The eBay Marketing Bible This page intentionally left blank The eBay Marketing Bible EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW TO REACH MORE CUSTOMERS AND MAXIMIZE YOUR PROFITS Cliff Ennico and Cindy Shebley American Management Association New York • Atlanta • Brussels • Chicago • Mexico City • San Francisco Shanghai • Tokyo • Toronto • Washington, D.C. Special discounts on bulk quantities of AMACOM books are available to corporations, professional associations, and other organizations. For details, contact Special Sales Department, AMACOM, a division of American Management Association, 1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019. Tel: 212-903-8316. Fax: 212-903-8083. E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.amacombooks.org/go/specialsales To view all AMACOM titles go to: www.amacombooks.org This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional service. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ennico, Clifford R. The eBay marketing bible : everything you need to know to reach more customers and maximize your profits / Cliff Ennico and Cindy Shebley. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8144-1440-8 ISBN-10: 0-8144-1440-0 1. Internet marketing. 2. Internet auctions. 3. eBay (Firm) I. Shebley, Cindy. II. Title. HF5415.1265.E56 2009 658.8'7—dc22 2009012582 © 2009 Cliff Ennico and Cindy L. Shebley. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. This publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of AMACOM, a division of American Management Association, 1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019. Printing number 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 From Cliff: To Dolores Ennico, the toughest customer I ever sold ⁄. From Cindy: To Dany Byrne, who stood by me while I turned my hopes and dreams into reality, and to Buster, Rascal, and Shadow, who fearlessly helped by keeping the bad guys on the other side of the fence. This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1 Developing a Marketing Strategy for Your Online Business 19 Building a Successful Marketing Strategy in Four Steps 19 Step #1: Who Are Your Customers Going to Be? 26 Step #2: Why Are These People Going to Buy from You? 32 Step #3: What Should You Be Selling on eBay? 41 Step #4: How Will You Get Your Message Across to Your Customers? 48 2 Building a Market- Friendly eBay Presence 53 Creating an Experience for Your Buyers 53 Your eBay User ID and Store ID 58 Your About Me and My World Pages 64 Elements of an Attention- Getting Listing 73 Building Your Brand in Five Easy Steps 83 eBay Listing Upgrades 95 vii viii Contents Using Your eBay Store Custom Pages to Generate Search Engine Traffic 98 Do You Need More Than One Store? 104 3 Using eBay to Market Your Products 111 eBay’s Policies and How They Affect Your Online Marketing Activities 111 What People Look For When They Surf the Web 117 Marketing Tools Inside the eBay Store 122 Creating Buzz in the eBay Community 127 Marketing by Doing Good 133 Keys to Scoring That Online Sale 135 Small Details That Build Loyalty 140 Marketing Doesn’t Stop Once You Make the Sale 143 4 Online Marketing Strategies and Tools 151 Two Fundamental Marketing Rules to Remember at All Times 151 What Internet Marketing Is (and Isn’t) All About 154 Search Engine Optimization 158 E- Mail Newsletters 168 Blogs 181 How to Squidoo 188 Podcasts 192 Videocasts 196 Social Networking 201 Making the Most of Web 2.0 210 Should You Be on the Cutting Edge of Web Commerce? 214 Track What’s Working and What Isn’t 216 5 Offline Marketing Strategies and Tools 221 When the Best Way to Market an Online Business Is Offline 221 Press Releases 223 Contents ix Newspaper, Magazine, and Print Advertising 231 Radio, Television, and Billboards 234 The Marketing Power of Adult Education 239 Guerrilla Marketing 245 Everything Your Customer Sees Is a Marketing Opportunity 249 6 Developing an E- Commerce Empire 265 Building Synergy Among Multiple Marketing Channels 265 Make Your Website the Center of It All 268 Reaching Out with Yahoo!, Amazon, and Other E- Commerce Platforms 276 Tips on Linking It All Together 284 Ubiquity Is the Ultimate Marketing Goal 289 Appendix A Marketing Resources for eBay Sellers 293 Index 297 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments Any book is a team effort, and The eBay Marketing Bible would not have been possi- ble without the support, friendship, inspiration, love, and occasional “noodging” of these individuals, among others. Our many thanks to: • Janelle Elms, noted eBay author, mentor to both of us, and founder of the Online Success Institute (www.osirockstars.com), for being such a great resource on “all things eBay” and for having literally invented the field of eBay marketing. • Jacquie Flynn, our editor at AMACOM Books, for believing that books for eBay sellers are indeed “business management books” worthy of the American Management Association. • Jennifer Holder, our other editor at AMACOM Books, for going through the entire manuscript and at least two eyeglass prescriptions helping us blend two voices into a single harmony. • The dozens of eBay sellers around the United States who allowed us access to their eBay marketing strategies and store designs, and shared with us “what worked and what didn’t.” • Sharon Guldner, who oversees the eBay Education Specialist program and teaches us the stuff about eBay that we don’t know. xi xii Acknowledgments • Skype, for making it possible for authors living on opposite coasts of the United States to collaborate on a book without running up thousands of dollars in telephone charges. • Most important, Dolores Ennico and Dany Byrne, the people who share our lives, our frustrations, and our computers, and who tolerate all the craziness during those last couple of weeks before the manuscript is due ⁄. Introduction If you own your own small business, marketing is the key to your success. It is hands down the most essential business skill. Without sales, without customers, without revenue, a small business cannot survive. And when you run your own business, on eBay or indeed anywhere else, you are the person responsible for making those sales happen, generating those customers, and bringing in that revenue. Let us put it even more bluntly: If you are in business for yourself (whether on eBay or anywhere else) and you do not know how to market yourself, your products, or your services, you will fail. It is an absolute, 100 percent guarantee, with no exceptions. Whatever you call yourself in your business— whatever title you use, however you describe yourself at networking meetings and cocktail parties— you are the salesperson in chief. If you don’t make sales happen, nobody else will. This is one activity you do not delegate to your employees, your outside advisers, or your beleaguered spouse or life partner. Without a doubt, this is the biggest difference between working for yourself and working for somebody else. When you work for somebody else— say, a giant Fortune 500 corporation— you can have a very exciting career indeed and not have to know a single thing about where your sales come from. You can pursue a career in finance, accounting, human resources (formerly known as “person- nel”), or information technology, and climb quite far up the corporate ladder without having to sell anything to anybody at any time. 1 2 The eBay Marketing Bible In the world of small business, that is a luxury you cannot afford. Marketing and selling are the most important things you do when you run your own busi- ness. Successful entrepreneurs and small business owners— however they may differ otherwise— are always very good at marketing, selling, advertising, and promoting whatever it is they have to sell. A lot of people think that marketing is the easy part of business— they take courses in accounting, finance, and other more technical areas of business knowledge that require higher mathematics, but they leave the marketing part for last, figuring they can always pick it up as they go. As you will see in this book, that is a recipe for disaster. One of the dumbest things you can do in any business is build it first and then start looking for the people who will buy your merchandise. Marketing is actually quite a challenge for most business owners. If you think about it, when you run any sort of business the one thing you do not have any control over whatsoever is your customers. You can control and manage your accounting records, your profit margins (by controlling costs), your em- ployees, and other aspects of your internal operations to some extent, but you have no control over things that happen outside of your organization. And buying decisions are made by your customers, who by definition are outside of your organization. You cannot force customers to buy something they don’t want to buy— period. They decide where (and, in these tough economic times, whether) to spend their hard- earned money. Your job as a marketer is to persuade them that they should not only buy, but buy from you. There are literally hundreds of books on the mar- ket today teaching you how to sell— they wouldn’t publish all those books if it were easy, folks.