Tricks for Promoting Your eBay Business

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Tricks for Promoting Your eBay Business

You can put 1,000 listings on eBay and not get a single bite--especially if nobody knows about them. Yes, your auction listings show up in eBay's search results when customers go searching, but that's not very proactive marketing. (And you can't rely on eBay's search results if you have an eBay Store because Store listings don't normally show up in eBay's search results.) To establish your eBay business and drive customers to your listings, you need to promote your business. That means employing advertising, publicity, and other marketing devices--just like the pros do!

Trick #61: Brand Your Business--And Market It

You have a choice. You can promote individual item listings or you can promote your business as a whole. (Or, of course, you can do both; they're not mutually exclusive.) This is an important point. Many sellers have the initiative to promote the items they sell, but don't have the foresight to promote their businesses. Naturally, promoting an item listing can help that item sell, but it doesn't do much good for you in the long term. When you promote your business, however, you create long-term awareness--and help to promote your short-term item listings. The first step toward promoting your business is to create a business identity--that is, you brand your business. A brand identity defines your business, tells the world what business you're in, and how your

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business is unique. Without a brand identity, you're just another anonymous eBay seller. With proper branding, you stand out from the crowd with a unique and memorable identity.

The ABCs of Branding

What's involved in establishing your brand? There are a lot of separate steps to take, but I like to think of them collectively as the ABCs of branding: A: Tell `em who you are--Give your business a name. You're not just

JoeSmith014; you're Joe's Discount Aardvark Accessories, or Aardvarks `R' Us, or Aardvark Emporium, or International Aardvark Supplies, or Aardvark Super Warehouse, or Aardvark Boutique, or the like. Your business needs a unique name that conveys what you sell and how you sell it (Discount? Warehouse? Boutique?), along with a little bit of your personality. B: Tell `em what you do--Tell your customers what you sell. That can (and probably should) be part of your brand name; if not, it can be conveyed in a tag line or as part of your logo. And it pays to be specific--you don't want retail shoe customers calling you up if you're a footwear wholesaler. C: Tell `em what you can do for them--Now we move beyond the name and logo to your brand's positioning. It's important that customers know what your business can do for them. You might be Joe's Discount Aardvark Accessories, but what does that mean? The unique benefit offered by your business becomes clearer when you say "Lowest prices on the Web" or "Biggest selection of custom accessories" or "We provide custom solutions" or something similar. Why should a customer buy from your business? That is the question you have to answer.

Establishing the Brand

Theory aside, what concrete steps do you need to take to establish your brand? Here's the short list:

? Business philosophy--Before you do anything else, stop and think about what it is that makes your business unique. Use the ABCs of marketing to help define what type of business you want to run. Are you the lowest-priced retailer? Or the one with the biggest selection? Or the one with the best customer service? (It's difficult, if not

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impossible, to be all these things simultaneously.) Equally important is to define who your customer is; you don't sell to everyone, but rather a targeted segment of the overall market. Determine what it is that makes your business what it is, and then define your business's philosophy based on this. ? Name--After you know who you are, you need to give your business a name. Make it short yet memorable; you want customers to easily remember who you are. ? Slogan--Many businesses have a slogan or tagline that accompanies their business name. This slogan should express your business philosophy, and further define what it is you do. ? Logo--People remember pictures. That's why a visual logo is important to a business. When you see a big block "M" with the smaller scribbled "TV," you know you're seeing the MTV logo. When you see a lowercase "ups" in the middle of a brown shield or the purple and orange "FedEx," you know you're seeing the UPS or FedEx logos. A logo should be distinctive and easily recognizable. It can be as simple as your business name in a specific font, or as fancy as a stylized graphic. You can even incorporate your business slogan in your logo, if you want.

Reinforcing the Brand

The previous steps establish your brand. Now you need to reinforce and promote the brand. How do you do this? The first thing you want to do is make the logo the dominant part of your business presence. That means plastering your logo on everything you do--your website, your eBay Store, and every single item listing. You also want to put your logo and slogan on your shipping labels, invoices, business cards, boxes, and envelopes. And, of course, if you create printed brochures or catalogs, as well as print or online advertisements, your logo should be prominently displayed.

tip

Whatever promotion you do, make it consistent. The key to effective branding is consistency. Use the same logo and slogan in everything you do; don't switch things up.

You want your customers to know that they're dealing with your particular business. Yes, they're buying a specific item, but they're buying it from

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you. It's the you they need to remember the next time they're in the market for something you sell. After all, you remember FedEx--even if you don't remember a specific visit to one of its stores.

Trick #62: Link to Your Other Listings

Although it's important to promote your overall business, you also have to promote the individual items you have for sale. With eBay, that means promoting your auctions and eBay Store listings.

Linking to Your Other Listings

The most obvious place to promote the items you're selling is through the other items you're selling. After all, if you have potential customers interested in one thing you're selling, why not show them what else you have for sale? You'd be surprised how many customers can turn into purchasers of multiple items--and those extra sales are especially profitable. eBay helps you promote your other listings by including a View Seller's Other Items link in the Meet the Sellers section of all item listing pages, as shown in Figure 7.1; this links to a page that lists all your current listings. If you have an eBay Store, there's also a link to your Store in the same place.

FIGURE 7.1 Links to your other listings and eBay Store.

Unfortunately, many buyers tend to overlook these links. For this reason, you might want to emphasize your other auctions by including other, more prominent links in your item listings. When you want to link to your active listings, insert the following HTML code in your item description:

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Check out my other items!

Naturally, you should replace USERID with your own eBay user ID. You can also replace the Check out my other items! text with any text of your choosing. To add a link to your eBay Store to your listings, insert the following HTML code into your item description:

Check out my eBay Store!

Replace StoreName with your eBay Store name. Again, you can replace the tagline with text of your own liking.

Linking from Other Sites to Your eBay Listings

You can also link to your eBay listings or eBay Store from other websites, using the same HTML code just described. You can also add an eBay button, like the one shown in Figure 7.2, to your business or personal web pages. When visitors click this button, they go to your Items for Sale page, which lists all your current auctions.

FIGURE 7.2 Add an eBay button to any web page.

To add this button to a web page, go to the Link Your Site to eBay page, located at pages.services/buyandsell/link-buttons.html. Check the box next to the My Listings on eBay button, enter the URL of the page where you want to display the button, scroll to the bottom of the page, and click the I Agree button. When the next page appears, copy the generated HTML code, and paste it into the code for your web page.

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Linking to Your eBay Store

Building a link to your eBay Store is a bit more complicated. Start by going to the HTML Builder page (cgi6.ws/eBayISAPI.dll? StoreHtmlBuilderHome), shown in Figure 7.3. From there you can build links to individual items, specific Store pages (including your Store's home page), and a Store search page. Click the appropriate link and then follow the instructions to build the link.

FIGURE 7.3 Build links to your eBay Store pages.

Trick #63: Set Up Product Cross-Promotions

Cross-promoting is a powerful tool to drive potential customers to the items you have for sale. If you have an eBay Store, you can scroll down to the bottom of any of your eBay listings (Store or auction) and see a crosspromotion box like the one shown in Figure 7.4. This box displays four other items you have for sale, and serves as a powerful advertisement for those items.

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FIGURE 7.4 A typical eBay cross-promotion box.

This cross-promotion box is available to all eBay Store sellers, and is managed via the Cross-Promotions Tool. You use the Cross-Promotions Tool to determine which items display in which boxes--vary the items based on the types of products you're selling. To manage your cross-promotions, go to your My eBay Summary page, scroll to the Manage My Store section, and click the Manage My Store link. When the Manage My Store page appears, go to the Marketing Tools section and click the Cross-Promotion Settings link. From there you can turn on or off cross-promotion, determine how you want to cross-promote, choose how your cross-promoted items appear, and so on. In addition to these settings, you can configure what items display, based on product categories within your Store. To do this, click the CrossPromotions Defaults link on the Manage My Store page. When the next page appears, click the Create New Rule link to link the display of products in a given category to the type of product viewed by a customer. For example, if you're a bookseller, you might want to display your active mystery books when someone is looking at or bidding on another book in the mystery category.

Trick #64: Encourage Add-On Sales

It costs less to sell additional items to an existing customer than it does to attract a new customer. That is, after you have someone hooked, additional profits come easily--if you can sell more items to that person. To that end, it's in your best interest to encourage add-on sales. Instead of selling one shirt to a customer, try to sell two shirts instead--or a shirt and tie, or shirt and shoes, or whatever. Adding extra items to an existing sale doesn't cost you any more money in terms of promotion; it's a quick way to boost your profit per sale.

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How do you encourage add-on sales? Here are some tricks to employ: ? Make sure to present your customers with a prominent link to your other eBay listings. This should be more than the default link that eBay creates; place a bigger link or clickable button within the body of your listing. ? Make it just as easy for the customer to view the listings in your eBay Store. Then, within your Store, make sure that you offer items that are complementary to the item the customer just purchased. If you're selling shoes, for example, your eBay Store should offer socks and shoe polish; if you're selling DVD players, offer connecting cables in your Store.

tip

Another reason to drive additional sales to your eBay Store is that eBay's Store listing fees are much lower than auction listing fees.

? Offer a combined shipping discount so that when the customer decides to purchase a second item, he doesn't pay double the shipping. Instead, offer some sort of deal, such as "$1.00 shipping for each additional item purchased."

? Offer a discount on additional items purchased. Maybe you offer a 10% discount on any items added to a purchase, or something similar--anything to encourage customers to add more items to their shopping cart.

However you accomplish it, the goal is to turn a $20 sale into a $30 one. The higher dollar value per sale, the higher your profit margin.

Trick #65: Optimize Your Listings for Search

Here's the deal: Fewer than 10% of customers find your listings by browsing. Fully 90% of eBay buyers find items by using eBay's search function. That means you need to optimize your listings so that your items show up when customers are searching for similar items. There's another reason why you want to optimize your listings for search. You see, your listings show up not only in eBay search results, but also when web users use Google, Yahoo!, and other sites to search the Web. If your listings are heavy with the right keywords, they'll show up in Google and Yahoo! search results--which is free publicity for your items. For eBay's search results, it's the title you need to focus on. That's because eBay's search function, by default, searches only listing titles. (There's an

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