Product Sourcing News   

I already have a website, why would I want to be on eBay?

By: Janelle Elms, CEO
OSIRockstars.com

Selling on the internet, and eBay specifically, can be a good sales channel to have in your business plan, but if you aren’t using the SEO/Marketing powerhouse tool, you are leaving a lot of money on the table. I am talking about an eBay Store.

When you create a website your startup costs include:
• A domain
• Hosting
• Shopping cart
• Newsletter program
• Design

And when you open your new website to the world how many customers do you have? Yep, zero. Now you have to implement a SEO (search engine optimization) strategy so your potential buyers can find you on Google and the other search engines.
For a $15.95 eBay Store you get:
• A domain
• Hosting
• Shopping cart
• Newsletter program
• Design

AND, when you open your new website you not only have immediate access to 85 million customers, but you also have built-in SEO that can have you ranked within days to the first page of Google.

I had a soon-to-be client who called me all excited, “Janelle, I am ranked #1 on Google’s first page!” I congratulated him and asked him for what keyword term he was ranked so well for. He replied with the name of his business. Sigh. So a bit of a reality check, you SHOULD be ranked #1 on Google for your business name – that is very easy. But are you ranked high on Google for the names of your products you are trying to sell? With an eBay Store you can be.

99% of eBay Stores are set up wrong, learn what the 1% know:
1. The mistake: Too many eBay Store owners think of their store as a holding spot for their inventory.
1% Truth: An eBay Store should be thought of as a website with its own domain, multiple web pages, and marketing tools. Your marketing plan should reflect its website status instead of a garage sale mentality.

2. The mistake: Most eBay Store owners only use one or two of the powerful tools that are included in the price of a store. The features they are using aren’t being utilized to their full profitable potential.
1% Truth: An eBay Store comes with a newsletter, buyer tracking reports, up to 10 additional ‘web pages’ for customer/product information and SEO, over 1000 promotional niche boxes, feeds for shopping search engines and GoogleBase, and profitable built-in SEO opportunities.

3. The mistake: Many eBay Store owners do not understand the power of profitable keywords. They choose to set up their eBay Store based upon what they would like to say to their customers.
1% Truth: It doesn’t matter in the slightest what we want to call our products or how we would like to talk to our customers. It only matters what the people with money want to call a product. Your Profitable Keyword Sheet should contain your buyer’s vocabulary and you should know all of the locations in your eBay Store to utilize those keywords for top ranking on Google.

One of my customers said to me recently, “I SO wish I had opened an eBay Store first before my website. It would have been much easier to gain traction in the marketplace with all of these Google friendly tools that eBay is giving me.”

You can learn more about the power of eBay Store and it’s many profitable tools at: OnePercentStore.com

Webinar with Janelle Elms on Monday July 27th at 9:00pm EST. Click the banner below to register to attend. You can also sign up for our other upcoming webinars from that page.