• Welcome from Brian McGregor
• 1. Thought for the Day
• 2. Promoting your eBay Sales
• 3. How to Take Advantage of eBay's Generosity
• 4. News & Views:
  Testimonials - Make $20,000 in 20 Days or Your Money Back
  Squidoo for eBay?
  There's Money in Them There Socks
  eBay and the CIA
  What Goes Around Comes Around
• 5. Someone's Auctioning What???
• Back to Newsletter Archive

You probably know that the big sellers on eBay don't rely solely on eBay for their online business.

They try and maximise their income by having other "irons in the internet fire", usually in the form of websites. This can give you:

> Increased traffic to your eBay Store and auctions
> Improved exposure in the search engine listings
> Attract more people to opt in to your email list
> Increase your revenues with another stream of income
> Bring in more testimonials from happy customers, building your credibility
> Lessen your total eBay and PayPal fees

As you will know, on the internet making the most of your traffic is one of the keys to success.

By having eBay auctions and other websites, you can cross-promote and "pass" traffic back and forwards between the two, thus making the most of your traffic.

However, for many eBay sellers, the prospect of creating a website can be daunting. There's so much to learn.

But there is a very simple way in which you can have your own website, and can therefore take advantage of these traffic strategies.

You do this by creating a blog. Now, don't turn off at the mention of the word blog - please hear me out.

One way you can visualise a blog is to think of it as a diary with products for sale. You just make entries when you have something of interest to record. Intermingled with your diary, you show items for sale and/or links to your auctions.

The simplest blog to set up is Google's Blogger. This is a free service, and they've made it extremely easy to create a blog and update it. There is lots of quality Help information too.

You start here - http://www.blogger.com

Just like in your auctions, strategic placement of keywords in your blog will help to make sure your blog shows up in front of people using those words in the search engines.

The key considerations are to make sure your keywords appear in your blog post title, and in the first and last paragraph of the text of your post, and also a few more times throughout the post body. Just make sure that you keep the flow of your keywords natural - remember people have to read your blog.

Now that you have a blog set up, how do you link to your eBay auctions? And how do you link back from your eBay auctions to your blog?

One method is to become an eBay affiliate. With this you earn money from driving people to your auction listings, or indeed other sellers' listings. When you join the eBay affiliate program, you'll get a unique affiliate ID that you embed in the links leading from your blog to eBay. You get paid a referral fee every time someone clicks through one of your links and buys something from eBay, whether it's your product or somebody else's.

eBay offers plenty of advice and help in implementing this affiliate opportunity. For example, you can have your live listings appear automatically on your blog. You can get more information about eBay's affiliate program here:

USA eBay affiliate - http://affiliates.ebay.com/

UK eBay affiliate - http://affiliates.ebay.co.uk/

With regard to getting visitors from your eBay auctions over to your blog, you can do this via your About me page. As you may know, you're not allowed to have a direct link to your website from your auction description page. But you can have such a link in your About me page. So that's how you can drive additional traffic to your blog from your eBay traffic.

Even if you're quite happy with your current eBay profits, expanding in the way described can protect your business from the vagaries of the eBay economy, not to mention adding another healthy revenue stream to your business!

You've probably noticed recently that eBay are investing considerable amounts in advertising under the banner of "Shop Victoriously".

One of the consequences of this will be a surge in eBay sign-ups. Which is great news for you if you are an existing eBay seller!

In reality, eBay's strategy is that they are getting geared up for a 2007 Christmas push.

eBay have spent time and money in coming up with a Holiday Hot List. This attempts to show you items which it is thought will be in high demand and in short supply during the yuletide period. The list is generated from input by retail industry experts plus information from eBay's historical sales data. It's worth taking a look...

http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/holidayhotlist/

Also, here is some free education from eBay to help you capitalise on the Christmas rush and generally develop your eBay business:

http://forums.ebay.com/db2/forum.jspa?forumID=93

Finally, keep your eyes peeled for free listing days. These occur around six times per year, but eBay typically only give you about 36 hours notice.

Knowing that these free days occur from time to time, why not prepare batch listings for all your stock items? If you use TurboLister, put all of your basic items into a file.

When the free listing day starts (make sure you're working to eBay's time clock to avoid any nasty listing fee bills), load up your auctions.

I know of one jewellery PowerSeller who adopts this approach. On eBay's last free listing day, they put up 27,000 listings. Apparently they only sold 250 of them, which would normally be a poor ratio. But these are 250 sales which cost zero listing fee. Plus, they had over 150,000 page views from people who had an interest in their goods and company. All for no cost!

As a company, eBay makes good profits. Make sure that when they use some of that profit to provide you with systems and opportunities, you take advantage to the benefit of your business.

Testimonials - Make $20,000 in 20 Days or Your Money Back

"$20k in 20 days? I've just done it and then some. Thanks Michael. I never really thought it would be possible, but you've (or perhaps that is I've) proved myself wrong. I'm very grateful."
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Michael Green's toolkit basically provides you with the opportunity to earn $20,000 in just 20 Days by following the detailed steps set out.

But the best thing of all is that The 20/20 Challenge is backed by a 100% guarantee. So you've got absolutely nothing to lose by giving Michael's toolkit a go:

http://www.workwinners.com/join_me/

Squidoo for eBay?

If you've heard of Squidoo, you'll know just what a phenomenon it is.

Now, the people who launched Squidoo have announced SquidBids. They call this Squidoo for eBay users.

Find out about SquidBids here:

http://www.squidoo.com/squidbids/hq

There's Money in Them There Socks

A sock worn by a photographer when Britney Spears drove over his foot sold for $585 (£285) on eBay.

The white sock was covered in Mercedes tyre marks after the singer ran over it as she left a medical centre in Los Angeles last week.

The item was described on eBay as: “The actual sock worn by a TMZ cameraman when Brit drove over his foot. Tyre tread guaranteed authentic!”

The proceeds of the auction were to be donated to the Children's Defence Fund.

Here's the auction:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220162340843

eBay and the CIA

According to a database maintained by the Senate's public records office, eBay listed the CIA on a form covering its lobbying activities for the first six months of 2007.

Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesman, said that listing was an error. Then he said the company did meet with CIA officials in the second half of 2006 to discuss amendments to a 1994 law — the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act — that required Internet phone companies to ensure their equipment can accommodate wiretaps.

eBay owns the Internet phone company Skype.

What Goes Around Comes Around

Do you remember how livid I was? This was a few months ago, and eBay announced that UK eBay sellers would no longer have their auctions appear on eBay.com, but USA sellers would have their items appear on eBay.co.uk.

It seemed to me to be very unfair for UK sellers.

Well, guess what?

eBay appear to be relaxing that policy, and giving UK eBayers some good news.

Here's the UK announcement:
http://www2.ebay.com/aw/uk/200710.shtml#2007-10-18151300

Incidentally, here's the same announcement as it's been made to USA eBayers. Talk about spin! You'd hardly recognise it as being about the same event!
http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200710.shtml#2007-10-17153123

As regular readers will know, the "Someone's Auctioning What???" section has been an important part of my newsletter for several years.

Sad to say, but the time has come to move on.

The good news is that I have decided to give this section a new life of it's own.

If you like the kind of humour found in "Someone's Auctioning What???", you'll love this.

I have a new website called http://www.funnyauctions.co.uk

I post an unusual eBay auction there virtually every day, together with my comments.

If you want to be notified automatically whenever I add an amusing auction to the funnyauctions site, just subscribe to the RSS feed on the home page.

The reason why I'm producing funnyauctions of UK eBay is simply because the UK is where I am based. I may introduce other country versions in the future.