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How To
Use eBay Auctions To Drive Traffic To Your Site
by: Peter Tarrida del Marmol
Many
eBay auction sellers rely only on eBay for generating
100% of their online income. Many of these people are
running a successful auction business; however, they
could do even better. They are missing a huge
opportunity to turbo-boost their business profits and
reduce their listing fees at the same time. If you feel
you are one of these people, these are the steps you
should follow to optimize your net auction business:
1.
Create a website. If you can write an eBay ad, then you
can design a website. It is not rocket science. You can
download many free web templates from the internet and
customize them easily with any HTML editor. If you type
the words “free web templates” in Google, for example,
you will get more than one million results!
2.
Register a domain name and hire a web hosting service.
These services start at about $40 per year, depending on
the web space and special services you require. Once you
have set up your hosting account, you must publish your
site.
3.
Register an account in Paypal in order to allow online
payments from your website. Paypal’s payment buttons and
shopping cart options are easy to use and allow you to
set up your site very quickly.
4. Use
allowed strategies in your eBay auctions to drive
traffic to your website. You don’t have to pay listing
fees and commissions for the sales that come from your
website, so your objective should be to use eBay only to
generate traffic and monetize your sales from your own
website.
But
everybody knows that eBay does not allow placing
outbound links in the auction ads, so how can you turn
the massive eBay daily traffic into a continuous stream
of visitors to your site?
Here
comes the interesting part…
The
first method is to put a link to your site on your
“about me” page and then link your auction ad to it.
This is allowed by eBay. Your auction visitors will be
directed first to your “about me” page, and then driven
to your website. A second way to gain traffic is
advertising your business using a picture or logo on
your auction ad that includes your website’s URL. By
doing this, you will be using eBay as a very cheap way
of advertising online. All your auction visitors will
see the name of your site and will be invited to type
your URL in their web browser.
To
optimize the number of visitors to your auctions, make
sure to use popular words in your auction’s title.
Another
easy technique is to write your site’s name without the
“http://” or “www” in a paragraph of your eBay ad. This
should be done carefully. The paragraph should not look
like an ad for your site, but as a natural explanation.
For example, let’s say your website is
www.auctionearnings.com. You could
include a paragraph like this in your ad:
“You can
find more information regarding this product at
AuctionEarnings.com,
as well as free articles and free e-books that will
contribute to increasing your knowledge on your subject
of interest.”
Finally,
and in my opinion, the most efficient way to gain
massive traffic is to create an information product and
give it away on eBay. Sell it for one penny and send an
email to your customers with a link to your download
page.
Attention - very important!
You MUST
capture your customer’s name and email address in order
to build your own customer list, so that you can promote
other products in the future using auto-responders. At
this point, you will be taking control of your own
business and you will not have to depend on eBay anymore
to monetize your sales.
Copyright 2005 Peter Tarrida del Marmol
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