eBay as a Marketing Tool

I just read this.....from John Reese.

I can hear you now…
“eBay? Why should I care about eBay? I don’t really
want to start selling crap out of my garage!”
Yes, eBay.....
And no, you’re not going to have to start an eBay
business out of your garage, unless you want to, of
course.
Too many people see eBay as just one giant, online
flea market that beginners take advantage of to get
their feet wet with making money online, which is
definitely a powerful strategy, but it’s definitely not
for everybody.
What people DON’T understand about eBay is that
it can also be a resource that potentially leads to
huge profits for their “regular” online businesses.
The truth is that when it comes to following the two
“Reese Rules” laid out for you above, determining
how the most successful products and services are
effectively being sold online, eBay is the ultimate
research tool.
With so many different items and services being
sold on eBay, any business can benefit from the data
that can be gathered by researching their site.
Now, before you say, “Ahh… I don’t need to use
eBay”, I want you to make me a promise and at
least check out what lies ahead within the pages of
this month’s newsletter and accompanying CDROM.
I guarantee you that regardless of your business
model, whether you create VRE sites, sell your own
infoproducts or physical products, promote affiliate
programs, sell web-based services or consulting
services, or whatever, you will discover at least a
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eBay - The Ultimate
Research Tool!
few tips that could potentially send your profits
skyrocketing.
‘What’ You Should Be Using eBay For
Keep up with what’s “Hot”
Like I mentioned earlier, you want to determine
which items are successfully being sold online, so
the first thing you can do with eBay is to pay attention
to the most popular items being sold through their
site.
What items are the hottest? What items are people
actively searching for?
By paying close attention to these products, you may
find a product that you want to add to your product
catalog or a new topic that you want to create a VRE
site for.
I’ll be discussing some resources within this issue
that will make this whole process a piece of cake.
Discover new VRE markets
If you’re setting up sites to make commissions from
AdSense or affiliate products, or even if you’re just
setting up sites to generate leads for your other web
sites, eBay is a goldmine for finding VRE markets.
Find new marketing methods
eBay marketers are very savvy, and you can learn a
lot by paying attention to how they are marketing
their items.
You may find that they use specific copy techniques
that you might want to test in your business, maybe
they’ve found a great way to incorporate audio or
video into their sales process, or what have you.
I’ve found many techniques that eBay marketers
have used that would be great strategies to test outside
of eBay, on a typical online business’ web site, within
their autoresponder sequences, on their blogs, and
so on.
Use it for driving traffic to your sites
Most people don’t know that there are a number of
great ways to generate traffic from eBay.
One of the ways that people have used to drive traffic
to their sites was by setting up their “About Me”
pages to point to their sites.
The “About Me” page is a page you can set up within
your eBay account that you can use to share various
bits of information with people who visit your listings,
including personal information about yourself, links
to favorite web sites, and so on.
Another benefit of setting up your “About Me” page
with a link to your web sites was that these links
could possibly generate traffic as a result of link
popularity with the search engines.
This was about the only way to get people to visit
your web sites because eBay’s policy has been that
you can’t directly link to a site from your eBay
listings unless that site was critical to the success of
your particular listing.
However, their policies change all the time, so you’ll
definitely want to keep up to date on their current
policies to see how you can promote your web sites
without breaking eBay’s rules.
A popular method that people are using to generate
tons of traffic for their sites with eBay these days is
by creating their own “eBay Store”.
An eBay store allows people to basically set up shop
online with their own store, and these pages within
their eBay store can get indexed by the search engines.
You can also link to your other web sites from the
pages of your eBay store, but again, check with
eBay’s policies to make sure you are properly
benefiting from every advantage you’re entitled to
in regards to driving traffic to your other web sites.
Another strategy that people have been extremely
successful with involves selling reports on eBay for
as low as a penny, and letting these reports do the
work of driving traffic to their web sites.
Of course, there are other gray areas that would
allow you to generate some dirt cheap leads from
your eBay listings that you can discover by simply
doing your own research there to see what other
marketers are doing to get people to their sites.
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Note: Later in this issue, I’ll be revealing a powerful
strategy that will allow you to pay for traffic on a
PPC basis through eBay, and get this traffic a whole
lot cheaper than it would cost you with Google
AdWords.
The best part is that eBay traffic is more qualified,
a lot of the time, because there are more buyers
prevalent on eBay than on Google, or any other
search engine where people search primarily for free
information.
Uncover profitable keywords
By using eBay for conducting your research, you
can discover keywords that may be beneficial to you
in your marketing efforts that you may have not
previously considered.
Whether you are reviewing regular eBay listings or
checking out someone’s eBay store, you should be
able to find tons of keywords that you can use for
your business.
In addition to what you see at eBay, when you access
someone’s web site by following the marketing
process that a particular marketer used in his eBay
listings or store, you may discover keyword ideas
for your business by researching that marketers
regular web site, itself.
Find partners
eBay is a great place to cultivate partners for your
online business!
Let’s say you create your own infoproducts and
you’re looking for joint venture partners to help get
the word out about your products.
If you sell an ebook on gardening, for example, you
could go to eBay and find people who are selling
gardening tools online, make contact with them, and
let them know about your ebook.
Let these people know that you will pay them $10
for any sales that they refer, showing them how they
can simply set up a little promotion of the ebook
within the email that goes out to anyone who buys
their stuff.
Another option would be for them to include a little
flyer or brochure that you could agree to create for
them that can be inserted into the packages they
send out to their customers, allowing them to earn
commissions from any sales resulting from these
backend offers.
It could be as simple as a single sheet of paper that
has a great headline, a brief description of the ebook,
a few bullet points, and even a testimonial.
You could even set each partner up with their own
domain name that redirects to their affiliate link.
The point is that you want to make your potential
partners feel like they have nothing to lose - money
or time - by allowing you to completely set them up
to start making money by promoting your product.
Keep in mind that many eBay sellers make just a
little profit per sale, so they often have to make a
large number of sales in order to earn a substantial
income.
Therefore, if you come to them with a no-brainer
offer, you could have an entire army of eBay sellers
marketing your ebook for you… and earning
themselves a nice backend commission for doing
so.
So now that you know about the power of using
eBay as a research tool for your online business,
you’re probably wondering if you’re going to have
to go to eBay and search listing after listing, and
category after category to find new ideas for products,
VRE sites, keywords, and so on, right?
Well, if I was going to create a video that takes you
through all of the various markets to conduct our
research, it would be multiple hours in length, and
you simply can’t afford to spend that much time
conducting your own research.
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eBay Tools!
Besides, by the time you accumulated all of the data
from this time intensive research, it would be
outdated. There would be new listings that will have
taken the place of these original listings, with new
items that are now the hottest sellers, and so on.
So, if it doesn’t make sense for us to spend all of
this time to conduct our research by browsing around
the listings on eBay, what should we do, you ask?
Hot Item Finder (hotitemfinder.com)
How would you like a tool that eliminates the need
to spend hours on eBay, quickly generates lists of
the hottest items on eBay, searches all of the popular
search terms within each eBay category, and provides
a list of the total number of items listed in each
category?
Well, “Hot Item Finder” is a tool that you simply
must buy if you are seriously looking to use eBay
for conducting market research for your Internet
business, and save TONS of time in the process.
I’ve created a detailed tutorial that shows you how
to use this piece of software, and you can find it on
this month’s companion CD-ROM, but I’ll do my
best to describe its functionality within this newsletter,
as well.
Once you’ve downloaded your copy of this software,
the first thing you’ll want to do is click on the “Item
Search” tab, enter a term that you want to have
searched for on eBay, and click the “Search eBay”
button.
Once the software completes its search, click on the
“Hot Item List” tab, and you’ll be presented with all
of the eBay listings that contain 20 or more bids for
that particular search phrase, representing the listings
which effectively generated a lot of interest.
The items being sold within these listings are some
of the hottest items available in those markets, and
you can use this data to develop new product or VRE
site ideas.
You’ll not only see the number of bids each listing
has received, but the software also shows how much
time is left for each listing on eBay, what the highest
bid amount is for each of the listings, as well as the
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actual title of the listing which is conveniently
hyperlinked to the actual listing on eBay.
The powerful takeaway that I want you to remember
is that when searching for topics related to your
particular business, you will not only be able to tell
which items are the most popular, but you can dissect
each of the popular listings to see what copy they
used in their titles and descriptions, to find potential
keywords you may have overlooked, to see how they
are using eBay to generate traffic to their main web
sites, and so on.
By doing one search with this tool, you could spend
an hour taking notes on the techniques and strategies
of several eBay marketers who are successfully
attracting bids for their items, and turn those notes
into an action plan to implement in your own business.
What would normally take hours to compile, you
are now able to do in a fraction of the time by using
the Hot Item Finder tool.
By clicking on the “Analysis” tab and then the
“Category Analysis” button, you can determine how
many items are listed within each category, as well
as how many items are listed in each of the
subcategories.
You can also determine what the most commonly
searched for terms are on eBay by clicking on the
“Popular Searches” button within the “Analysis”
tab.
You can even click on a particular category within
this section and find the most popular search terms
for that particular category. For example, by clicking
on coins, you may find that silver is the most popular
search term.
What this all means for you is that if you are looking
for product ideas, you can use this tool to determine
what people are actively searching for online, and
if you locate a market that shows potential, you can
decide to create your own product around that market,
a VRE site, or whatever.
Now, keep in mind that, although you can retrieve
this data for many of their categories, eBay does not
release all of their data for every category.
However, there’s plenty of data for you to be able
to develop ideas for new products, discover effective
methods for promoting your products or web sites,
and so on.
You can also discover the most popular products
within these categories by clicking on the “Popular
Products” tab and selecting the category you’re
interested in.
For example, you can discover within seconds that
“The Little Mermaid” (1999) is the most popular
product listed in the DVD category.
You can also determine which products are the most
popular on eBay overall, which at the time of this
issue’s creation, happened to also be “The Little
Mermaid” DVD.
There’s also a keyword research tool. By clicking
on the “Keyword Search” button, you can generate
a keyword list in much the same way as regular
keyword generation tools do, but whereas the results
from those tools might contain searches for
information, tutorials, and so on, the keywords
generated with this tool are more product oriented
because people on eBay search for things to buy.
It’s definitely worth running some searches with this
keyword tool to see if you can come up with
additional keywords for your other marketing
campaigns.
Another great way to determine what the hottest
products are on eBay is by clicking on the “Most
Watched” button to find out which items people are
adding to their “Watched Items” list within their
eBay accounts the most.
When a user finds an item that they are considering
placing a bid on, they have the option of adding that
item to their “Watched Items” list so they can go
back to it easily the next time they access their
account.
Finally, because this powerful piece of software has
so many functions, it’s impossible for me to
thoroughly teach you how to use it within one issue
of “The Reese Report”.
Therefore, I highly recommend that you invest in
your own copy of this software, and take the time
to learn how you can use it to quickly find new
product
ideas, VRE site ideas, and other pertinent data for
your online business.
eBay Keywords (ebaykeywords.com)
Earlier in this issue, I mentioned that I would be
sharing a powerful strategy with you that allows you
to get highly targeted PPC traffic via eBay at a
fraction of the cost of promoting via Google Adwords.
Congratulations to The Reese Report subscriber,
Scott Reichel, for recommending “adMarketplace
Keywords”, which is a service that allows you to
place PPC ads above eBay listings.
By bidding on particular keyword phrases, your ad
appears above the eBay listings whenever someone
searches for those keywords.
Unfortunately, the negative thing about this service
is that you cannot send the traffic from these ads
directly to a web site.
Although that would be the ideal strategy, what you
can do, instead, is send the traffic to your current
eBay listings or eBay store, which will then do the
job of strategically funneling that traffic to your
regular web sites.
Besides, if you’re promoting physical items in your
eBay store, using this PPC strategy should be one
of the traffic generation methods that would definitely
be worth testing.
By using the Keyword Suggestion Tool within this
program, you can not only generate a list of keywords
that you might consider using for your PPC campaign,
you can see what the maximum bid cost currently
is for each of those keywords, allowing you to quickly
decide whether it’s worth paying to have your ads
appear for certain keywords.
Also, by clicking on the “View” link for a particular
keyword, you can get a detailed look at who your
competition is for that keyword, what their ads look
like, what they’re paying to list their ads with this
service, and so on.
One thing I want you to understand is that with click
costs in the low teens for many of the search
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terms you could be purchasing, if you are promoting
any type of physical product at all, you are absolutely
out of your mind if you haven’t set up an eBay store
that you can inexpensively send highly targeted
traffic to with this service.
Remember, you can then turn around and funnel the
traffic you receive at your eBay store to your main
web sites.
By using this technique, you may find that your eBay
ad campaigns are resulting in much higher returns
than your Google AdWords campaigns.
Now, here’s what’s truly powerful for you even if
you don’t have an eBay store or sell physical products
of any kind.
If you have an infoproduct, you can research the
various competitors for certain keyword combinations
that are related to your market, and find hundreds
of possible joint venture partners who might be
willing to promote your infoproduct to their customers
on the backend.
Just because you may not have an eBay store doesn’t
mean you can’t take full advantage of what this
service has to offer.
I hope, by now, that you realize that eBay is more
than just place to sell unwanted junk that’s been
clogging up your basement, garage, or attic for
several years.
It’s a powerful research tool that every Internet
marketer seriously needs to use in order to develop
new product ideas, web site ideas, and untapped
marketing strategies.
By using the tools mentioned above, you can create
a successful marketing game plan within a fraction
of the time that it would normally take for you to
physically search throughout the thousands of eBay
listings within your particular niche, looking for
product and marketing ideas.

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