eBay Buying should be fun!

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!

You have probably read plenty about niche marketing on the internet - but what does it really mean? This article takes a look at niche marketing in its context as an eBay shop based business.

eBay: who would have thought ten years ago that this little project of Pierre Omidyar’s, started in his living room, would now be the global phenomenon it has grown into? Many things have changed in the last ten years and opportunities for business online have mushroomed to the extent that there’s now almost ‘too much information’. One thing that seems to baffle people who want to get on the eBay bandwagon - and it’s nothing to do with the mechanics of having an eBay account which, let’s face it, are pretty simple. No - the real stumper for many people is this: what do I sell? What do I trade in? And what’s the best way to get exposure for my goods?

These questions are not asked by the casual eBay member; the one who wants to sell off some unwanted household goods or hold the online version of a garage sale. That type of trading, although still massively widespread amongst the eBay community, is not what niche marketing is about. In fact, it’s not what an eBay business in 2007 is about at all.

I personally don’t know any eBay millionaires but they doubtless exist and let’s get one thing straight: eBay did NOT make these people rich - they made THEMSELVES rich. They had the savvy to see that eBay is what it is - a superb turnkey operation simply begging to be taken advantage of. They learned how to take advantage of the plethora of tools and reports that eBay waved in front of them, tools that elsewhere could well have cost a fortune. And do you know what? You can do exactly the same! It’s just a question of learning how to use the eBay system.

One of the must-knows for anyone setting up or operating any trading business is this: know your market. What do your customers want? Where are they? What do they want to pay for your goods? These are questions that all business owners must know but, before that, before anything, you must know what you are going to sell. What is your stock-in-trade? Where will you buy it from? What investment do you need and (and this is a really important one) - how are you going to get those products in front of these potential customers that your research tells you are champing at the bit to buy from you?

In a redbrick business there are several avenues to market - direct mail, yellow pages, mailshots, catalogues - all tried and tested and all ranging from quite expensive to ruinously so. Just try pricing a minute of prime TV airtime - but have the smelling salts ready! On eBay things are a little different - simply get an eBay shop.

For those who don’t know what an eBay shop is, in some ways it’s a return to the old virtual shopping mall idea of the late ‘nineties, with all the pros and none of the cons. The virtual malls were a good idea let down by clunky servers and snail-speed connections. By contrast, an eBay shop is quick, easy to maintain and, importantly, easy for your prospective customers to use. It’s also inexpensive and will put your goods in front of more prospective customers than you could ever realistically hope to contact by other means.

Where an eBay shop can really come into its own is when you have your own website. Why? Simple. Your eBay shop can easily be embedded into a page on your site - where of course you can offer other goods or services and have targeted ads such as Google AdSense on the page, giving you more opportunities to earn income. An eBay shop can be as simple or as complex as you like and can grow as your business and experience does. Many people start off by selling products that they are interested in - a niche interest! But there are many, many niches within the eBay marketplace and ways of discovering them do exist - unfortunately these are beyond the scope of this article.

eBay shops are ideal for those niche businesses I mentioned above. If you want to sell pottery figures from Wade - great! Bakelite inkwells - no problem! I’m not saying you’ll ever make your fortune doing this but the important thing is that you will ‘cut your teeth’ in a real business environment - and there are enough niches for all. Maybe you’ll spread to a broader product base and make your million after all - maybe you’ll just have a very nice niche business that you understand and are good at. It’s all up to you!