Making Sales Happen At The eBay Alternatives

A seller trading at an eBay alternative venue might have all of the elements of success already at hand. They can have all of the drive and perseverance in the world, superb value products, a great venue with a slick user interface and a wide range of selling formats and payment options but still have one key thing missing - buyers. If only the buyers could find the items on offer!

No matter what else an alternative venue seller has going for them, he or she isn’t going to start making regular sales until they have the one thing that must be earned when you move away from eBay – traffic. If a seller can get traffic to their sales pages, they have accomplished the number one task in online marketing.

Amazon aside, When you open your store or list auctions at any alternative venue to eBay, you have to think about your presence there the same way as webmasters think about an independent website. At eBay the fees paid by sellers are largely spent funding a huge, multi-million dollar traffic generation machine and the alternative venues cannot hope to match it. Let's be honest, they are rarely funded to do so by sellers who want to avoid the eBay type fees! So, to succeed as a webmaster or as an alternative venue seller it is best to understand and accept that your marketing is going to mean some serious, regular effort on your part if you want to succeed in the competitive business of selling.

The sheer scale of the internet and the enormous number of people involved in various forms of ecommerce means that sellers must continually strive to stand out, rise above their competitors and keep on raising the bar even higher. The good news is there are some very effective, proven and cost free ways to drive pinpoint targeted traffic to alternative venue sales which can help anyone who has the determination to get ahead in online selling do just that.

First let's understand that you will be building your traffic generation from a standing start. You aren't benefiting from eBay's marketing machine anymore but with some patience and understandng of how natural search works and how the likes of Google and Yahoo will guide internet users to your pages, there is no need to accept slow sales for too long.

The initial step to begin driving targeted traffic to your listings is to make the most of how search engines work – they are undoubtedly the very best source of free targeted traffic, so you should absolutely take full advantage of what they can offer. It is crucial to start working toward a decent search engine ranking for your storefront or listings page for it to become increasingly visible to potential customers when they use the search engines. The process isn't instant. It takes time to build momentum but patience will be rewarded if you start to follow these tried, tested and proven methods.

First off you will need to ensure your pages get indexed by the major search engines as quickly as possible. Do not rely on the venue's own SEO efforts to accomplish this for you as that could take months or may never happen at all. To illustrate this point click HERE to see how many eBid.net pages are currently indexed by Google. Now view this eBid.net page to see how many current listings there are on the eBid site. When you consider that each listing on eBid is capable of being individually indexed by Google there is a huge number missing completely. Unfortunately it is actually worse than it first appears because a lot of the pages that are included by Google are not even sales listings or storefronts at all, rather they are long standing help pages and forum discussions. This reality isn't because eBid are unusually bad with their SEO or Google have a dislike for the site, in fact it is entirely normal. It is simply because the search engines are always playing catch up with websites that have fast changing content and wont always index pages that apparently have little interest to wider internet users. So to really start attracting heavy traffic from the likes of Google you need to give the search engines a lot of help to index your offerings quickly and regularly. Try the same test with all the various eBay alternatives to prove my point and confirm eBid is not at all unusual.

Many people still believe you have to submit URLs directly to the search engines in order to get them crawled and added to their index. This is not true. Yes you can submit addresses directly but you can then usually afford take a world cruise for a few months only to return and find your pages still aren't included yet. The major search engines actually index the web by discovering new pages themselves and they do this by crawling around the web following the "signposts" they find. These signposts are actually links placed on web pages that point to other web pages. Most experienced webmasters know that they will get new sites indexed within a few days once they make sure links pointing to them are placed on various existing web pages on other websites because these will direct the search engines to their new site. Alternative venue sellers can and should do exactly the same with their storefront or sales page URLs.

The importance of external links - links pointing to your storefornt or sales page from other websites - doesn't stop once your venue presence has been indexed. The links then become a large influence on the ranking the search engines apply to your pages when it comes to displaying them to searchers. Think of each link as a vote where the more votes you have means the higher you rank in search results. But now also realise that some links will have more voting power than others because they are placed in more relevant locations to your own web pages content. For example, if you are selling antiques, then a link placed on an antiques forum is more likely to have a stronger vote than a link in a car mechanics forum. So, once indexed, to build up search engine ranking and visibility sellers must never stop looking for opportunities to get their links placed on relevant external websites whenever possible. To ignore this advice can actually undo the very indexing process. Remember I said that Google don't automatically index all website pages if there's apparently not much interest in them on the wider internet? Guess how they judge that lack of interest? No links = no votes = no interest = little or no search engine visibility.

I hope by now I have driven home the importance of getting your links placed around the internet. It is not simply about attracting visitors who will click on those links, it's far more important than that. It's your reputation, your status, your standing on the internet that is at stake. Each relevant link you manage to get found by the search engines can push your sales pages a few inches closer to the prime, main street position from the bleak, mountain village backstreet where all new websites and web pages are created.

So, by now, I hope you are already asking how and where you can get your links placed around the internet. Here are a few suggestions:

1. Forums. Most venue websites have their own forums but, because any links placed there are usually internal links (the same domain as your own sales links), they have little value other than helping to index your pages and direct other site users to your listings. Valuable but not crucial. Other internet forums can be a valuable and entirely legitimate place to have your links displayed. Most forums allow members to place their links in their posting signature meaning each time you offer an opinion or bit of news, your link is displayed for people to see and search engines to find. Remember that relevancy is important so searching out forums that specialise in the kind of things you sell is a very good idea. In addition to that you have several auction forums around the web that are usually free to join and happy to see your links in return for a few opinions and friendly chat - not least our own.

2. Blogs. It became so popular to find all the blogs you could and post comments in order to get links published that most blogging software now automatically tells search engines to ignore links in comments using the "nofollow" instruction to avoid what is now termed as blogspam. Yet blogs are still an amazing resource to get links published that lead to your auction or store pages. The only difference is you will need to start a blog and make actual posts instead of simply commenting on other peoples blogs. The really good news is anyone can start a full featured blog with minimal skills by using the free blogging networks like Blogger or Wordpress. Just remember that when you create your blog you then face exactly the same challenge of getting the blog indexed and more visible at the search engines.

3. Article writing. In my experience this has consistently been the best way to create traffic generating links. In a way this is similar to blogging. You write a few hundred words about a subject you choose and submit it to a website that will publish it. Don't be tempted to submit exactly the same article to numerous websites as Google has an uncanny ability to spot duplicate content and penalize it as articlespam which makes all your effort become virtually worthless. One good, keyword rich article published on just one website can be much more effective than most people ever realise.

The reason why article placement is especially good as a way to generate links to promote your sales pages is pretty obvious. Remember I talked about the importance of relevance for the pages your links are found on? Well it's not rocket science to realise you should try to write about subjects associated with the products you sell. Not only does this create a relevant web page to place your links on, it also lends itself perfectly to building links in to the article text naturally when you want to illustrate examples etc.

I cannot stress enough how powerful article writing can be to your traffic generation and, to help Pheebay visitors publish their articles here, we now have a dedicated article submission page to make the process a piece of cake!

4. Social Networking. The various social networking sites are an easy place to get links published however they tend to be weak traffic generators. professional Internet marketers mostly agree now that traffic quality is somewhat thin from these sites and relevancy is also weak in the eyes of search engines meaning they have little longer term value other than perhaps signposting a few friends to your sales and helping get indexed in the first place.

5. Squidoo. Sites like squidoo can offer a lot more scope than a simple blog. By publishing a "lens" on squidoo you can determine the subject matter (relevance) and build solid, informative content at a pace that works for you. A good Squidoo lens can be a darn good traffic magnet in its own right (remember it too needs to get indexed and build backlinks) and it is easy to add some impressive bells and whistles to your writing such as RSS feed displays of your actual sales listings (assuming your chosen venue is RSS enabled). To explore the potential of Squidoo further I have no hesitation in suggesting you follow 0ctavias 0fferings posts in our forums. She has recently been granted the status of "Giant Squid" and "Squid Angel" by Squidoo because of the amount of lenses and quality of lenses she has created. I can think of no better person to help new Squidoo users reap the full benefits a lens can bring and she is very willing to help our forum visitors.

6. Other websites. Time and space makes it impossible to cover every type of website that offers the potential to publish links for you. Obvious options include online directories which can often help with indexing although many offer weak ongoing ranking benefits. Topsite websites are another option where you can sometimes place URLs in to a league table where people vote for what they think are the best sites. Posting videos on YouTube can also help publicise links, linked images can sometimes be displayed in galleries etc. etc. I'm sure there are numerous other ideas I've not even thought of yet too.

But to sum up the subject of placing your links I would like to emphasise that the need to keep working on your backlinks is crucial. Try to make it a routine that you visit a few forums once a day and make a post, write an article once a week, set up a blog and do a post regularly. By getting in to a routine, you will eventually see the advice I am giving here is not based on guesswork.

If I had to choose the most effective link publishing method based on ease and proven results it would be article writing. The internet and search engines love fresh, original content and, not only can you guarantee subject relevance, but you don't have to establish another website and take on the additional promotional challanges that come with it (e.g. your own blog or Squidoo lens).

My final suggestion to help sellers maximise their online marketing is to consider sharing the workload. If you are concerned that you can't put a Squidoo lens or blog together and take on the additional promotional work that entails, then why not share a blog or lens with some friends or colleagues who also trade on your chosen venue? If you share the workload you can each have another place to post your content and build your internet presence.

Nothing I've written about here is particularly new or unique. The same advice is littered all over the internet but usually written aimed at newbie webmasters. Remember to think of your sales venue storefront as if it were a standalone website. once you grasp that similarity and the need to get out on the net and promote that "website" you will find the sales can be made, it just takes a few weeks of consistent effort.

You've stopped paying the eBay fees which means you've no longer got 100,000 affiliates driving traffic to your listings. You now have no dedicated PR machine working round the clock marketing your venue. You no longer have a multi-million dollar contextual advertising campaign working for you. Instead you have much lower fees to pay, more independence and far greater control of your own destiny. It's up to you to make that cheaper and less regulated environment generate profits for you - and nobody else.