May 2002

Traffic Generation Technique
Ebay

I am just getting my feet wet on Ebay as a seller. I've been buying stuff on there for awhile. My first auctions went up this week and so far I've  sold two "Wake 'em Up!" books and gained two new customers.

The last part of the last sentence is what I want you to pay attention to -- "and gained two new customers." That's the real important issue here.

Hold the presses. hahahaha another one of my auctions just ended and guess what NO BIDDERS hahahahaha. It cost me a whole 35 cents to list "Wake 'em Up" in an obscure area and nobody found it.

This is cracking me up because everything has a certain skill level to it. I started my auctions on a whim and then got the book Ebay for Dummies. I'm now reading about all the dumb things I've been doing. There are best times to run auctions, Best times to start. Best times to end and more strategy than you would realize. I can only suggest that you get a book on it which will save you lots of time.

The beauty of the whole thing is that it's so darn cheap to try out. The other thing is that everyone on there is not necessarily an el cheapo bargain hunter. I certainly am not cheap, but I buy stuff on there all the time and if I find a good company I'll buy stuff direct from them.

OK, back to my two new customers. It's too early to say if these people are likely to spend any more money with me, but I spoke to one of them on the phone for about 15 minutes and she's an author with a published book and she wants to be a better speaker. WELL HELLO . . .WHO'S BETTER THAN ME TO HELP HER ALONG HER WAY?  . ..  (For those of you who don't know me that's my field.)

That's the point. She could become a long term customer and buy thousands of dollars worth of products and services. We're back to the old "Lifetime value of a customer" concept.

I'm thinking that once I learn how to do it, the process of the auctions can be virtually automated. Ebay has a $5.00 a month tool that keeps track of your auctions and uploads them with templates so they look nice. If you're really industrious you can make some really fancy stuff layouts of your products.

So Tom, what does this have to do with website traffic?
Well here's the scoop. There are tricks of the trade to put your website address in with the ad. There are personal home pages Ebay gives you that tell about you and what you do. There are millions and millions of visitors to Ebay all typing in keywords (that's another thing you need to learn to do. . .put keywords in your descriptions so you come up on searches.)

So if you have any kind of product, audio tape, video tape, book or whatever, you can use it as a loss leader. If you're self published it's probably not even going to be at a loss. I sold one Wake 'em UP book for $8.00 plus shipping and the other for $6.83 plus shipping. With a $2.00 cost I still made a little money on both and got two new customers.

Let's say I can get that up to a five or ten or twenty new customers per week. Now we're talking some good revenue when some of them upgrade to other products and services.

More updates on my Ebay auctions next month.