eBay is the #1 auction site on the internet. eBay is the fifth most visited site on the Internet. Now, eBay jumped on the blog bandwagon. They have opened a brand new section of their site called eBay blogs. This area allows a registered eBay user to sign up for, and maintain an eBay blog.
Blogs are here to stay. So, if youre serious about growing your eBay business then you should definitely consider signing up for, and creating your very own eBay blog. eBay has done a great job of making the process simple and easy so that almost anyone can navigate through the steps and easily set up their own blog. You do not have to have any programming experience or special html knowledge. Just visit the following url: http://blogs.ebay.com/ and click on the large button that says Start Blogging.
What Are Blogs?
In the simplest of terms, a blog is basically an online journal. Blogs provide a place where you can easily write news and information about yourself and your auction sales on a daily basis. The word blog is a combination of web and log combined together to make the word blog. Blogs are a hot internet craze because they allow anyone to easily publish their own thoughts and content online - instantly.
Blogs are also wonderful for creating a ton of extra traffic and visitors to your auction listings. If you frequently post great content to your blog it will quickly be picked up by the search engines which will create more visitors to your blog and your auction listings for free.
What Should You Blog About?
In this day and age, its hard to imagine being an eBay seller and not immediately see the benefit of having a blog. It provides an easy way to interact with your customers. You can provide updated information about your auctions, the products you sell and general info about your business. Once you get used to blogging, you should consider making posts to your blog on a daily basis.
To get the most from your blog you want to think about writing content that is useful to your customers. eBay sellers should use their blog to provide more information about what they sell. For example, a seller who specializes in model cars might take some time to write a few articles or create posts about tips for building model cars. Another seller who sells wedding related goods might write blog posts about effective wedding planning on a shoestring budget. The point is this: you want to make the content useful to your customers so they will come back often. The more you write good quality content and inform your customers, the more they will want to purchase products from you. Another benefit is that you can quickly establish yourself as an authority on the subject.
If youre not sure what content to post in your blogs, simply do a google search for your subject and see what comes up. Use this information to create your product content. Caution: stay away from having a blog with very little useful content and a lot of sales ads for your auctions. Its good to occasionally write a blog post to promote a new item you have up for auction, but if that is all you do then youll get very few repeat visitors to your blog. eBay is a very community oriented platform and the more community friendly information you provide, the more potential you have for repeat customers to come back to your blog and hopefully visit your eBay auction listings.
How do you Promote Your Blog?
Like any other site on the internet, your blog will have its own unique url or website address. You will want to make sure that you keep this hand and start promoting your blog. There are a variety of ways that you can promote a blog. Some of these would include submitting your website to major search engines, and blog/website directories. You can easily further promote your blog by taking the content or articles that you write on the blog and submitting them to some of the major article directories. You can also create your own domain name and then forward it to your blog, so that you have a link that is easy for people to remember. In the past, I have used http://www.highfivedomains to secure my urls for blog promotion.
What about Blog Comments?
Another great way to promote your blog and build traffic to it is to comment on other peoples blog. As a general rule, you should only post to other related blogs and post meaningful comments. If you start leaving a bunch of random comments that have nothing to do with the blog, or the blog post in general, then people will see this as blog spam also known as splog content.
Does eBay have Blog Tags?
Another useful feature that eBay has included is blog tags. When you first set up your blog, there are some important fields to fill out including the selection of the tags that people will use to find your blog. These tags are basically keywords that people might use to search for your blog. If we continue with wedding example above, a seller of wedding related items would want to use common wedding keywords in their tags section. This could include tags like wedding, invitations, cake toppers, and wedding planning. Now, when another eBay user searches for wedding related blogs this blog will show up in the listing and again bring some free traffic to the blog.
In the not too distance future, eBay blogs will be commonplace. It is now that you have the opportunity to set yourself apart from your competition by setting up your blog and using your blog to get free traffic to your eBay listings! |
