CHAPTER
2 -
PRO-ACTIVE MARKETING
Some
supremely simple ways to increasing your visibility.
Common sense would dictate that the more people who know about your auctions, the wider the net of potential customers will become aware of what you have to offer. It makes sense, right? But of course, you never want to SPAM (send out unsolicited email) or otherwise behave inappropriately on the Internet.
So how can you do boost your visibility where it counts? Easy! Via the following three ways.
What do I mean by the above? Well, every email program allows you to customize your signature (a text file that contains some information about you). Let's say that you participate in a model horse forum such as Haynet. You could append to every posting something like:
Barbara Ling
See my wonderful model horse auctions in action!
http://www.barbaraling.com/modelhorses.html
Whenever anyone clicked on that link, they'd be taken directly to all of your auctions.
Proactive marketing at its best! Think of the potential! Every time you respond to a customer...post to a forum...answer questions for your peers....your model horse auctions will be at their fingertips.
Here's how you do it!
Provide a direct to your USL in every forum posting/email
First you need to know how to create an email signature.
Have you ever created your own email signature? Every email program has a slightly different style of doing so. You can find the process which works for you at CoolSig. (you'll also see bunches of other uses of email signatures at their main page as well).
Next let's get your USL (unique selling link)
View any auction you currently have, and then click on 'View Seller's Other Items'.
Now look at the resulting URL in your web browser, and remove everything after your eBay ID.
The final format might look like:
http://cgi6.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewSellersOtherItems&userid=martrac
If anyone clicked on that link from anywhere on the Internet, they would immediately see all of the items you are offering!
Now you have your USL....but it doesn't quite lend itself to email. It looks rather long and convoluted, right? But think how great it would be if you could create a page like
http://www.YourWebsite.com/modelhorses.html
that instantly whisk visitors directly to your auctions if people click on it!
Now follow these steps.
Step 1 - Create a blank page on your website and name it "modelhorses.html". (what's that? You're not comfortable with creating webpages? You can find some great tutorials at
What's that, part II? You don't have a webpage? That's okay - just grab some free space at http://www.geocities.com . It's free!)
Step 2 - In the currently-blank page modelhorses.html, include the following code.
===================
<title></title>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;
URL=http://cgi6.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewSellersOtherItems&userid=martrac">
</head>
<body>
<p>Redirecting you now to my great model horses....
</body>
</html>
====================
Step 3 - Put your own USL in after the code URL="...". And because you want people taken immediately to your auctions, leave the "content=0 - that means, wait 0 seconds before going to your auctions.
Step 4 - Okay! You should now have a page on your website that if anyone visits, will immediately take them to your own auctions.
Step 5 - NOW revisit creating your email signature. Use your shortened URL as the place visitors should click on to learn more about your offerings. And if you really don't want to use your own webpage at all, just visit TinyURL at http://tinyurl.com/ , paste in your USL and use what is returned. I do not know how long it stays active, however.
Now let's talk about:
Index your website in Google
Certainly peole will uncover your model horse auctions in eBay. But think for a second...is there any other place on the Internet that they would look?
Of course there is - it's Google! Google at http://www.google.com is one of the most popular search engines today. Millions and millions of people visit it, and over 3 billion pages are indexed in it! Just think how much more targeted visibility you'd get if your model horse webpage (that included direct links to all of your auctions!) showed up in the top 10 for specific queries.
Impossible you say? Certainly not, I respond! Look at the results for
I've achieved something similar myself! Because I targete the sellers of model horses instead of the buyers, I made certain to devise a page that ranks high for model horse resources like so:
How did I achieve this? It's really not difficult at all - you merely need to design pages on your site that revolve around the topic at hand (in your case, model horses).
Visit the page Business Building with Breyer Model Horses at http://www.barbaraling.com/knowledge-center/model-horses.shtml .
Then look at the top of your browser - you should see something like:
Model Horse Hobby - Forums, Webrings, Business, Money , Auctions
That's the title tag of the webpage. The title tag gets indexed when a page is submitted to a search engine! So if you ensure your webpage title tags have relevant keywords and content, your chances at achieving a high ranking will increase. Other techniques you can incorporate to boost your visibility rating include crafting resource pages about your hobby and encouraging others to exchange links (thus increasing your link popularity).
Ever receive email from enterprising folk, offering you the service of submitting pages in search engines? Forget about it! You can do that yourself for free - for example, Google's Site Submit page is at http://www.google.com/addurl.html . Not only that, but you can also search for
or
to find targeted niche places to submit your pages as well.
Want some great resources about targeted search engine visibility for auctions? eBay Search Profits.com explains in great detail how to use Google to drive targeted traffic to your specific online auctions. And JimWorld has a complete suite of free tools to help you with Internet marketing in general.
Include your USL on your personal auction website
You really really really should have your own personal auction website to where you can direct customers to learn more about you. The benefits are immense (especially if your site ranks high in the search engines! eBay Search Profits details exactly how to achieve that, btw) and include:
- You can create a resource page that other enthusiasts will tell their friends about
- You can highlight your passion about the hobby
- You can join model horse webrings and increase your visibility to a targeted audience
But one of the most compelling reasons why you should have your own personal auction website is because you can include your USL on each and every page! In other words, no matter where a visitor lands, they'll see a link to view your model horse auctions.
Check out this Betty Boop store page. Note how every link goes directly to the targeted seller's auctions. You can do the same thing for your model horses! Just use your personal USL instead.
Finally, you can
Include direct links to your other auctions in every auction you list.
Sure, you count on people clicking on 'View seller's other auctions' to learn what else you have to sell. But just think how many more people will see a link like
Prefer a different model horse - click here to see my other show-quality horses!
Remember (and this is key!) everything you do in your model horse auctions should not only highlight the wonderfulness of the item in question...it should also give the viewer other options to buy from you as well! And by highlighting a direct link to your other auctions within the description, you achieve just that.
What else can and should you do? Every eBay seller can create their own About Me page - the page on which you can write anything about yourself and your offerings. If you are passionate about Model Horses, make certain that comes out! You want to ensure you become more than simply a seller ID to interested buyers...you want to be known as a trustworthy and responsible vendor as well.
So. We've now just covered some neat ideas you can implement now to boost your auctions visibility to people outside of eBay! And because those people will now know of your offerings, they'll come to your eBay auctions to discover more, thus increasing the potential number of bidders for your Model Horses.
Just getting them there, however, doesn't automatically mean you'll sell more (although the probability does increase!). You don't want your visitors to visit your auctions, yawn, and go to a different seller, right?
Of course not. So let's now turn to the next chapter and analyze how to impove your auction ads.
Breyer Animal Creations is owned by, copyrighted by, and a licensed trade mark of Reeves International Inc.
Copyright
2005 Barbara Ling
http://www.barbaraling.com
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