HOW TO BUILD A NICHE TARGETED E-MAIL LIST AND DRIVE MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF TRAFFIC TO YOUR WEBSITE USING EBAY

Table of Contents
1 A DIFFERENT ANGLE ON EBAY .................................................................................... 6 WHY EBAY? ..................................................................................................................... 7 BEWARE OF THE RULES............................................................................................. 8 UNDERSTANDING THE POWER OF NICHE MARKETING ON EBAY ......................... 9 WHATS YOUR NICHE? ................................................................................................ 10 2 THE POWER OF THE EBAY ABOUT ME PAGE ........................................................... 13 STEP ONE HOW TO GET PEOPLE TO VISIT YOUR ABOUT ME PAGE ................ 14 USING YOUR ABOUT ME PAGE AS A REPORT IN ITSELF................................... 15 STEP TWO WRITE SOME REVIEWS AND GUIDES FOR EBAY SURFERS .......... 16 STEP THREE LINKING TO YOUR OWN WEBSITE FROM YOUR ABOUT ME PAGE AND GETTING VISITORS TO CLICK ON THAT LINK ............................................... 17 USING EFFECTIVE COPYWRITING TECHNIQUES ON YOUR ABOUT ME PAGE 18 3 THE POWER OF MARKETING CHEAP E-BOOKS ON EBAY ...................................... 20 WHAT KIND OF E-BOOKS SHOULD YOU BE SELLING? ......................................... 21 SOURCING YOUR E-BOOKS ....................................................................................... 22 AUCTION OR BUY IT NOW? ........................................................................................ 23 SENDING THE WINNING BUYER THEIR E-BOOK .................................................... 24 BONUSES AND FREEBIES ........................................................................................... 25 BEFORE YOU GO ....................................................................................................... 26 YOUR EMAIL SIGNATURE ........................................................................................... 27 4 MAXIMISING THE MARKETING POTENTIAL OF YOUR E-BOOK CONTENT .......... 28 WHERE DO YOU GET STARTED? ............................................................................... 28 THE BENEFITS OF A HOW TO TITLE ......................................................................... 29 PLANNING AND FORMATTING YOUR E-BOOK......................................................... 30 THE ADVANTAGES OF OFFERING RESALE RIGHTS TO YOUR BUYERS............... 31 SOME POINTS TO BEAR IN MIND ............................................................................. 32 5 WHAT ELSE CAN YOU SELL ON EBAY IN ORDER TO BUILD THAT MAILING LIST?.................................................................................................................................. 35 ALWAYS START WITH YOUR NICHE ......................................................................... 36 SO WHAT EXACTLY IS CAMTASIA ANYWAY? .......................................................... 36 ARE TANGIBLE PRODUCTS OFF LIMITS FOR ATTRACTING NEW CUSTOMERS?37

THE MAIN BENEFIT OF SELLING TANGIBLE PRODUCTS ON EBAY ...................... 38 HOW TO VIRTUALLY GUARANTEE YOUR INFORMATION WILL BE KEPT BY YOUR CUSTOMERS ................................................................................................................. 39 THE ATTRACTION OF PROMOTIONAL ITEMS .......................................................... 41 6 PROFIT OR LOSS? CHOOSING YOUR SELLING PRICES ON EBAY ...................... 42 THE POWER OF THE NUMBER SEVEN....................................................................... 42 SHOULD YOU BE TRYING TO COVER YOUR EBAY SELLING FEES? ..................... 43 BUDGET FOR SUCCESS .............................................................................................. 44 THE ISSUE OF SELLING PRICE AND VALUE ............................................................ 45 PART ONE OF TEN? ...................................................................................................... 46 WHAT ABOUT HIGHER PRICED PRODUCTS? ........................................................... 47 7 BUILDING A REGULAR PRESENCE ON EBAY ........................................................... 49 MAINTAIN YOUR PRESENCE AND CUT YOUR LISTINGS FEES ............................. 50 HOW DO YOU COMPETE WITH SELLERS WHO ARE ALREADY WELL ESTABLISHED? ............................................................................................................. 51 THINK ABOUT TRAFFIC COMING IN ...................................................................... 53 AND FINALLY THINK OF A SPIDERS WEB ........................................................... 54 8 CREATING A DESIRABLE FREE NEWSLETTER TO SNAG MORE PAYING CUSTOMERS ..................................................................................................................... 55 DONT CONFUSE FREE WITH HAVING NO VALUE .................................................. 56 TOO MUCH TO HANDLE? ............................................................................................ 56 HOW CAN A FREE NEWSLETTER FIND YOU PAYING CUSTOMERS? .................... 57 AN EMAIL NEWSLETTER ON PAPER ....................................................................... 58 WHAT KIND OF FORMAT SHOULD YOU FOLLOW? ................................................. 58 AROUSING THE READERS INTEREST ...................................................................... 60 PASS IT ON ................................................................................................................... 61 IN CONCLUSION .......................................................................................................... 62 9 THE IMPORTANCE OF HAVING A SALES STRATEGY .............................................. 63 WHAT ARE YOUR GOALS? .......................................................................................... 63 USE EBAY AS A HUB.................................................................................................... 64 A KEY PART OF YOUR STRATEGY MAKING YOU AND YOUR WEBSITE EASILY ACCESSIBLE IN A CUNNING WAY ............................................................................. 65 BE PREPARED ............................................................................................................... 66 A WORD ABOUT COSTS .............................................................................................. 67 ACHIEVING MORE IN LESS TIME .............................................................................. 67

TRYING DIFFERENT TACTICS WHEN YOU ARE LISTING ITEMS ON EBAY ......... 68 THE IMPORTANCE OF REGULAR ACTIVITY ON EBAY ............................................. 69 10 TESTING, TESTING, TESTING .............................................................................. 71 DONT GO IT ALONE .................................................................................................... 71 WHAT COLORS SHOULD YOU BE USING? ............................................................... 72 DONT JUST EXPERIMENT WITH WORDS EXPERIMENT WITH PICTURES AS WELL .............................................................................................................................. 73 MAKE GOOD USE OF THE STATS THAT COME WITH YOUR EBAY STORE .......... 73 TESTING DIFFERENT KEYWORDS IN YOUR AUCTIONS ........................................ 74 REGULAR ACTIVITY EQUALS BETTER RESULTS ..................................................... 74 ANALYSING TRENDS OVER TIME .............................................................................. 75 TO CONCLUDE .............................................................................................................. 76 Internet marketing resources........................................................................................... 78

1 A DIFFERENT ANGLE ON EBAY

If you were to ask a group of people how they could make money using eBay, they would probably all come back with similar answers sell off their unwanted possessions, sell things for other people and take a commission on successful sales, or perhaps go the more professional route and buy stock to resell from a wholesaler. The chances are very high that none of them would think of using eBay as a springboard to achieving bigger and better things elsewhere. Yet a small number of internet entrepreneurs are doing just that utilising the sheer power and reach that eBay has to offer in order to build their own successful website and mailing list. And there are many advantages to using eBay in this way. These people arent selling things on eBay to make money not on eBay at least. They are using the site in perfectly legitimate ways to help them build their mailing list, which will reap them lucrative and repetitive - rewards in the future. If you have your own website and you want to build your own email list in the quickest time possible, you need to be looking at this gigantic auction site to help you do it. And if you are already selling on eBay and youre thinking of expanding into your own website, then its time to start looking at eBay in a whole new way to make sure you get there in double quick time. Before we get into the details of how to use eBay in this way, lets look at why the auction site is such an attractive proposition for internet marketers who want to build an emailing list like this.

WHY EBAY?

If you stop to think about it, the answer is quite simple. There are millions of people the whole world over who even as you are reading this are browsing the listings on eBay, looking for items to buy. And what specifically do they look for? They look for items relating to their hobbies, their interests and their lifestyle. If they see a product that could improve or enhance any one of those three things, they will very likely buy it. This equates to pure gold for you as a seller. As soon as you log on to your eBay account and list an item for sale, you are tapping into a market that runs into the millions. People from countless countries all around the world will find your auction (or Buy It Now item) if you have written a good title and description that is designed to be easily found in the search results. Its far easier to find customers on eBay than it is to find them anywhere else online. Anyone can set up a decent website even if they pay someone else to do it for them but unless you can find and drive traffic to it, you wont sell a thing. EBay is different the traffic is already there in droves; you just need to show them the products and wait for the sales to start trickling in. Thats an over simplified example of course, but it does illustrate the point. EBay does have many advantages over more traditional online advertising methods and they really pay dividends and you can see the results very quickly too. For starters, its pretty cheap to list an item for sale on eBay for a duration of ten days. For that time its available for the millions of eBay members worldwide to view and possibly buy. Your item will be listed in an appropriate category of niche buyers that already have an interest in what youre selling.

Just think about that for a moment. No other website whether its an auction site or anything else gives you the exposure that eBay does. You could place an item for sale in an online classified advert, but it wouldnt get a fraction of the traffic that your eBay item will. And its very likely to cost you a whole lot more than a ten day auction on eBay. So imagine for a moment that you could take advantage of just a fraction of the traffic that eBay gets, and turn it into a niche email list that would pay you dividends each and every month for years to come. Thats exactly what youll learn about in this e-book, and youll be pleased to know that once you apply the principles herein and put certain rules into practice, everything can pretty much run on autopilot. All you need to do is sit back and watch as your email list starts to grow bigger and bigger.

BEWARE OF THE RULES

Before we go any further however, its important to remember that eBay has very strict rules on what you can and cant do on their site. For example, you cant use the site to blatantly divert traffic to your own website. However they do give you certain allowances and it is these that well be covering in detail later on in this e-book, in order to build that list of people who are ready and interested to hear about and buy your latest products. Well be covering how to make the most of your eBay About Me page and how to make sure its as accessible and appealing as possible for anyone who happens to be looking at your listings. Well also discover what to sell on eBay that is relevant to your business (whatever it may be) and how to design and use those products to legally self promote yourself and your business. EBay may be strict on the rules, but they still offer you a goldmine of opportunities to develop and grow your own business elsewhere on the internet you just have to know how to use them to your best advantage.

UNDERSTANDING THE POWER OF NICHE MARKETING ON EBAY

Youll notice that the title of this e-book refers to building a niche targeted email list using the power of eBay. That word niche will pop up again and again during this e-book, and its important that you understand the power of it, because it can unlock serious profits for you and your business. Some people use eBay to sell a wide variety of things virtually anything they can get their hands on and many of them make a good living or second income using this method. But theres no order or logic to it. The only thing that drives them is profit. If they can get their hands on a load of kids toys one week, thats fine. The next week it could be power tools. Whatever they can get at a good price and make a decent profit on is fine by them. But consider how you would feel if you bought something from this person. Now they could be an excellent seller, with one hundred per cent positive feedback and a fast and efficient service. Youd be happy with your purchase of a power tool that youd found tucked away in their hotch potch of listings and youd both walk away happy. But what would happen the next time you needed another power tool? Would you go back to them because you remembered that they sold a wide range of power tools at great prices? No. You might go back to them because of their excellent service and efficient manner, but the chances are theyd be selling something completely different this week, and youd have to take your business and your money elsewhere.

Now think about what would happen in fact, what probably has happened when you have a similar experience, except this time its with someone who has established a business that sells power tools and nothing else. If you received excellent service and an excellent power tool the first time around, the chances are high that you would remember that seller and go straight back to them the next time you need a power tool to add to your collection. Are you beginning to see the power that niche marketing holds? If you become known as an honest business person that specialises in a particular area of sales, you will be able to convert a far greater percentage of your customers into repeat customers than the guy who sells anything and everything, hoping to sell to everyone all at the same time. Hell sell to a lot of people but its doubtful that a lot of them will return, because they know he doesnt specialise in what theyre looking for, and they havent got the time to wade through lots of his listings for dozens of things that dont relate to what theyre after. Repeat customers are where the real money lies in internet marketing, and in order to capitalise on this fact you need to establish a niche for yourself that you can become an expert in.

WHATS YOUR NICHE?

Okay, so weve established that in order to experience real and lasting success with your online business, you need to build a niche email list that you can promote your products to on a regular basis. If this is done correctly you can pretty much guarantee a good monetary return from every single email you send out to your list. Some internet marketers claim they expect a return of several thousand dollars every single time they recommend a product or send out an offer to one of their targeted email lists. Just think - you could soon be

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building a similar list for yourself. It takes time, but the destination is well worth the wait. Your internet business will determine what your niche should be, although you might need to narrow the focus slightly in order to generate plenty of sign ups to your email list. For example, if you sell e-books on how to make money from home then your niche will be slanted towards people who want to do this themselves. But if you sell computer software, the focus is not so easy. You might sell software to help people with their bookkeeping and tax affairs, in which case your email list might be slanted towards home business people (you could also source more products that would appeal to this market). If you sell mainly childrens computer games then youll want to appeal to parents, so this could be a good niche to aim at. Its all a matter of focus, and once you get your first email list established theres nothing to stop you starting another one to really maximise your business profits. For starters its best to concentrate on building just the one though. Always take a good look at your product range and consider what niches you could appeal to before making a firm decision on which one to target. You can then have a look on eBay and see which of these possibilities produces the best sales overall. One final point before we move on make sure that you have a real interest in whatever niche you pick, because then youll be able to write your auction listings with real enthusiasm. People can tell when you genuinely have an interest in your subject because it comes across in your writing whether its on the page or on a computer screen. Youll also find it much easier to build that email list and generate massive amounts of traffic to your website if you establish yourself as an enthusiastic

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expert on your chosen niche. People will be drawn to you and your name will start to become known for all the right reasons. So if youve decided on your niche and youre ready to earn some serious cash with the help of eBay, its time to explore the huge possibilities that await you.

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2 THE POWER OF THE EBAY ABOUT ME PAGE

Everyone knows that when you join eBay you get access to your own About Me page, which you can use to tell people all about yourself. Many people dont use this at all, and those that do often dont use it to its fullest advantage. But if you want to convert more of your auction visitors and buyers to customers who will visit your website, sign up for your newsletters and buy from you on a regular basis and spend more money with you in the process its vital that you devote some time to creating a good quality and professional About Me page. The truth is, if you stick to eBays rules about how you can and cant use your About Me page, you can use it as a means to drive traffic directly over to your own website. Think of this page as a landing page which should try and persuade surfers to click across and see your own website. Obviously not everyone who arrives at your About Me page will make that journey, but the more people you can get to visit, the better. This chapter will reveal how to make the most of your About Me page, with the ultimate end goal of getting truck loads of traffic to your website, which in turn will convert into large emailing lists and lots of paying customers. If that sounds appealing, lets move on.

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STEP ONE HOW TO GET PEOPLE TO VISIT YOUR ABOUT ME PAGE

Obviously, this is essential. EBay quite happily allows you to have a link on your About Me page which goes directly into your own website, so its in your own best interests to get as many people to see that link as possible. To begin with, eBay gives you that little blue and red me symbol which appears alongside your eBay ID on all your listings. If anyone visiting your auctions clicks on this little symbol, they will be taken directly to your About Me page. The problem is everyone knows that little symbol is there but very few people ever click on it. After all, there is never any reason to, is there? It looks pretty but thats about it. Fortunately eBay also provides a solution to this problem, but you have to be pro-active in order to make it work for you (dont worry, its easy). Have you ever been on one of those promotional single page websites and noticed how they steer you to do certain things? Whether its ticking boxes to say yes! to the benefits of a product or using the click here button to request a free newsletter, the owners of these websites know that you are more likely to do something if they tell you exactly what it is they want you to do. This may sound obvious to the majority of you; after all you know you have to click here in order to buy a product, but its all about making the process as easy as possible, and steering you towards the result the website owner wants. You can do this on all of your listings on eBay in order to drive more traffic to your About Me page. It also helps to position you as a more helpful and accessible seller. Simply put a line in all your auctions asking customers to Click here to visit my About Me page. EBay allows you to do this in its policies section which, by the way, is advisable to visit on a regular basis, just to make sure you are staying on the right side of any policy changes.

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You can then make the word here a clickable link by using simple HTML. You dont need to be a computer whiz to do this all you need to do is copy and paste the following line of HTML into all your listings, making sure you replace the words About Me page URL with the URL to your own About Me page, including the http:// part. <a href=About Me page URL>here</a> The process of directing everyone to click here will drive more traffic to your About Me page where the link to your website will be waiting. Experiment with where you put this invite to visit your About Me page; it may work better at the end of your listing, where you can tell people a little about how you work. For example, you could try something like this: If you have any questions about any of our products, please do not hesitate to contact us. We always combine on shipping costs for multiple purchases. And click here to visit our About Me page! It can equally be placed before the description of the item you are selling, but bear in mind that if you do this you are directing them away from finding out more about your product and possibly making a sale. So do weigh up your options before making any firm decisions and dont forget you can always make changes.

USING YOUR ABOUT ME PAGE AS A REPORT IN ITSELF

This is something you may not have thought of doing, but its a way that is guaranteed to drive even more eBay visitors to your About Me page.

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If you think of using it as a stepping stone to allow people to get to your website, youll start to get more ideas as to what your auction visitors will be interested in reading about. Lets say you sell wooden toys on eBay, and you want to get more people to visit your website, which sells an entire range of toys not listed on the auction site. Fair enough, why not do a bit of research and find out the benefits of giving kids wooden toys to play with rather than electronic games? For example, you might say they save you lots of money by not having to buy batteries for them. Theyre also longer lasting, dont fall out of fashion as quickly, and can even be passed down to their children as a family heirloom. All you need to do is write a short report detailing the benefits of the toys you sell, and post it on your About Me page. Somewhere within that report will be a link (clickable of course) to your own websites home page (you cannot link directly to a product that is for sale, as this is construed by eBay as trying to drive their customers off their site to buy elsewhere). Your listings will then contain a line which will read something like this: To find out why we choose to sell wooden toys rather than more modern toys which require batteries, click here to visit our About Me page! If people have found your listing and are interested enough to read the description, the chances are high that theyll want to find out why you sell what you do. Its human nature were curious beasts at heart!

STEP TWO WRITE SOME REVIEWS AND GUIDES FOR EBAY SURFERS

Whenever you look up a product on eBay, you wont just get your search results appearing on the next screen. Youll also get a small box underneath the related categories section which will tell you about any reviews or guides people have written that are related to the product you have searched for.

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This is a great opportunity to establish yourself as an expert on whatever you are selling, and you can also put a clickable link to your About Me page within the body of the guide or review. Youll also find that youll be mentioned as a reviewer next to your eBay ID, which in turn provides another way for people to get some information from you and to ultimately end up looking at your About Me page and surfing over to your website. Make a point of writing a guide every week if you can, and youll soon have another strategy out there on eBay, working hard to gain you more traffic.

STEP THREE LINKING TO YOUR OWN WEBSITE FROM YOUR ABOUT ME PAGE AND GETTING VISITORS TO CLICK ON THAT LINK

If youve started to put all these strategies in place, youll now be getting a much larger percentage of people visiting your About Me page. The next step is to make sure they leave that page and visit your own website. As mentioned earlier, you cannot link directly to a product which is for sale, but there should be no problem at all if you link to your websites home page. You will of course need to make sure that home page has plenty to offer your visitors, but that will be covered in more detail later on in this book. The main point to remember is that you shouldnt be trying to sell anyone anything from your About Me page. All you are trying to do is to get them to visit your website, and the easiest way to do that is by creating some intrigue and promise.

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USING EFFECTIVE COPYWRITING TECHNIQUES ON YOUR ABOUT ME PAGE

Professional copywriters the world over all know that its not just about what you tell people, its about what you dont tell them that gets them to perform a certain action. If you were to tell someone that a box over by the door has chocolate in it, they wouldnt have any need to go and open it (unless they love chocolate that is). But if you told them there was something interesting and desirable in that box, most people would have to go and have a look. Its that curious thing called human nature again. Now lets transfer this to your About Me page. Dont tell your visitors that there are wooden toys by the hundreds on your website (even if there are, you are liable to annoy the good folks at eBay by putting something like this); try arousing their interest instead by telling them to click here to reveal this years top ten most sought after toys! This will pique most peoples curiosity, whether they have children or not. And of course they will be taken to the page on your website that features an article about the top ten toys for this year followed by a list of your own websites top ten best selling toys. Its all a question of baiting the hook. If its enticing enough, youll easily be able to lead all those people who have faithfully followed you to your About Me page right onto your website, where you will have loads of goodies waiting for them. Use words like discover, find out, reveal and so on to generate that interest and get people to go exactly where you want them to. Combined with the click here technique we discovered earlier, you can create a link to your website that lots of people are going to follow.

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Once they get there, its your job to keep them there as long as possible, either to sign up for a newsletter or free report, or to actually buy something. Either way you want to capture their details and put them on your mailing list, and well cover more ideas about how to do just that later on in this book. But for now its time to leave the About Me page behind and explore how to sell items on eBay for very little money and still make a huge profit while simultaneously building one of those monster mailing lists that internet marketers are always talking about. Think it cant be done? Perhaps those sums dont add up? Once again, its all a question of looking at things in a different way.

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3 THE POWER OF MARKETING CHEAP E-BOOKS ON EBAY

If you have a few minutes to spare, go and have a look for e-books on eBay. Youre guaranteed to get thousands of results coming back. E-books are seriously big business on eBay, but one thing you are bound to notice if you look through the completed listings is that the vast majority of e-book sales are for less than a dollar. Now I want to toss in one more catch here, and that is that eBay no longer allows the sale of downloadable digital products. Thats ok though because now your ebook products will relly have a much higher perceived value more on that later! But from this point forward when we speak about ebooks just know that what I mean is that you will be burning your ebooks onto a cheap 19 cent CD and shipping them to your customer. I will not be mentioning that again each time I bring up ebooks so please know that this is what I mean in all future talk about ebooks. The great thing about this is that you will also be collecting your customers physical shipping address to be able to market to later, not just your customers email address. Also before I go too much further I want to mention a resource you should check out that can help with this auction listing and shipping process and thats www.auctionmagick.com

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Ok so back to what happens when we are only selling a product for one dollar Which begs the question how are these sellers making any money? Its true that you havent got any delivery costs or stock to pay for they just send a copy of the appropriate download to everyone who buys from them. But once youve taken their eBay fees into consideration and perhaps the fees for their eBay store if they have one, that doesnt leave much if any room for profit. Well heres the secret. Most of these sellers arent selling e-books on eBay for a dollar, or less than a dollar, or even a cent or two, to make money. They are selling them to generate a customer base which they can then transfer over to their own website. Many e-book sellers have feedback stretching far into the thousands; if just a quarter of those people went on to sign up to their newsletter, or take a look at their website, or buy another more expensive ebook directly from the seller after reading one of their emails, thats a lot of cash thats been generated from that initial two cent sale on eBay. Making the initial sale is always the hardest part in any business. Gaining new customers is much more time consuming and more expensive than the costs involved with keeping existing ones. The more barriers you can break down between you and your potential customers, the more likely it is that they will take a chance on buying something from you and then spending more money with you in the future.

WHAT KIND OF E-BOOKS SHOULD YOU BE SELLING?

If you are now sold on the idea of using cheap e-books to snag new customers from eBay, you should now be thinking of which ones to sell. Its vital to remember that cheap should never mean nasty every single e-book you offer for sale should be of top quality regardless of the price, otherwise the buyer is unlikely to come back and spend more money with you.

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Think about your business as a whole. You want to find more customers for that business, so your e-books should have titles and content that will appeal to those people. Lets look at some examples to see how this could work for you: If you sell bar equipment and related items you could sell an e-book revealing 101 recipes for mixing your own cocktails If you sell home brew kits you could offer an e-book describing how to make the perfect beer or wine for half the price of a store bought one If you sell toys you could offer an e-book giving ideas on how to create the perfect party bags for kids at budget prices If you sell sewing supplies and kits you could promote an e-book on how to design your own cards and other gift items If you have a website which offers a paid membership giving access to exclusive internet marketing advice every month, you could sell an e-book revealing 101 strategies for making more money online If you have a website which sells wholesale items to trade customers, you could sell an e-book revealing how to make money on eBay by buying stock to resell Do you get the picture? No matter what business you run, or what the focus of your business or website is, you will almost certainly be able to come up with several ideas for e-books that will appeal to your customer base.

SOURCING YOUR E-BOOKS

You have two options available to you when you know what subject you want your e-book to cover. You can either find a previously published e-book online (maybe even on eBay itself) that you can buy with resale rights and sell it on yourself, or you can write your own.

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Each option has its own benefits and drawbacks. Its generally a lot quicker to find a previously published book you can sell on, because once youve found it its just a question of setting up a listing on eBay and starting it. The downside is that there could be lots of other people selling the same book, so you have no exclusivity to it. Writing your own e-book has the downside of needing your investment of time to actually sit down and churn it out, and if youre not a good writer this can present a problem. You can pay someone else to write it, but whichever method you choose it will be at least a few days before you can get the e-book live and for sale on eBay. Incidentally the next chapter goes into how to write an e-book to build your email list and promote your own website; you may find writing your own isnt as hard as you might think. The good side to creating your own e-book far outweighs the time involved in doing it, and thats the fact that no one else will be selling it. If you pick a good subject and create a good listing title that will easily be found by the very people it will appeal to, you are likely to sell plenty of copies, and each one will get you a brand new customer. Another incredible resource to get ebooks that you can rebrand as your own without writing a word are PLR ebooks form a site like www.NakedPLR.com and www.SourceCodeGoldMine.com You can use this content as is or rebrand and rename it to fit your niche. Remember these are lead generators you are looking for here and PLR content like this will work great!

AUCTION OR BUY IT NOW?

Once again, there are pros and cons to each of these methods. Auction listings are better for exposure as you know they will run for the full duration of the

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listing. That means youll get more potential for people to click through to your About Me page or visit your website, as well as encouraging bids on your listing and possibly selling your e-book for slightly more than the minimum price. Buy It Now items tend to capture those people who want an item now, instead of having to wait seven or ten days to get access to it. Because e-books are delivered digitally, you can be reading one within minutes of buying and paying for it. That benefit is taken away if you have to bid on an auction unless of course its near the end. Thats why a lot of bids wont happen until the last hours or minutes of an auction. Some sellers put each e-book on auction and then put copies of the same title in their eBay shop to be bought immediately. This covers both options, encourages people to visit your shop and possibly buy more than one thing, and also gives them all the options. So you might have a title on auction starting at a cent, while that same title could be available in your eBay shop for ninety nine cents to buy immediately. Only testing will reveal what works best for you, but if you cover all the bases youll get the best results.

SENDING THE WINNING BUYER THEIR E-BOOK

After each successful sale, you have a chance to make a real impression with the buyer. To begin with you might want to email each e-book out manually, but youd be better off to automate everything by purchasing a program such as My Digital Dispatch, or another similar item on the market. You can also use something like Microsoft Outlook to deliver them but it wont check up on whether the payment made to you is correct; it will just recognise that you have received a payment and send the appropriate book accordingly.

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But its not so much the delivery of the e-book that we are interested in here its the email that will accompany it. This is your golden chance to start developing a relationship with your customer; one that could last for a long time if its handled correctly. Start by thanking them for their valued purchase, and then give them the details of where to access their e-book. You can provide it as an attachment but many people are quite rightly nervous of opening these, so provide a link to your website instead where the e-book can be stored. This link should not be accessible from any other page on your website; the only way people can get to it is if they are given the link itself. The most important part of this standard email sent out to all winning bidders and purchasers will be to invite them to sign up for your free newsletter on the very subject they have just bought an e-book on. You should find you can get a very high take up rate on this offer after all its a freebie, and its on a subject they clearly want information on. Just this one act will boost the numbers on your email marketing list enormously. As long as you use the double opt-in method to keep yourself safe from any possibility of spam accusations, you can quickly and easily build a healthy email list that will be your key to internet profits for a long time to come. No remember eBay no longer allows digital products on their site so this digital version you will be shipping will just be so that the user can get instant access to your content, but what they are actually bidding on and what you will deliver on top of this digital version will be a copy of the ebook on CD shipped to their address. You can tell them they will be getting a instant digital copy sent to them but that what they are bidding on is the ebook CD that will be shipped.

BONUSES AND FREEBIES

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You can also make your customers purchases even more valuable by offering them a chance to grab another freebie or two from you, as a thank you for buying one of your e-books in the first place. This can be of a higher value than the e-books you are offering on eBay, and it doesnt necessarily need to be in e-book form. You could link to an affiliate site if you wish, but there are more advantages in getting them familiar with your own website. Why not set up a page on your website that has a specific item or selection of items for sale? That way you are offering another good deal for your customers. The key is not to stray off the beaten track; keep in mind what your customers are interested in, and make sure you serve those interests. If you can do that efficiently and with products that are of excellent quality, youll make more sales and build a bigger email list than you ever thought possible.

BEFORE YOU GO

Have you ever read that one before? You know the kind of thing you click on the link to accept your free email course on your favorite subject, or receive your free package of e-books, and up comes a page telling you its the only chance youll have to say yes to this offer. What follows is a huge package of e-books and downloads that are offered for sale at a hugely discounted price. These pages are popular with sellers for one reason they work. Internet marketers use them because a high percentage of people take up the offer and pay for the additional package. Once you have enough downloadable products to make up a package like this, its definitely in your best interests to offer one. Theyre a good impulse buy, because people dont like to think theyre going to miss out on anything.

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YOUR EMAIL SIGNATURE

Another simple but effective way to market your website and generate extra traffic for free is to make sure you include a signature in all your outgoing emails. This applies right across the board, but you should definitely have a good signature in the emails you send out to your winning buyers on eBay. Simply create a one or two line signature which arouses that old favorite, human curiosity, and contains a clickable link to your website for your customers to follow. Again, if its related to the subject of the e-book/s you are selling youll be able to achieve a high volume of traffic quite easily. Although e-books are by far the most popular and easiest of ways to market low priced items to your customer base through the power of eBay, there are several other ideas you could use to penetrate that same market. These will be explored fully in chapter five, but for now lets continue on and have a look at the potential that the content of your self written e-book has to promote your website and build your email list for months if not years to come, long after the initial sale has been made.

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4 MAXIMISING THE MARKETING POTENTIAL OF YOUR E-BOOK CONTENT

In the previous chapter we discussed the potential of selling low priced e-books on eBay, and using them as a marketing strategy to attract more customers to your website and onto your emailing list. But thats only half of the story. Because what goes inside the e-book is just as important as the price you sell it for, and the number of people you sell it to. Not just in terms of the information you reveal that will be of use to the customer, but in terms of the opportunity you have to promote your own website and boost your own emailing list. This is another big reason for taking the time to write your own e-book, or at least hiring someone else to write it for you. By creating your own e-book you will know you have something unique that hasnt done the rounds of eBay and the whole of the internet three or four times already. Which gives you a golden opportunity to get lots of other people in on the act of promoting your business and your website for you.

WHERE DO YOU GET STARTED?

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The title of your e-book is half the challenge. You need to start by thinking about your kind of customer, and try to figure out what they will be looking for on eBay. If you have already established an off-eBay business you should have a good idea of what kind of products are the most popular. Try and select an ebook to write that plays to these products if you can. For example, lets say you run a business which sells toys, and your biggest selling lines are party bag toys. So your challenge will be to come up with an ebook that will appeal to people looking to buy these toys. An attractive and eye catching title will help you to direct as many potential customers as you can towards your listing; something like this would be ideal: How to Find Party Bag Toys For Less Money- ebook e-book This title has exactly 55 characters including spaces, which is the maximum that eBay will allow for a listing title. Youll notice that e-book has been spelt both ways, so this will catch everyone looking for e-books, regardless of the way they spell it. This immediately gets your book listed in even more search results. This title will also come up if people search for party bag toys in general on eBay, and as it promises to show them ways to find party bag toys for less money, the chances are youll get a high take up rate for this e-book, especially if you price it nice and low at just a few cents.

THE BENEFITS OF A HOW TO TITLE

The phrase how to is a great one to include in your listings titles if its appropriate to what you are selling. People are constantly on the look out for information that will show them how to do something, and the two main types of information that they are looking for will help them to either: make money

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save money

If you can make sure the subject of your e-book appeals to one or other of these needs, you have a potential winner on your hands.

PLANNING AND FORMATTING YOUR E-BOOK

Even if youre an experienced writer, its advisable to plan out your e-book before you actually write it, and there are two very good reasons for this. Firstly it will enable you to make sure the book is tightly focused and includes all the ideas, tricks and tips you can think of to include in it. Secondly and perhaps most importantly planning your book in advance will allow you to fit in some links to your website and affiliated products. Links can be embedded in your e-book quite easily, and they are one of the most powerful ways to monetise the content and let it sell for you for months (if not years) to come. Its as close as youll ever get to perpetual advertising for free and if you play your cards right, you can get other people to help you promote your links and website (more information on that coming up). Incidentally, its well worth investing some cash in some e-book software when it comes to formatting your e-book. Not only will some of these packages enable you to protect your work from being copied illegally, they will also allow you to present your work in a professional way. The key point to remember when planning any e-book you write is to always, always, always make sure you include content that cant be found anywhere else. If you are writing about a subject you know well, that shouldnt be a problem, but its very important that you find your own USP your unique selling point. This is what will set you apart from every other e-book (or standard book) that is already available on the same subject.

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You want to be able to get past the natural hesitancy people will have about buying your product. You want to tell them why they need your book, and what they are getting for the small amount of cash they are required to part with. You also want to sell as many copies of your e-books as possible, so make that sales copy as appealing as you possibly can. If you can offer to solve a problem or give the buyer information that will save them or make them money, you will be in the money yourself, as theyll be only too eager to see what else you have for sale so long as your low priced e-book delivers what it says it does. Remember, most e-books are fairly short, and those that are sold for a few cents are very often no more than a short report perhaps twenty or thirty pages long. So dont be put off by the word book if you are new to this you wont be writing anything as long as a book, unless of course you want to. And the price for something of that length should go up accordingly. On the internet, information is perhaps more highly priced than it would be in a traditional bookshop. Top tip to research how other people promote their businesses on eBay, buy a few cheap e-books and see what they do to attract you to visit their own website. You can learn a lot from what other sellers do and dont do.

THE ADVANTAGES OF OFFERING RESALE RIGHTS TO YOUR BUYERS

If youve had a browse round the e-books available on eBay youll no doubt have noticed that a lot of them are available with resale rights. If youre not familiar with how the e-book market works, you might be wondering what author would be daft enough to part with the rights for their work, knowing full well that other people will now be able to sell their book and keep all the profits for themselves. The answer is simple it gives that author free advertising.

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Remember all those links to your affiliate products and your website that were mentioned earlier? If you make sure you insert these in all the e-books you give away resale rights to, youll soon be getting free advertising all across the internet. This generates what is known as a viral effect. It goes like this. You write an original e-book which contains relevant affiliate links and mentions your website and your newsletter (which should also be related to the content of the e-book). You then list it on eBay with a selling price of just a few cents, and give away resale rights to it as well. When the sales start coming in, you know theres a good chance those customers will be interested in finding out more about your website, and maybe theyll sign up for your newsletter too. Thats round one of the benefits eBay offers you in terms of getting some free advertising. But round two can be far more powerful. Not everyone will want to use those resale rights and sell the book themselves, but some certainly will. So after a while there will be a second wave of e-book sales going on. You wont know about them, but youll be getting more traffic to your website and more sign ups to your email newsletter and mailing list as a result. And then those sales will start selling the e-book and so on, through as many levels as you can imagine. Thats why its called viral marketing. Combined with the opportunities you have to write and sell cheap but effective e-books on eBay that are slanted towards the subject of your business, it can be the key to some really impressive results.

SOME POINTS TO BEAR IN MIND

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All this mention of affiliate links and website links makes it sound as if your ebook should be one long advertisement. It shouldnt be, of course. The main reason for writing the e-book should be that it will benefit your target audience in some way, and they should receive information during the course of the book that, if acted upon, will be of real use to them. Its very important that you keep this in mind while you are writing. Have a brainstorming session to come up with everything your customers would want to know about your subject. What angles have been done to death? Which ones havent? If you have extensive knowledge of your market, you should have an idea already about which areas seldom get covered by other people. This could of course mean they are not that popular but it could mean youve uncovered an area ripe for the picking. Why not find out? The fact that e-books are generally fairly short in length gives you another big advantage they dont take that long to write. And once youve written one or two youll start to get quicker, as youll develop a routine for yourself that will become natural to you. When you are thinking up ideas and writing e-books primarily to sell on eBay with resale rights, its very important not to give away all your secrets. Whats meant by that? Well, if you are going to sell your e-books as a way to introduce more people to your website and mailing list, you want to provide a taster of what they can expect when they do business with you. Not the whole chapter and verse, but just enough to whet their appetite. Interestingly, some sellers do things the other way around. Lets say for example that they have written a comprehensive e-book about making money from selling crafts. They might then write a smaller e-book revealing ten specific crafts that can rake in the cash. This e-book would be sold for a low price on eBay, and acts as an introduction to the bigger and more in depth book. The seller knows that anyone who buys his

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short, low cost e-book is likely to be interested in his bigger, more expensive one (and perhaps, his newsletter on that very topic as well?), and of course he will have put one or two references to this in the short e-book, plus links to his website where the main product can be bought. If you can think of topics which can be approached in this two step manner, its definitely worth choosing one of them as your first foray into finding fresh customers on eBay. Before you know it, youll have a wealth of e-books being sold on your behalf and your email list will be looking a lot healthier as a result. Remember a great place to get a head start on ebooks you can rebrand is www.NakedPLR.com and also www.SourceCodeGoldMine.com

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5 WHAT ELSE CAN YOU SELL ON EBAY IN ORDER TO BUILD THAT MAILING LIST?

Up to this point you would be forgiven for thinking that the only way to build up a niche targeted email list via eBay is by selling e-books. In fact, this is only really scratching the surface of what you can do with this huge auction site. Once you get into the frame of mind that you are not going on eBay with the intention of making money, youll actually find the ideas of what to sell to reach your niche target audience will start to flow a little more easily. Obviously there are costs involved with listing items on eBay listings fees and their many variations, Final Value Fees and so on but these should be thought of in a similar way to paying for advertising elsewhere. The issues surrounding pricing and costs (and knowing how much to charge) will be covered in the next chapter, but first lets explore the myriad of possibilities to find more niche customers on eBay by appealing to them with a wider range of merchandise. Weve already seen that e-books are an ideal product to attract the attention of the people youre after on eBay. From the customers point of view theyre cheap, they dont have any postage costs, theyre instantly received (either via email or a link to download them) and they can help solve a problem or make life easier in some way. And for you, theres no physical stock to find room for, as its all stored safely on your computer.

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Keep these benefits firmly in mind when you are thinking of products to appeal to your market; if you can satisfy all or most of these points youll be able to gain access to a much wider customer base than you have now.

ALWAYS START WITH YOUR NICHE

You need to fix this firmly in your mind in order to come up with saleable ideas that will meet with success on eBay. Think about who you are trying to reach and what problems they may have that need solving. And its not necessarily just problems either. For example, lets suppose you run a wine making business. You could come up with any number of possibilities on this subject. How about a batch of recipes for making unusual wines from household items such as coffee and rose petals? It can be done! You could also make a video presentation with the help of Camtasia, showing people how to make wine easily at home. This would be directed more at beginners, so make sure thats the focus of your list before plunging in and doing it. Incidentally, videos are an excellent way to market your services towards new customers. They are particularly good for any how to subject you want to exploit, as you can show people step by step how to do things. You also get to put a human face on your business, instead of being just another faceless internet marketer. Videos are also an up and coming media to use online by internet marketers, so its worth learning a bit more about Camtasia and what it offers to see how it could benefit you and your business via eBay.

SO WHAT EXACTLY IS CAMTASIA ANYWAY?

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Camtasia is a program that allows you to capture screen images for use in a video that can then be accessed online. It can also be used to good effect with a PowerPoint program. Thats a short description, but it does capture the benefits of the program, especially if your business is concerned with online media and marketing. If you sell software, for example, you can create a short video with Camtasia that shows ways to make more cash by using a certain software application. This can then be sold via eBay for a low price, enabling you to reach more customers that may well be interested in your main range of higher priced software items. Camtasia also offers the benefit of audio to go along with your video, so you can create a script that will describe what the viewer will see. This combination allows you to come up with lots of different uses for the program that can be applied to your own business, whatever it may be. From how to videos to revealing the secret shortcut techniques for starting an internet business, the possibilities are endless, and its a perfect product to sell for just a few cents on eBay. You can learn more about Camtasia and how you can make first class video based information products at www.CamtasiaCashSecrets.com

ARE TANGIBLE PRODUCTS OFF LIMITS FOR ATTRACTING NEW CUSTOMERS?

With the focus on ebooks and video products, there has been not much mention of tangible products that youd actually have to mail out to your customer other than the ebooks on CD.

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But dont dismiss these products, as they can also be a vital weapon in your arsenal of marketing strategies at rock bottom prices. You can actually print your ebooks out into a totally physical manual and skip the CD, these will look great on your auction page with an image of your book. If you go into any bricks and mortar shop, youll find a range of goods at various prices, and some of these lines will no doubt be whats termed as pick up lines perhaps impulse buys, or add-on items that complement the main theme of the business. These are the kinds of item you need to be looking for if you dont have access to them already low price but good quality items that will capture the attention of your targeted niche audience. Keep that word quality in mind too; dont forget that every item you sell regardless of the price is a reflection of your business as a whole, so it should always be of the best possible quality that you can find. If even one item out of a range of a hundred items or more is of low or even poor quality, it is natural for the customer to assume that the rest of your range will be of a similar standard.

THE MAIN BENEFIT OF SELLING TANGIBLE PRODUCTS ON EBAY

Weve seen already that theres a big opportunity to promote your website and/or opt in newsletter when you email a customer with the download link to the e-book they have just purchased. But you have just as good an opportunity to tell them about your business when your product has to be mailed out to the customer. You should of course enclose some kind of invoice to itemise what has been bought, and to thank your customer for their valued custom.

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But next comes the promotion part. People often keep invoices and payment advice slips so if your website or products are mentioned on the back of that slip, theres the chance that your ad will hang around for longer than it takes to discard the packaging the item came wrapped in. This is particularly true if you sell products to other businesses, as the receipts and invoices will need to be kept for tax purposes. Your promotion and website link could end up being kept for years and found every single time tax time rolls around. If even one per cent of these occasions results in an extra sale, a new customer to your website or a sign up to your newsletter, that could mean a good amount of extra revenue for you. And all because you took the time to promote your website on the back of every invoice you sent out.

HOW TO VIRTUALLY GUARANTEE YOUR INFORMATION WILL BE KEPT BY YOUR CUSTOMERS

There are two main possibilities here. First of all you can create some kind of special offer voucher or money off coupon specially aimed at first time customers. This will have an offer code on it which must be mentioned in order to get the discount on any merchandise available on your website. You can either do this for orders over a certain amount, or simply make it available on any order placed. This is a real incentive for the customer to turn that initial tiny purchase from eBay into a much more lucrative sale for you via your website which of course will incur no selling fees or final value fees. You can make this offer time sensitive in order to encourage people to visit your website straight away, rather than leaving it until some later date (by which time theyve probably forgotten about the offer anyway).

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The second option is to use the power of the freebie to make sure your information isnt discarded. There are lots of ways you can create freebies for your customers, ranging from a simple pamphlet to a free download, or perhaps a free product or sample which promotes the rest of your range. Weve covered e-books and downloads already, and including the link to a free report or two is easily done when you send out your packing slip or invoice. Just make sure its in red (or highlighted in some way) so the customer wont miss it. But tangible products also work well as freebies. Now this method obviously means you will need to part with some cash in order to get hold of your freebies, but if you think of it as an investment into bigger profits later on, youll start to see why freebies and samples are a good way to build your customer base and generate more traffic to your website. You only need to think about the free product samples you get through the mail, and the free sample displays promoted by the large food stores to see that freebies do work. If they didnt the big companies wouldnt use them. Its all about removing any doubt the customer has about buying a new product. Despite the hundreds of thousands of successful transactions that take place on eBay each and every day, there are unfortunately some that do go wrong for whatever reason. Because of this, a lot of people are nervous of parting with a lot of money when they buy stuff on eBay, just in case they get scammed. This is why our strategy of selling low priced items and not making a profit on eBay works so well it gets past this barrier. But you then need to give people a gentle push in the direction of your website in order to place higher value orders, and this is where freebies work so well. Here are some examples: if you run that wine making business we mentioned earlier, you could perhaps provide a sample of some of the corks you sell if you sell party bag toys, send out a sample of one of your ranges

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if you sell temporary tattoos, provide a sample of one of your best sellers if you sell anything and everything to do with tea making, pack a sample teabag into every package you send out

Get the idea? You can build the cost of doing this into your outgoings to reduce your tax bill, but the overall cost will be offset by the number of repeat customers you will get.

THE ATTRACTION OF PROMOTIONAL ITEMS

There is one other area of freebies to consider, and thats promotional items. These can be more expensive and are best left until your business gets to the stage where you can easily afford it, but they are worth remembering when you get to that happy stage. The best promotional items are ones that are genuinely useful, such as pens, pencils and fridge magnets. These can be humorous or practical, but they should all have your website address on them. What better way to keep your business fresh in your customers mind? Pop one into every small eBay order you send out, and spread the word in a useful way. Finally, dont overlook the benefits that a simple sticker can offer. This method is especially useful when you sell consumable items, such as those teabags we mentioned earlier. Print up some stickers that you can put on every consumable product you send out; something like this example: Running low? Why not re-order now before you run out altogether? Visit us at (website address) and enjoy low prices and speedy service. You get the idea. If you can take that initial eBay sale and use it to keep in contact with each new customer, youll convert a lot of them into regular customers who may well stay with you for years.

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6 PROFIT OR LOSS? CHOOSING YOUR SELLING PRICES ON EBAY

So far weve learned to look at eBay in a completely different way. Instead of using the auction site to make money, youre going to use it to promote your business and build your mailing list, customer base and website traffic. But apart from mentioning the need to keep your eBay sales prices low, in order to attract more customers, we havent really discussed the topic in cold hard numbers. How low is low? Should you be making a loss on eBay, or breaking even? What should you be charging for your products? There are pros and cons to low prices, and well cover all of these in this chapter. But the most important word to remember in this section of the book is experiment. You need to experiment with your prices when youre looking to promote your business on eBay. Prices arent set in stone, and sometimes even the smallest price change can make a big difference to the number of customers you get coming through your virtual shop doorway and buying a low priced item of stock.

THE POWER OF THE NUMBER SEVEN

Before we go into more depth concerning prices, lets find out which number you should always end your sales price in. Its the number seven.

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Why? Well the truth is, no one really knows. People do tend to find prices that end in odd numbers more appealing than even numbered ones; hence why you more often see items in stores priced at $4.99 instead of $5. Its perceived as being a better deal and a lower price, even though the difference is only one cent. But why end it in a seven? Research has shown that prices ending in a seven are more attractive to customers than any other number, so even though its a mystery, dont knock the research end your prices in a seven wherever possible. The only variation to this would be if you are selling an e-book, for example, and the vast majority of the ones that are already selling on eBay are for one cent. In this case youd fall in line with them, instead of pricing yourself out of the market. Even if its just a few cents difference, people will always go for the better deal whenever they can.

SHOULD YOU BE TRYING TO COVER YOUR EBAY SELLING FEES?

The answer to this really depends on the product you are selling, and you need to take all the selling factors into consideration before making a decision. Obviously it would be ideal if you could cover all your costs within the selling price of your product, but if youre selling e-books for a cent or two each youre obviously not going to be able to do that. But the only investment into that e-book will be the amount of time it takes you to write it. There are no physical costs involved you dont need to buy it in multiples and you dont need to stock it. Its safely stored on your computer and you can send out as many copies as you like without it costing you anything.

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A tangible product will have a unit price, but it may be sold at a slightly higher price than the e-book. You will also need to figure postage and packaging costs into the picture, although postage is usually paid for by the customer - unless you decide to offer free postage of course. Overall you could find the loss taken on each product will turn out to be the same, even though one has a higher price than the other. Weve talked about looking at these low priced eBay sales as a form of advertising; youre not going on eBay to make money, youre offering several products that are extremely low in price in order to attract the attention of the niche customers youre after. Its those valuable follow up sales and sign ups to the newsletter you send out informing people of your latest (and higher priced) products that is the ultimate goal to aim for. What you are essentially doing is offering loss leaders as bait to attract new customers. Loss leaders are a form of promotion in which youll take a hit on that first sale in order to obtain bigger and more profitable sales later on. In short, its a trade off lose some money now to earn more in the future.

BUDGET FOR SUCCESS

The best way to keep tabs on your eBay ventures is to set yourself a realistic budget to stick to. Make sure its an amount of money you and your business can afford, and set it aside to pay for your eBay listings and associated fees. It should also cover the cost of buying any tangible items you want to sell. In this way its much like setting a budget for advertising; you might have a hundred dollars set aside for the purpose, but you just need to decide how to spend it. Obviously the cheaper the selling price, the cheaper your listings and final value fees will be, but you should still keep tabs on what you are offering for sale, and

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how successful each product is. If something isnt performing as well as it should be, try tweaking the title and the price a little, and if it still doesnt draw in the customers you should think about dropping it and replacing it with another product that has more potential.

THE ISSUE OF SELLING PRICE AND VALUE

The task of setting the selling price of your product isnt usually too hard. If its a tangible product you have bought from a wholesale source, they will usually tell you what the recommended retail price is, and thats pretty much what you stick to. But on eBay, the retail price doesnt always apply. You can pick almost any product, find out the recommended price and do a search for it on eBay and come back with a variety of prices both higher and lower than that amount. If an item is popular and especially if its hard to get hold of youll often see the price rise as a result of supply and demand (especially at Christmas). If eBay is awash with that item, the price usually drops as a result, as there are more items available than there are people interested in buying them, so everyone is vying to capture that all important sale. And of course, when you write and create your own e-book, the subject of pricing becomes even harder. You can gauge how other similar e-books are selling, but you might not know how long they are in comparison to yours. And yours will of course be unique to you. There is also the problem of how potential customers view products with a low price. Sometimes people can associate a low price with a low value item. The only sure way of arriving at the right price for each product is to do some research and see what other people are selling similar products for. You can then use this as a benchmark for your own items.

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You can help to dispel some of the negative feelings some people have for low prices equalling low quality by giving out as much information about the product as you can. Making sure your listing is as professional and helpful as possible is just as important for a product that sells for a cent as it is for a product that sells for a hundred dollars. The main thing is how the customer perceives you as a seller; giving out a positive image goes hand in hand with how your selling price is perceived. If your image is good, the customer will see your offer as a great deal offered by a good seller. If its not so good, the customer is more likely to see you as someone who just wants to be rid of the stock that doesnt sell too well. Luckily it is quite well known that many sellers use cheap e-books to drive traffic off eBay and onto their own websites, so the notion of the one cent e-book is not a new one. People are quite used to being able to get e-books for this kind of price, and often search eBays listings to find titles that are of interest to them. The key point to remember is this no one expects to get the best e-book on earth for one cent. So make yours as good as you possibly can and surprise them with the overall quality and content of it. This will up the curiosity factor and encourage them to sign up for your newsletter and visit your website.

PART ONE OF TEN?

Another good strategy for funnelling visitors from eBay onto your website in search of further information is to offer an e-book that is actually the first part in a ten part set. The first part should be a stand alone e-book that contains links to your website where the rest can be purchased. In this case, where there is a high chance that people will want to find out what the rest of the course has in store, you can and should offer the first part for sale at just one cent.

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You need to be careful of two things in this case: make sure the e-book you sell on eBay is useful and usable in itself; the customer should not be made to order the rest to get some benefit from it make sure you do not state that the rest of the set can be bought from your website in the eBay listing itself This is a good way of making sure the loss leader product you offer on eBay for one cent has a definite and very strong link to your website. This will convert still more customers from eBay into customers of your own. Theres no doubt that a low one cent price (or at least a price thats under a dollar) will convert many more browsers into buyers. And that means you can build one very important thing on eBay your feedback rating. The higher it goes and the closer to 100% you can keep it, the better you will be regarded by potential customers. Many people check the feedback of a seller before making a purchase. If its at 100% and they have sold hundreds if not thousands of items, that seller is more likely to sell even more, as they have already established a good reputation for themselves.

WHAT ABOUT HIGHER PRICED PRODUCTS?

If you are coming round to the idea of using eBay to drive traffic to your own website and build your email list at the same time, why not expand your presence on this site by listing other higher value items as well? This is especially good for tangible products that you already have on your website. If you can list items that are consumable, so much the better. Just remember to put that sticker on each consumable that has your website address on it. After all, you dont want repeat sales to be through eBay do you?

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As a rule of thumb, apart from your one or two cent listings, aim to list products which are five dollars or less. This is still a low enough price for people to take a chance and buy something from someone they dont yet know. Use these items to back up your rock bottom price sellers, and develop the range you have on eBay. The bottom line is this do your research, see what other people are doing, and experiment to see which price gets the best results. Only by doing this can you hope to maximise the potential of eBay as a means to drive more traffic to your website.

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7 BUILDING A REGULAR PRESENCE ON EBAY

To really benefit from the sheer power that eBay has to offer, you need to make sure you have a regular presence on the site. You can start small and build up slowly, but you should always aim to have some listings live on the site at all times. Weve already discussed the fact that you are basically advertising your business through listing items on eBay selling something to break even or even make a loss, just so you can get more people to visit your website or sign up for your email list or newsletter. Its a well known fact that in the world of advertising, a person has to see an advert several times before they will act on it. This doesnt always apply, of course, but in general we all need to be reminded that something is out there before we will buy it. In short, we need to get into the subconscious of our customers and remind them of what we sell. So in short we need to apply this same logic to eBay. Just because you have a one cent e-book up for sale, doesnt mean someone will buy it the first time its listed. They may well do, but if it doesnt sell the first time around dont give up hope. There have been countless cases of someone listing an item on eBay two or three times and not getting a single bite, and then the next time its listed, there is a bidding war which drives up the price tenfold. Now lets look at an example of how big an audience you could potentially reach on eBay and lets not forget that with your About Me page, your links to it from each and every auction, and the other techniques we have already

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covered, you dont necessarily need to have a winning buyer to increase the traffic to your website. Everyone who visits one of your auctions and clicks through to your About Me page could then visit your website or sign up for your free newsletter. So lets suppose that for every item you list, you get ten visitors to that auction. Thats a very conservative number. So it follows that when you list ten auctions, you can expect to get a hundred visitors in total. List a hundred items and youll get a thousand visitors, several of whom will no doubt end up on your website. This is why its a good idea to make sure you have plenty of ten day auctions running, as you know you will get the maximum amount of exposure for your money.

MAINTAIN YOUR PRESENCE AND CUT YOUR LISTINGS FEES

You would be forgiven at this point for beginning to wonder how much all this business promotion on eBay is going to cost you. Dont forget the need to set a budget for this side of your business, as this will determine how many listings you can reasonably expect to put on eBay in any given period of time. But there is one way which will enable you to reduce your listings fees by more than 75% - so long as you have plenty of items to list. The solution is to open an eBay store. This currently costs $15.95 per month, with an insertion fee of just five cents per item - and that is good for 30 days, not just ten. Its not an option to take if you are just starting out listing cheap items or ebooks, but when you realise the huge potential that eBay has to offer and you start to see the results of the extra traffic your website will be getting (not to mention the extra sales you will see from the new customers on your emailing lists), youll be first in the queue to open a new store.

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An eBay store is like a slow burner it takes time to really see the results it can bring. After its been open for a while your listings will start to show up in Google, Yahoo and other major search engine results. This alone will get you even more traffic, and its another reason why you should word your listings titles very carefully, in order to appeal to your target niche audience in the best way possible. Having an eBay store also sets you apart from the majority of other sellers, and it enables you to brand your store in a similar fashion to your website. Whatever colors you use on your website, make sure your eBay store uses the same ones. You can also upload your website logo, and of course eBay helpfully provides a link for people to subscribe to your newsletter (which in turn will have a link to your website, right?). An eBay store raises your visibility both immediately and over time; in short its a selling tool not to be missed.

HOW DO YOU COMPETE WITH SELLERS WHO ARE ALREADY WELL ESTABLISHED?

Its very easy to become disillusioned when you are doing your research on eBay and you come across other sellers whose feedback is in the thousands, and who not only have an eBay store, but its stuffed full of listings for e-books and countless other items which run well into three figures. These people are clearly well established, but there is no reason why you cant join them. EBay is such a huge site with millions of users worldwide, it would in fact be very difficult to saturate this market. The keys to succeeding at what you want to do lie in four areas: learn from those who are already successful at what you want to do

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establish your own excellent reputation keep your customers happy and wanting to come back for more offer your own unique blend of products

This list is not exhaustive, but it does illustrate the main points that will make you successful at generating the traffic and customers you are looking for. It doesnt matter if you are starting from zero feedback, or you have already started to make some sales. We can all learn from what others are doing and in time you might even find that what you learn from other sellers leads to you enjoying even more success than they are. Its all about finding your own feet, and establishing a regular and familiar presence that people will become acquainted with. Part of the process of driving traffic from eBay onto your own website is to attract that traffic in the first place. You should have a clearly defined idea from the word go as to what niche audience you want to attract. Once you have that angle, you can then set to work on building up your own little corner of eBay that people will recognise as being yours and yours alone. How exactly do you manage that? Well, its very much a case of taking a look at what those other already successful sellers are doing, and adding a portion of your own ideas into the mix. By doing plenty of research (which is the cornerstone of every successful eBay venture, whether you use the auction site as your main business or as a way to find new customers to drive traffic to your website), you will be able to get a clearer picture of the reasons why those successful sellers you envy so much at the moment became so successful in the first place. In short, the old saying if you cant beat em, join em does hold true on eBay. Take a look at the items which these sellers seem to do very well with, and make a note of them. Ideally you should build up a picture of several successful sellers sellers you would want to emulate and look up to for guidance (without actually getting in touch with them; you can get all the information you need from the way they design and promote their listings, and the items they sell).

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Over time you will get an idea of what has made this handful of sellers as successful as they are. You will find quite naturally that your own ideas and outlook will add a further spin on this, and you will be able to create your own formula for selling success. And as we have seen, every listing and every experiment you try on eBay will lead to more people following the links you set up to your About Me page and from there, they can go to any number of other places to find out more about you and your business.

THINK ABOUT TRAFFIC COMING IN

Weve talked at length about how to get the traffic to flow from your eBay listings and onto your website. But theres certainly no harm in getting more people to visit your eBay listings in the first place particularly if you have a shop, although steering people towards your About Me page is equally desirable, for the reasons we talked about earlier. Consider having a signature in all your outgoing emails, which directs people to your About Me page to find out about signing up for your email newsletter (for a more in depth look at newsletters and what to include in them, keep reading to get all the answers in Chapter Eight). If you are active in forums, you can include a similar signature after all your posts too. And for the ultimate in traffic steering opportunities, why not start your own blog? These are almost essential for everyone who wants to build an internet business, as you can include links to your website, your eBay shop, your About Me page, and any number of other relevant links to your products or newsletters. The moral of the story is to take every opportunity to make the most of promoting your listings on eBay.

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AND FINALLY THINK OF A SPIDERS WEB

A strange sub title, but an appropriate one when we are discussing how to establish a regular presence for yourself on eBay. In short, think of the links you are creating every time you list a new item on the auction site. Each listing has a link to your About Me page, plus at least one link to your shop if you have one. From any one item, a potential buyer could visit several of your items and also browse around your About Me page. The more items you put up for sale, the more chances you have not only of selling something, but of reaching more people who could end up finding the link to your website and signing up for your newsletter. You can indeed weave yourself a huge web on eBay, and if you make it attractive enough you can catch many new customers in it. One final thought to end this chapter on. The more time you spend on eBay, the more you will notice that certain sellers keep popping up again and again in certain categories. That kind of reach doesnt happen overnight; it can take months to penetrate a niche category and reach your target audience effectively. But the sooner you start the sooner you will begin to get the results you are looking for. And you could start getting those results much sooner than you think.

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8 CREATING A DESIRABLE FREE NEWSLETTER TO SNAG MORE PAYING CUSTOMERS

So far we have talked about how to entice your eBay customers from the auction site and onto your own website. One of the best ways to do this is by offering free information on a relevant subject and making it available via your About Me page. Weve covered how to get people there, but we also need to explore what to give them when they sign up to receive this regular information because getting those names onto your emailing list is only half the battle. In order to really succeed in this area you need to ensure you can retain a high percentage of those sign ups; so make sure you stick to doing two things religiously: make sure they have a reason to want to stay on your mailing list. make sure your newsletter is unique to you, and contains some valuable information each and every time you send it out.

Thats why this chapter explores the need to create a desirable free newsletter; that word desirable is very important if you are to build a niche targeted email list that will eventually produce healthy profits every single time you mail a newsletter out to it.

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DONT CONFUSE FREE WITH HAVING NO VALUE

This is a trap that many newbie internet marketers fall into. They think that all thats needed is to offer a free newsletter, and because its free people wont mind if theres nothing much in it. Thats a big mistake to make, because what these newbies dont realise is that a free newsletter can act as a shop window which looks out onto the rest of their business. If people subscribe to the newsletter to get a free look and they dont like what they see, theyll move on. The point is, people will tend to associate that simple newsletter with you and your business as a whole as they quite rightly should. The assumption is that if there is no value or quality to the newsletter, your products wont be that good either. In truth, although you wont receive any direct monetary compensation for the time you spend creating your newsletter, you will receive compensation further down the line, when your readers take your advice and buy one of your products (or a product you are affiliated with). Its very important therefore to take a step back and look at the whole picture before you design your newsletter. The very fact that it will need to appeal to the niche audience you are aiming at means that great care should be taken in designing the content and format you will be emailing out.

TOO MUCH TO HANDLE?

If there is a single factor that needs to be recognised when creating an email newsletter for a niche audience, its this it takes time to create a good one.

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Thats why you need to be realistic about what you can offer your subscribers on a regular basis. Its no good designing and writing pages of useful content for the first newsletter and then finding you cant keep it up. Aside from the pressure it puts on you, people dont generally have the time to read great long emails, so your hard work will probably be wasted. Weekly or monthly emails are best some marketers promote a monthly newsletter with shorter weekly bulletins in between. This format actually works very well as it saves your subscribers from being bombarded with information, yet keeps your name and business fresh in their minds over time.

HOW CAN A FREE NEWSLETTER FIND YOU PAYING CUSTOMERS?

It does sound like a contradiction in terms, but in fact it makes perfect sense. Weve spoken about the issue of trust on the internet, but its worth repeating that you need to break down as many barriers as possible to ensure that your customers order from you hopefully on a regular basis. The easiest way to do this is to provide something for free. The customer has nothing to lose by signing up for a free newsletter; if they dont like it all they need to do is unsubscribe. You are required to put a link in each email, giving the person the option to unsubscribe each time. By reading your newsletter each time and learning from the information you provide, your subscribers will start to build a relationship with you. If you then recommend a product that would be relevant to your niche audience, they will be far more likely to buy it from you than from a totally unknown seller. In essence then, an email newsletter is your way of proving yourself in the long term.

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AN EMAIL NEWSLETTER ON PAPER

We know there are plenty of ways to make sure eBay traffic flows from the auction site onto your website, and gets directed to your About Me page, where you can mention the existence of your newsletter. But just in case all those methods pass by the buyer, you can also attract their attention to it when you mail out an order, by including a printed copy of the latest newsletter in with their item(s). All you need to do is encourage them to do one of the following: Ask them to email you a request to join your newsletter mailing list (they would then need to respond to your confirmation email to start receiving the newsletter) Ask them to visit your website and join your emailing list from there. Some people set up a dedicated page which describes the purpose of having the newsletter and detailing the benefits of receiving it. If you are selling e-books and there is no physical need to mail out an actual product, all thats needed is an invitation to join your newsletter included either in the body of the winning buyer email, or in the signature section at the end.

WHAT KIND OF FORMAT SHOULD YOU FOLLOW?

Some sellers send out newsletters in plain text as they are easy to read and they dont cause any problems for the recipient, no matter what kind or age of computer they have. Emails containing graphics can look superb, but they take longer to load and depending on your computer they may not display at all. This is whats known

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as an HTML email. These also carry the risk of having a virus attached, whereas with a text based email this isnt an issue. So by using a text only newsletter you will be appealing to the broadest group of people possible, as well as retaining the most important part of the whole newsletter and thats the words themselves. Speaking of the content, there is one very important rule you need to follow when creating a newsletter that has a niche audience appeal. Basically you need to remember not to create something that is a blatant advertisement for your business. Of course you will want to promote your products and make recommendations for certain things, but that shouldnt be the sole content of the newsletter. Try if you can to create a theme for each newsletter, as this will help the whole thing come together and make sense for the reader. To clarify this point, lets take an example and follow it through to its logical conclusion. This can then be applied to your own area of expertise. Lets go back to the example of the wine making business we mentioned previously. A good theme for a newsletter would be to give out advice on how to solve the most common problems people encounter when making their own wine at home. Incidentally, if you possibly can, make sure you inject a little humour and personal experience into a newsletter like this, as it shows you have a track record in the subject and you know what you are talking about. TOP TIP: branding yourself as an expert can be done very effectively with a regular newsletter and if you do the job well, people will automatically think of you and associate your name with the niche subject you have chosen. To make the wine making newsletter more readable, you could divide up the problems people have and create a top ten list of the most common mistakes people make and how your subscribers can avoid making those mistakes themselves.

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You can then recommend specific products or chemicals that will prevent problems occurring in the first place, or correct them if they do happen. Try and intersperse product recommendations with real content, rather than having them in two separate sections. By blending the two in and not making the recommendations sound like nothing more than a pure plug to get more sales and earn more money, you will probably find you will actually achieve a better sales result in the end. Its also a good idea to mention the name of your website two or three times during the newsletter. It doesnt always have to be done as a shameless plug either you could simply say something like this: Joe Bloggs Wine Making Digest comes to you monthly from the owner of www.wine4u.com. Its simply a way to get your customers familiar with the name of your website, and if you make it a clickable link they can visit your website there and then.

AROUSING THE READERS INTEREST

Just as we have created ways for eBay surfers to click on links and find your website or newsletter invitation, so we can also create interest which will keep a high percentage of newsletter subscribers coming back for more. The simple trick to use is to reveal a little of what will be covered in the next issue. Dont tell the subscriber exactly what they can expect to find out; instead, hint at it and give them an idea of how it will be of benefit to them. For example, you could say something like this:

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Dont miss next months newsletter, which will reveal how you can make perfect home made wine with the help of some very unlikely sources In case you are wondering, wine can be made from tea, coffee and even rose petals. And maybe you could create an e-book containing unusual wine recipes, to promote in that next newsletter? Incidentally, this kind of intriguing comment to promote a forthcoming issue works just as well when used on your About Me page on eBay. You can also mention intriguing and unusual facts in any guides you write for eBay, and direct people to your About Me page to get more information (and of course, more information about your newsletter).

PASS IT ON

Finally, heres a simple marketing trick that works rather well, although many internet marketers overlook it entirely. Quite simply, all you need to do is add a message at the end of each newsletter which says something like this: Enjoyed the newsletter? If you did, feel free to pass it on to a friend, relative or colleague who may find it of interest. If not, tell us and well se what we can do about it. We value your opinions and do all we can to serve our customers well. Asking people to pass it on can find you a whole new audience without any extra work on your part. This is especially true when youre marketing towards a niche audience. People often meet with others who have the same hobby or interest, and share any worthwhile information they get hold of. Why not put the idea into the head of your customer and extend your marketing reach even further?

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IN CONCLUSION

We can see that simply providing a free newsletter is not enough to ensure your eBay customers spend plenty of money with you. You need to ensure the content is as good as you can make it; that you can create some intrigue for forthcoming newsletters; blend in your promotions carefully and highlight the benefits of each one for the customer; and use them to establish that all important relationship with your customer over time. If you can achieve all these things, you will eventually be the proud owner of a large niche targeted email list that is capable of unlocking huge profits for you and your website.

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9 THE IMPORTANCE OF HAVING A SALES STRATEGY

Okay, heres the first question do you have one? And if not, why not? A sales strategy, as we will discover in this chapter, is one of the most vital things that any internet marketer can create. Its easy enough to list plenty of items on eBay; its easy enough to sit down and think up some ideas for a great newsletter; its not too hard to design a website that appeals to a niche audience; and its even a fairly simple process to write an e-book or two once you know how to do it and you have a structure to follow. But unless you know how to link all these things together, your business will only be operating at a fraction of its overall potential. Thats why the best thing you could ever do is to stop working for a day and sit down with a pad and pencil and figure out exactly where your business is going, and how eBay can help you to get there.

WHAT ARE YOUR GOALS?

Obviously your main goal is to drive traffic from eBay onto your website, and encourage more people to sign up for your free newsletter all by using the legitimate methods that we have looked at in this e-book.

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But that is a very broad goal. In order to achieve it, we need to break it down into manageable sections, and make a list of all the individual things we need to do to make that main goal a reality. As many people find out, being an internet marketer can go one of two ways when you start experiencing some success. You might find you get so busy that even though you are making a lot of money and earning more than you did in your regular job, you are working far more hours to achieve it. Every day seems to slide by and there is always so much more to do to make things even better. Alternatively, you can enjoy some free time by working smarter instead of harder. You can still earn a good income, but the time you do spend working will be better organised and you will know exactly what needs to be done, and what your priorities are. Does that sound like the better option? If you said yes, then its time to find your own strategy.

USE EBAY AS A HUB

When working out your strategy, it makes sense that as you are using eBay to generate more traffic for your site, you should make eBay the hub of your plan. Everything will then revolve around this so you can clearly see the links it has with your business. Sketching this out on a sheet of paper will help you to see the relationship between each site or entity (like the newsletter, for example) more clearly. It also helps to ensure you have all your bases covered in terms of promoting your site.

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For example, you will have a link from eBay to your About Me page, and two links from that to your newsletter and your website. If you want to write a guide for eBay, you can link that to your About Me page as well. For every e-book you write, you can insert two links to your website and newsletter. This then serves as a reminder to make sure all these elements and links are in place for people to follow. Its a simple technique, but it helps you to get a clear picture of your strategy and how it will work.

A KEY PART OF YOUR STRATEGY MAKING YOU AND YOUR WEBSITE EASILY ACCESSIBLE IN A CUNNING WAY

We all know that eBay doesnt like you promoting your website in listings. But theres no reason why you cannot include contact details in listings, so that people can get in touch with any questions or queries they may have about the item. Now, everyone who has a website also has one (or several) email addresses attached to that website something like admin@mywebsite.com, sales@mywebsite.com, or even queries@mywebsite.com. All you need to do is register one of these with eBay, and then mention it in every listing just in case someone needs to get in touch with you. Most people, when they see an email address like this, will recognise that if they put www. in front of mywebsite.com, they will reach your actual website. So you arent actually giving away your website address you are simply giving browsers all they need to find it themselves. A big part of your eBay strategy is to make your website and newsletter as easy to find as possible, and this little trick is just one other way of doing it. Ideally, you will apply every tip and trick in this e-book plus more besides, and as you gain experience you will find that the more ways you give a customer of

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getting in touch with you, and the more links you give them to follow, the more chance there is of generating more traffic overall. And thats what were all after.

BE PREPARED

If you dont already have a newsletter to offer your customers, you are probably itching to get one started. Similarly, you probably now see the potential of a one cent e-book maybe you have a couple of ideas youd like to write up for that as well? Oh, and you know there are a couple of cheap items you can buy to resell as well they need to be sourced and bought. This is exactly the point at which you need to slow down if you want your strategy to work effectively. Dont rush to achieve everything all at once; take the time to create a truly excellent product, and remember that even a free or virtually free item still has to have a value in order to attract and keep a good customer base. So before you offer your free newsletter, make sure you have at least a couple of issues already written, just to be on the safe side. Make sure also that if you are starting to promote your website through links and legal methods on eBay, its actually worth visiting. Make sure people arent going to be met with an under construction message, or a half completed homepage you havent had time to finish. Dont forget that the homepage is the first thing they will see, so it has to be enticing and well presented. Having a well thought out strategy will help to ensure that the various tasks you must complete will be done in the right order and in the best way possible. Plan your time, estimate roughly how long it will take you to complete each task and make sure all the elements to your marketing campaign are in place before launching your eBay efforts with a vengeance.

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A WORD ABOUT COSTS

Another important reason for forming a sales strategy is perhaps the most vital one of all. However well your items sell on eBay, however many visitors you get to your website, and however many sign ups you get on your emailing list, you need to know the bottom line you need to know you are making money. If your selling efforts are haphazard, and you write two e-books one week and put them up for sale, before forgetting about writing any more and going on to tweak your About Me page, how will you discover how good your results are? Looking at how much money you have made overall and how much you have spent on promotion isnt enough if you are to truly make the best of your strategy and your time. Its far better to break down profits by item, so that you can see how well your efforts are being rewarded. You can then streamline your efforts so the e-books that are selling well can be promoted more heavily, for example, and those which are failing to sell at all can be looked at and perhaps altered to try and gain better results. It may be as simple as changing a word or two in a listing title, but if you dont know how each individual activity is performing, you will have no idea of just how much better your overall profit margins could be.

ACHIEVING MORE IN LESS TIME

Every internet marketer wants to achieve higher profits, and the sooner that happens the better. The key to doing exactly that when utilising the power of eBay as an advertising medium is to get your priorities straight.

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Every single day you sit down to work at your internet business, ask yourself what the three most important things are that you could do that day. What things would move your business forward constructively at this time? It could be as simple as creating an outstanding About Me page. It might be that you need to write the next issue of your newsletter maybe you need to do some research to make that possible. Perhaps you have an e-book that is almost finished and you know it would only take another hour or so to actually complete it. Whatever your choices are, make sure you do each one to the exclusion of all else. Follow through and complete each task in turn, and after just a few days you will find you are achieving far more than you ever thought possible. Its such a simple technique, this one, but its helped more people achieve far more than anything else theyve tried. Give it a go for a few days and see how your business benefits as a result. This is one strategy you cannot afford not to try.

TRYING DIFFERENT TACTICS WHEN YOU ARE LISTING ITEMS ON EBAY

Many people get stuck in a rut when listing new items on eBay. They finalise all the details of the listing, and when it goes live they leave it well alone. But that isnt always the best option. Part of your strategy to gain extra traffic from eBay and funnel it towards your website should be to see how many visitors each auction or Buy It Now listing is getting. It could be that your results are as good as they are going to get but only by testing alternative titles, descriptions and prices will you find out the answer to that.

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The next chapter will cover the importance of testing, but for now suffice to say that you need to avoid being static in your promotional efforts. Be flexible and see whether you can squeeze even another ounce of results out of your efforts. It could make a huge difference in the long run.

THE IMPORTANCE OF REGULAR ACTIVITY ON EBAY

Finally in this chapter, we should pay attention to the importance of regular promotional activity on eBay. Its not enough to have a huge surge of effort in January and post twenty or thirty cheap e-books to attract customers, when two months down the line youve got a single e-book just finishing its lonely ten day run. Keep records; relist items continually; make sure you have new projects in the pipeline so that your inventory of cheap items designed to appeal to your niche audience is gradually getting bigger. Its absolutely vital to keep a regular presence on the auction site so people will know you are there. If you only list every now and again, your business will suffer and people would be forgiven for thinking you had disappeared out of sight and werent trading any more. Not everyone who sees your listings will buy from you the first time around; they may come across your e-books several times before deciding to take a chance and buy something. So make sure you are there when they decide to part with some cash. After all, as we have discovered, who knows where that first two cent sale will lead? That same customer might part with fifty dollars or more via your website a few months from now. If you have a well thought out sales strategy, you will be able to convert more of those initial sales into long term customers with money to spend. And when its

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a niche audience you are after, you have the chance to serve their needs for many years into the future.

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10 TESTING, TESTING, TESTING

We touched on this in the previous chapter, but now we will explore more fully how we can bring together all the different elements of this book and ensure they are working in the best possible way to bring us the best possible results. Testing is absolutely essential if you are to squeeze the best profits out of your business. Testing allows you to improve on good results and turn them into outstanding ones, and identify bad results and see where you can make them better. To that end, lets take a look at how you can get started in this area, and what kind of results you can expect to get from your efforts.

DONT GO IT ALONE

This is a good piece of advice that many people dont naturally think of. When you begin to sell items on eBay to attract a new stream of traffic to your website, its worthwhile surfing the internet to find a couple of forums or blogs that you can refer to on a regular basis. Many sellers are quite willing to explore and discuss their own efforts with others, and you can learn a lot about methods of testing your results by reading what other people are already doing. Even eBays own forums are worth checking out, and if you cant find any references to testing, try posting a query yourself to see if that yields any responses.

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This is much easier than going it alone and having to start from the very beginning. There are bound to be sellers out there who have already tested their results and found certain ways and means of tweaking their listings to produce even better sales right from the start. You might think that sellers would be hesitant to reveal this kind of information, but many eBay related forums are very friendly, open places where sellers are happy to share. Just make sure you share your own experiences in return!

WHAT COLORS SHOULD YOU BE USING?

A lot of sellers make changes to their descriptions as they gain experience, and some even tweak the titles of their auctions to see whether changing a word here or there makes a difference to the overall results. But not many people think about changing the colors they use for the graphics in their auctions or on their stores homepage. As far as the text goes, you are best off sticking to standard black; use bold or italics if you want to highlight something. But when you are designing your listings and thinking about how your eBay store should look, its worthwhile testing out a few different colors to see which combinations bring the best response. Some eBay store sellers seem to pick the loudest, most garish colors they can get their hands on. They obviously think it will attract more attention. It does but it usually sends people in the opposite direction straight afterwards. Use calming, welcoming colors in your listings where possible. For example, blue is a calming color and helps to relax people. Red, on the other hand, is a

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more urgent color, which could work against you. However, some people may associate it with stop, and it may keep them on your pages for longer. This is why testing and experimentation is advisable until you find the right blend of elements that works for you.

DONT JUST EXPERIMENT WITH WORDS EXPERIMENT WITH PICTURES AS WELL

When you are selling items on eBay especially if you are doing so to drive traffic to your own site you need to make sure your photos or graphics are doing your product justice as well as the text. You may well be running your business empire from your back room at home, but you dont need to let your customers know that. If they can see your messy computer desk in the background, it not only detracts from the item you are selling, it also gives a bad impression of your business. Make sure you take good, clear and sharp pictures of any stock items, and take them against a white background. A white sheet draped over a chair is sufficient to get good results. If you are selling e-books, ensure the graphics are professional looking. There are plenty of sellers on eBay who sell e-books, and if yours doesnt look as good as theirs do, you will lose out on sales. Plain and simple.

MAKE GOOD USE OF THE STATS THAT COME WITH YOUR EBAY STORE

If you own an eBay store, youll know that you get regular information on how much traffic you are getting to your listings. They are also kind enough to inform you of where it is all coming from.

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It takes time for a store to become established and start receiving hits from the search engines, but the small monthly fee you will pay to have a store does get you a ton of information which can be of huge benefit when you are testing what works and what doesnt. You can easily monitor how many people are finding each listing, which ones are most popular, and which ones are continually being found by the search engines. Make a note of your results and try changing the titles of your less successful listings in order to see if you can improve on them.

TESTING DIFFERENT KEYWORDS IN YOUR AUCTIONS

Keep an eye on your auction titles, as these contain the search terms that people will be looking for. Every now and again, check the completed listings for each item you have been promoting. This will enable you to see how your sales are faring when compared with the competition. If they are selling plenty of items and youre not, then the completed listings should tell you why. Are they using different keywords? Do they have a different selling price? Is it higher or lower than your one? Is their description longer? Shorter? Do they have more feedback? If you use all this information and process it carefully, you should be able to see where your own listings can be improved which in turn will help you snag more sales, more customers and more traffic to your pages and to your website.

REGULAR ACTIVITY EQUALS BETTER RESULTS

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We have seen the benefits that a good strategy will have on your goal to drive more traffic to your website using eBay. Regular organised efforts are the best way to ensure your continued success, and this applies equally to your testing methods. You should constantly be checking your efforts and monitoring your results; its much easier to keep on top of your eBay marketing strategies when you only need to make small adjustments each day. If you leave things to run naturally and only check your progress once a month, youll find a mountain of tasks that need completing in order to improve your results, and you are likely to become overwhelmed by them.

ANALYSING TRENDS OVER TIME

Testing isnt just about checking your short term results. Its also about gathering data over a longer period of time, in order to see whether there are any trends that you can come to expect from your sales and marketing efforts. For example, eBay is typically a lot quieter in January and February, as everyone recovers from the hectic sales period in the run up to Christmas. But this may not necessarily apply if you are selling personal improvement and dieting ebooks. Everyone wants to lose weight for the New Year, so you might find your own sales will increase. The more experience you gain in promoting your business through cheap and virtually free items on eBay, the more you will know exactly how and when to reach the biggest audiences. Analysing data month by month will help you to promote and develop your business still further, and for better long term results. You will also recognise how to divide up your budget so that you have more cash available to list more items during periods that you know will typically bring in

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plenty more sales. You will then cut back on your listings during the quieter months and devote more time to writing new e-book material to list later on.

TO CONCLUDE

This e-book has taken a long journey through the mechanics of how to use eBay in a way you may never previously have thought of. Many sellers take the time to establish a presence on eBay, but never get around to developing their own website, let alone try to link the two together to maximise their selling potential. Still others have their own website but are unsure as to how they can venture onto eBay and find more customers some even wonder whether its worth it at all. Hopefully, from the information you have read and digested in this book, you will see that it is certainly well worth the effort to take another look at eBay, and check out the almost limitless possibilities it offers for you to take your business to another level entirely. It is always essential to keep up to date with their current rules and regulations, and you need to ensure you are always on the right side of eBay. But if you are sensible you will find that you can sidle right up to the limits of the rules without overstepping the mark. It may be that you already have a niche market in mind by this stage, and you know exactly how you are going to find those people on eBay and entice them over to your own website. But if your website has quite a broad appeal, you may be struggling to see how you can narrow that down a little to reach the people you are intending to find. Heres another little secret you dont have to limit yourself to one tiny niche. It may be that your website deals with wine making and beer making. Thats really two separate but related niches. So appeal to each one separately.

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Rather than get bogged down with trying to cover too much ground, start with the wine making niche and develop that over time. Eventually, with some of the tweaking, strategy making and testing we have talked about, you will have a virtual blueprint that you can lay down and follow in the future which will make the beer making niche a lot easier to penetrate. As always, internet marketing is a learning curve that just keeps on going. You can never know all there is to know about marketing and doing it on eBay is no exception. You can learn from others and from yourself, and every lesson is as valuable as the last. Never forget, though, that you should always put your customer first. Youre bound to make mistakes everyone does but every single one can be turned around and learned from. If a mistake is made to the detriment of your customer, make it right as soon as you can. A fast and efficient service alone will put you far ahead of much of the competition. Now is the time to close this e-book and get to work on your plan to find fresh customers with the help of eBay. But revisit this e-book often, as it will help you to stay on track and in touch with your goals and strategies. It should guide you as you start to make your own About Me page; write your very first e-book; and begin selling small, cheap items to your niche audience. There is always something new to learn, but with the help of this e-book and your own ideas and plans, your own learning curve will be more enjoyable than you thought possible.

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