Getting Traffic To Your Ebay Store

Getting Traffic to Your EBay Store

Opening an eBay shop is a great way to get your products out in front of potential customers but the customers won’t just appear. You have to go out and get them and bring them into your shop. The best way to do this is to mix your listings between auctions and shop items. The more auctions you have running the more visitors you will get to your shop. Auctions on eBay are highly visible whereas shops are not.

The trick is to use auctions to attract people’s attention, once they see the auction and visit your page you then need to get them into your shop where your other products are. All you need to do is link them directly to your shop with a “Visit my shop for other great products” link at the bottom of your page.

Having a mixture of auctions and shop listings is the way to get large numbers of repeat visitors to your shop. I usually, as a rough guide, run about 25% of my listings as auctions if I want to have a busy time. If I want to keep my eBay store reasonably quiet while I work on other areas of my business. I stop all auctions and just keep my shop open. This guarantees me some constant visits but not the mad rush that comes with running auctions.

Like the supermarkets that use loss leaders to pull people into their stores, you should put things on auction for a low price. These don’t have to be expensive things. The objective of the exercise is to get people into your shop where they can browse through your products which are priced for profit. You could buy some small items and sell them at cost price. I recently read about a successful tactic employed by one seller to get people into his shop. He bought items from the pound shop and listed them as auctions. These had the desired effect of getting people into his shop.

Personally I put a variety of things up for auction. If you’re lucky you will create a bidding war and once people start bidding you will make a huge profit. I put a dvd on auction once and five people got into a bidding war, I ended up selling it for over £50.00.  I’ve just run a successful little campaign on eBay, putting up over forty auctions. The result was a huge increase in sales from eBay and my website. Not to mention the sales that took place outside of eBay. Some of the auctions I ran lost me a little money. But the overall picture was a large profit. If you lose a little money on some auctions just look at them as advertising costs

Don’t just open an eBay shop and sit back waiting for the money to start rolling in. Go out and pull the customers in by using auctions. It’s a great way to get traffic on eBay.

Getting Traffic To Your Website

Traffic! Traffic! Traffic.! How many times a week do you sit in slow moving traffic in our gridlocked cities cursing? Plenty no doubt. Traffic is the curse of modern life, there’s just too much of it. As far as your website is concerned though, you can never have enough. There’s millions of dead websites and blogs floating through cyberspace; websites that were designed with great enthusiasm by their owners,

representing their hopes and dreams. Now empty and dead. Their problem was they couldn’t generate the traffic to them. A website without traffic is dead. It may look great, it may win awards for design, but if no one visits it, it’s as pointless as a shop in the Gobi desert.

Getting traffic to your website is essential to your online success.  This is the first of a series of posts that will discuss techniques to increase your traffic. Let’s be frank about one thing, it takes work and effort, like all internet businesses. Generating traffic is a skill you need to learn and something you need to practice every day.

Our objective is to build quality links back to our website and get listed in the search engines. It’s a huge subject, way beyond a few blog posts but I’ll discuss some of the most effective measure I employ every week.

The first and one of the most effective ways to bring traffic to your site is through article marketing. What is it?  It’s a method used to generate traffic by writing short articles and submitting them to article directories like ezine.com.

The articles would be relevant to the content on your site. So, for example if you had a site that sold mortgage products, you would write articles about related subjects. You could write about the best mortgage for example, or how to apply for a mortgage. The article has to inform the reader about some aspect of the subject.

At the bottom of the article, there is always a place for you to put information about yourself and the address of your website. Once you have written your article you submit it to an article directory and leave it to do its job. There are techniques you need to employ to ensure your article comes up in Google when people search for the subject you are writing about.

Article directories, especially the top ones have a good source of traffic and you are plugging into it. By placing an article in a top directory, you are immediately exposing your site to thousands of potential customers who will see your article and follow the link back to your site. Google will also know your website is listed on an article directory and pull your site up in its page rank. You will have back links to your site. These are essential in giving your site visibility.

The beauty of article marketing is that it’s a source of constant traffic to your site. Even if people are not reading your articles and clicking on the direct link to your website, Google will recognise the back links to your site and give you a higher search engine ranking. This is known as organic traffic, and will continue to bring you traffic long after you have forgotten about the article. Article marketing accounts for about 30% of the traffic I get to my websites. The more article the more traffic.

One article is not enough. You need to submit a good few. I support any website I put on the web with 30 articles to begin with. This brings in traffic straight away. I then continue to add articles occasionally. Once you get into the habit of writing articles then it comes easily. I can write a 400-word article in less than half an hour, but I’ve been doing it for ages. You’ll soon get into the knack of doing it.

Go over to http://ezinearticles.com/ and have a look at the articles. All these authors are writing for one thing only, to promote their websites and businesses. Article marketing is an excellent way to generate traffic to your site and it doesn’t cost you anything. I can vouch for its effectiveness.

8 Steps To Dealing With A Crisis

Ok it has to happen. Despite all he careful planning, despite it can’t happen to me attitude problems are a natural part of life and we have to deal with them. In business a problem ignored will inevitably grow to a crisis.

If we bury our head in the sand it will jump on our back. So let’s get real, let’s behave like adults and prepare for the unavoidable slings and arrows that will come our way sometime. We’ve got a crisis. Sales are falling, costs are rising, we’ve lost parcels in the post or the computer with all our business contacts on has just crashed out on us. You get the idea. It’s a crisis.

Who’s fault is it? Forget it, it doesn’t matter. We haven’t got time to form a circle and point at one another. Form a circle but make sure the rifles are pointing outwards. First we first with the problem. Once we have it sorted and the ship is back on an even keel we can look into what were the reasons involved in causing the crisis. Until then let’s deal with the problem.

1. What is the problem? Define it, write it down be clear about what the problem is. You should be able to write it down, there’s no room for vagueness, we need to know exactly what we are dealing with. How is it impacting on the business.

2. Get control. You are the leader of your business whether it’s a home based business that you run from your bedroom or a multinational. You are the boss, the commanding officer you have to show leadership. Stand tall and be confident. Wilting under pressure is for wimps.

3. Stay calm and logical. Get the facts. I used to love those old war films where a submarine had just been depth charged. Water is spraying everywhere; pipes are falling off, bodies are laid over the deck plates and the submarine is diving straight for the bottom and about to implode. Everyone is on the brink of panicing, then the captain, holding onto a rung of the metal ladder leading up to the conning tower calmly asks for the damage report. The calmness in his voice restores confidence. You are the captain. It doesn’t matter how fast the submarine is sinking get that damage report. If you haven’t got the facts you can’t provide solutions. Get the facts.

4. By now you should know what the problem is. You should have the facts to support your assessment of what has gone wrong. Write them down. Now think of solutions to the problem.

5. Deploy your solutions and monitor the results. Believe in your ability to deal with the problem. Listen to feedback from others but don’t let them sway you once you have made your decision to deal with the problem. You have by this stage, established what the problem is, what caused it, what affect it is having on the business and you have deployed your carefully thought out solution. Give it time to work.

6. Take relaxed decisions. Don’t be rushed, don’t be panicked. Whatever has gone wrong has happened, stressing out over

it will not solve the problem faster. Sit down and relax a while.

7. Tell people what’s going on. If you employ staff keep them informed if you work from home tell your partner that you are having a problem. Don’t sulk and lock yourself in the office answering all questions in monosyllabic grunts.

8. Once the c

risis is over assess what happened. Why did it happen? This is not a time for the blame game it’s a time for logica

l

ly making decisions and implementing systems that will prevent the problem from recurring.

Pat yourself on the back you’ve arrested the descent of the submarine and you are rising fast to the surface.

Problems are unavoidable in business that’s what makes it fun. When they arrive at your door stay calm and work your way through the 8 point plan. You are the commander. You can lead your business out of it.

Time Of Opportunity

We are living in possibly the best time in history to become an entrepreneur. New technology has made the world smaller and made it possible for anyone to start a business from his or her own home for minimum cost.

You don’t need to have any kind of licence; you don’t need lots of money. You don’t need to have any qualifications, your age is irrelevant, your race is irrelevant, and your past is irrelevant. All you need is the self-belief, the will and an idea and you are good to go. The only thing that can hold you back is yourself. You can be creating a small income online within a day.

You can begin building your own wealth now, all you need to do is take action. Everybody and anybody can start a small business and begin creating wealth. I was listening to a conversation recently where a man was complaining to one of his friends that he was only getting £60.00 a month from his company pension.

He looked fit and strong yet he was limiting his lifestyle to £60.00 a month. Do you know how easy it is to earn that money on the internet? With a little effort, he could be earning hundreds of pounds a month.

So what puts people off starting their own wealth-building plan? It’s laziness. Most people are not prepared to put in the effort required to start their own part-time enterprise.

Make no mistake it does require some effort, especially at the beginning. You will need to learn a new skill set, which will require you putting in some study time.

You will need to step out of your comfort zone and move into new areas. One of the biggest reasons I heat from people who want to start a business but keep putting it off is that they don’t have the time.

This is just an excuse. We can all find 15 hours a week. Just turn off the TV, stop idly surfing the internet, don’t buy anymore computer games, and the time you will free up will be enough to put into a wealth-building plan.

It really is a great time to become an entrepreneur; there are no restrictions. All you need is a plan and the determination to implement it.

If you’ve been thinking about starting your own business, then get working on the plan and take advantage of the opportunities available to you today.

Just Back from Holiday

I’ve just returned from a nice little break in southern Spain. I spent a week relaxing on a beach and visiting some wonderful places. I needed to recharge the old batteries and prepare myself for the next stage of my business development. I’m working on some excellent ideas that I intend to put into place over the course of the next few months.

Before I can do that I need to learn a few new things which I’m busy doing right now. When you start an online business one of the things you will have to get used to is learning a whole new skill set. It essential if you are going to succeed. You don’t need to be an expert on everything but it makes life a lot easier if you acquire a basic knowledge of things like HTML and Dreamweaver for website design. And a basic knowledge of Photoshop or some other photo manipulation software for graphics.

I didn’t post anything while I was on holiday. I decided to have a total break, computer free. We need to work and be productive, it keeps us healthy and motivated but we also need to just chill out now and again. Life’s too short for it to be eaten up with work and no play.

I’ll be back with my regular posts from now on.

See You

Paul