sales fluctuations is that they can wreak havoc with establishing a regular income. However, there are sellers who are able to maintain consistent sales day in and day out and are able to minimize the impact of normal sales fluctuations to their bottom line. What are they doing differently than other eBay sellers? In order to hedge against the normal dips in sales due to the season, the day or general buying trends, these sellers have diversified their product lines. Here are those tips I promised for diversifying your product lines: 1. Sell complimentary products in addition to your "product line staples". If you primarily sell tools, some complimentary products would be tool gift sets, tool boxes, safety goggles, gloves, how-to books, measuring tapes, levels, replacement saw blades etc. 2. Sell information related to your "product line staples". Do you sell small kitchen appliances (toasters, food processors etc.)? Are you a fabulous cook who uses these products or do you know someone who is? Create some quick and easy recipe books (create them in Adobe PDF format) and sell them as add-ons to your products. Information products like these are quick and easy to create, cost next to nothing to make and are great add-on sellers to your primary products. 3. Sell merchandise at a variety of price points. Whether you sell merchandise that is very expensive or moderately priced, it is important to have items up for sale at a variety of different prices. You need both lower priced products and higher priced products in your stores and auctions in order to pull in the broadest range of buyers. With products on both ends of the pricing scales you will attract more buyers. Even though the smaller purchase won't net you as much profit, you will garner sales that you otherwise would have missed without those offerings. Additionally, once a buyer has purchased even a small item from you and been very satisfied with their purchase, they are more likely to come back on a regular basis for more! 4. Carry "out of season" products. If you are a seller based in the US, chances are you stock your auctions with products based on the current US seasons. You sell bathing suits in the summer and ski jackets in the winter. If you only follow the US seasons you are missing out on a huge world market. In other parts of the world where it is their summer and our winter, you have many buyers looking for bathing suits. In January, when American's thoughts turn to that February trip to Hawaii, you will find people on eBay looking for bathing suits, sunglasses and the like. Carrying out of season products offers another advantage as well. You can find rock bottom deals on inventory at the end of the season or out of season. 5. Carry related items in addition to complimentary items. In tip #1 we talked about carrying complimentary items to your primary product line. Related items are a bit different. Let's use the example of the eBay tool seller. Related items are things that people shopping in your store might be interested in as well that aren't directly complimentary to your product line staples. For example, in the case of the tool seller, think about who is going to be shopping for your tools? Men, men who are dads, women buying for their husbands, fathers, sons, women buying for themselves..... What other types of products would these people be interested in? Would the men who buy tools be interested in the latest gadget for their car? Would the dads be interested in buying that adorable little kids tool bench for their children? What about your women buyers? Are there some hot home accessories that might be a good seller to a woman who is browsing your store? Would a mom looking to buy some tools for a Father's Day present also be able to find a new kitchen utensil or home organization unit that appeals to her. Hardware stores are doing a great job of this now! Everyone from our local True Value Hardware to Home Depot and Lowes are branching out into selling related items to their product line staples. Some of Lowe's biggest growth has come from the addition of appliances, kitchen utensils, home organization products and the like. If a husband and wife go shopping at Lowe's - he might go off looking for the skill saw while she shops for the new refrigerator. (Or visa versa!) Use this business model to diversify the products in your eBay store. 6. Introduce new products at least once a month. Almost every successful eBay PowerSeller always has at least 3 new product ideas in the pipeline. As soon as you get one product line up, running and selling, move right on to developing the idea for the next product. There are two important reasons for this. Sometimes a product line staple can experience an unexpected lull in sales or even worse - a fast unexplained drop in demand. If that happens you are left with not much to sell. Adding new products at least once a month allows you to inject some fresh energy into your auctions as well as bring a new breed of bidders to your eBay store. A new product or product line can be short term or long term. There are things that you might by a small lot of that you never plan to sell again. They may be good for 60 - 90 days worth of sales and then they have run their course. Other new products you might add can spun off into a niche or a product line staple. Think about this - when you go to your favorite 'brick and mortar' store, aren't you always excited to see what new merchandise they are carrying? Your eBay buyers feel the same way. New merchandise gives you as a seller a huge psychological boost as well. 7. Carry completely unrelated merchandise to your product line staples. If you own a store in your local neighborhood, chances are everyone knows pretty much what merchandise you carry and what kind of store you are. This in and of itself can be the determining factor as to whether or not someone enters your store. If I am walking by the local train shop, I would not expect to walk in and find cosmetics. And if they did carry a great brand of cosmetics that I might want to buy, I would never know it unless they advertised. The great thing about eBay is that the majority of buyers will find your auctions by searching with keywords. If I am looking for Video Games, my search will take me to your store even if you are a tool seller who carries video games. This is a huge advantage to use as a seller in being able to diversify your product lines! As an eBay seller, you should be constantly sourcing products, identifying suppliers and looking for great deals on merchandise. Remember, you make your money when you buy your inventory, not when you sell it! If you come across a rock bottom price on a Lot of Disney Christmas ornaments, but you are primarily and art supply seller, it doesn't matter! Pick up those Christmas ornaments, write a good title using great searchable keywords and watch sales fly! Even if you are selling in a very narrow niche market, don't limit yourself to selling those products alone. If you come across a great deal on a good seller on eBay, buy it, list it and market it right alongside your other merchandise. I have seen diet books being sold on eBay right along side a 5lb box of rich delicious chocolates by the same seller. Both items were selling like hotcakes. 8. Sell seasonal or trendy merchandise. There is no better feeling than to get in on the upside of a top seasonal seller or an up and coming trend, ride the sales wave and get out before the prices go down or the market is oversaturated. While 'timing the market' does take some work, research and experience you can make a fortune on eBay in a short time if you get in on a hot product before everyone else does and get out before everyone else gets in. This technique is not for the faint of heart - it takes really knowing what the trend is before it becomes mainstream and having the courage to make your inventory purchase BEFORE the evidence of the sales are in. But, if you are able to spot those trends, know where to research them or are just one of those people who are an early adapter of new trends, you can make more money off of one trend in a few months than you might make with all your product line staples the rest of the year! As you can see diversifying your product lines is only limited by your imagination! Think out of the box when adding products to your existing lineup. When evaluating products you might like to sell on eBay, do it with a fresh eye. If you see a product that interests you, consider selling it if only for the purpose of diversifying your product lines. Founder and CEO of What Do Sell®, Lisa Suttora is a noted eBay authority. An internationally known product sourcing and trending expert, Lisa has coached thousands of eBay entrepreneurs in building a successful eBay business. Lisa is the co-author of the best-selling product sourcing book 'What to Sell on eBay and Where to Get It' from McGraw-Hill publishers and the Product Trending Editor for the Product Sourcing Radio Show. WhatDoISell.com, the oldest online private membership community for eBay Sellers has been serving eBay sellers since 2004. An eBay Certified Provider and a member of the Better Business Bureau, whatdoisell.com is your all-in-one solution for starting or expanding your eBay business. http://www.whatdoisell.com To receive your free Product Trends 2008 report, please go to http://www.producttrends2008 |
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