eBay® PowerSeller Business Practices FOR DUMMIES®

Chapter 11. Marketing Your Items to Grow Sales

In the early days of the Web, making money was all about making your site sticky — that is, able to attract people and keep them hanging around for a while. Stickiness happens when you give buyers a direct route to your items so they can buy, buy, buy — and this is still your goal; hopefully every visitor will buy something. To achieve this goal, you take advantage of promotions, affiliate programs, the eBay About Me page, search-engine optimization (SEO), and more. Those tools are still in place — and you can put them all to good use.

Now the Web is in a new incarnation — Web 2.0. Today's Web is more about interaction, getting sites involved with other sites by syndication through RSS feeds. Sites like Nextag, PriceGrabber.com, Shopping.com, and even Google have become places for people to interact with thousands of sites at once.

If you find the theory behind these mega-sites confusing, think about it like this: When most people want to book an airline flight, they go to a site such as Orbitz or Expedia (which access the databases of most major airlines) to seek out low prices. They find the flight and price they want and buy it right there (rather than going to the individual airline's site). The airlines syndicate their stock of seats for sale to these sites. You can do the same with the items you have for sale.

In this practice, I introduce you to the tools and tricks that grab buyers' attention, which gives you the short ...