Let me first offer a couple of quotations I admire to help make the point of this article.

Philip Dusenberry once quipped; "I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes...". A joke maybe but the point is that advertising = sales = profit. No advertising = less sales = less profit.

Anyone looking to sell online needs to invest at least two out of the following three things in their advertising: time, effort, money. In fact most online sellers already invest a large degree of time and effort in creating their listings on the various auction venues. If they list at eBay the high level of fees they pay means they are also investing good money in advertising already by paying for the higher buyer traffic volumes that eBay attract courtesy of their own financial investment in contextual advertising, affiliate marketing, TV spots etc. As a result of this many eBay sellers - the vast majority in fact - organise little advertising of their own, if any at all.

But sellers wanting to shave the venue costs by selling elsewhere must understand that some of those savings need to be reinvested in advertising if they want to see a level of sales anywhere near those that will be achieved at eBay. This leads me to the second unattributed quotation to think about; "The man who stops advertising to save money is like the man who stops the clock to save time".

The rest of this article is being written on the assumption that you either want to make more of your eBay business by attracting more competition among buyers and increase the percentage of listings that succeed or, you want to save cost by using a cheaper venue but are willing to invest your time and effort rather than money in advertising.

You're trading online so what is the first qualification we can make about your likely buyer? They too need to be online. So is a prominent Google entry better than a huge advert on the back of a bus staring right in the car drivers face behind? It may seem obvious but let's examine the differences between the two:

The Google listing will likely be seen by many people worldwide whereas the bus is in one area, on the road for part of the day and the advert can only be seen from one angle.

The Google listing has zero financial cost attached to it - we are not talking about Adwords. The advert on the back of a bus will cost you several sales before you reach break even.

The Google advert will be seen by people sitting on a computer and online. They are ready and able to respond to your advert. The driver behind the bus is supposed to have both hands on the steering wheel.

If you're selling online you need to appeal to buyers ONLINE. This doesn't mean ignoring offline opportunities (leaflets included with purchases to existing buyers for instance) but it should indicate where the majority of your investment in promotional advertising is best targeted.

So my aim in this article is to get online sellers at eBay or any alternative venue to think about the search engines and how they can drive buyers to your listings.

Your auction listing is a web page. Your "about me" profile is a web page. Your auction venue storefront is a web page. Your "see other listings from this seller" page is a web page. Search engines index and display web page links to people looking for things. The logic should be obvious.

If you are selling things related to a particular subject the search engines will match enquiries to the relevant, topical key words in your web pages. At this point the search engine decides how prominently to display your link to that searcher. If they decide to put your web page link in the top ten returns for that search there is a very good chance you will get a vistor to your sales listing. If they decide to list your web page link in position 100+ you have almost no chance of getting a visitor.

By now many readers will guess that I'm talking about the magical skill of "Search Engine Optimization" or SEO for short, a subject entire websites and businesses are now built around and individuals have even gained "guru" status simply by talking about it sensibly. But the truth is your web pages at eBay, eBid, Tazbar or Oztion need some individual SEO effort too if they are going to hit the best spots in Google & Co's search returns.

At this point a lot of articles would go all technical and educational. I'm not going to do that save to focus on a couple of golden rules of SEO. The first of these rules is "Content is King".

In short, the placement of your web page link in search returns will be determined by the relevance the search engine sees in your web page to the subject being searched for. The more relevance the search engine sees the more likely you will feature highly. So I suggest you ignore all the fancy talk about "page rank" and META tags and concentrate on writing good quality content (item descriptions) ensuring the important words people are likely to use to find your item are included.

Writing for the internet demands skills many traditional authors haven't a clue about. It's a unique talent that effectively means you need to start with a collection of important words and then build a natural flow of descriptive language around those words. Ideally the very important words will be used as soon as possible, more often, used in titles, headings and link descriptions. It is a skill needed but it is not an impossible talent to become competent at. If you can use a venue website and type a product description you should be capable of writing to impress the search engines.

Dismiss any thoughts you have that there are tricks and favours needed to get your web pages to the top of Google. People claiming this are talking bunk - particularly if they are expecting you to pay. If you write relevant, keyword rich, quality content free of spelling errors and too much "filling", there's no reason why your web pages can't make #1 on Google for your important search terms.

But the positioning of your web page has one other very important factor taken in to account by most search engines and that is "popularity" - the second "golden rule" for this article. This is where things might become a little more awkward for the online seller but let's see.

Because sellers are listing on a venue website, the vast majority of "popularity" is credited to the venue rather than the seller's web pages. You need to get the message thru to Google & Co that "my own web pages at this site are popular in their own right". How do you do that? It's quite obvious really. You need people to acknowledge your presence and communicate with you and about you. This is how things and people become popular in reality and it is the same online. Celebrities crave column inches in newspapers and air time on TV. They will often go to extrordinary lengths and suffer humiliation in the name of entertainment in the quest for popularity. Well, the good news is, nobody need eat grubs in the jungle or get slimed in front of an audience to make their web page popular.

Popularity on the Internet is largely down to the amount of mentions you get in relevant circles. When people on Pheebay - an auction forum - are talking about you and linking to your pages then Google will make a note of that and add some weight to your popularity score for auction relevance. If a forum about undersea oil exploration mentions your web pages for porcelain doll auctions the search engine may think it's a bit "artificial" and overlook it suspecting a paid for inclusion. So the aim is to get mentioned and linked in relevant places. The strongest possible mention you can get is someone on a relevant website saying; "go and look at this persons web page" - in other words a clickable link to your web page.

So, as the title of this article says, I am telling auction venue sellers to get out more. Get out on the wider internet. Your product listings and sales may be conducted on eBid, for example, but your marketing presence and popularity needs to be built up AWAY from eBid and point back to YOUR pages on eBid.

If you choose to ignore everything else ever talked about SEO and simply concentrate on writing good quality descriptions for your listing pages and investing time and effort getting out around the web, at relevant websites to increase your popularity, then Google & Co will reward your investment more than you can probably imagine.

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