A Simple, Cost-Free Way to Drive Traffic to Your eBay Listings

Here’s a great way to eliminate rivalry on eBay, an incredible way to make sure hundreds of people open your listings and buy from you without ever studying similar products listed at the site.

Imagine this: you’re selling Product A, as are hundreds of other people on eBay, and for those other sellers it’s a question of trying to make their listings stand out from the crowd when a potential buyer keys ‘Product A’ into eBay’s search box.  Just how do those sellers get buyers to choose their listings over all the others?

One way is to make their listings different, by offering lower prices and bonus gifts, for example, and that can work well for someone with hours to spare and who doesn’t mind fighting price wars for the lifetime of their products on eBay.

All you have to do, however, is make sure your listing is the only one people see when they search for ‘Product A’!  But in this case, it’s not people searching on eBay you want to capture, it’s millions more people using Google and other mainstream search engines.

The trick is to drive traffic to your listings from outside of eBay in a way that ensures only your listing appears to countless potential buyers.  The way to do that is to get your eBay product link, and only your link, to as many people as possible.

This is the sort of traffic you’re looking for:

i)  People searching for information about a specific subject but not necessarily looking for something to buy.  So they might want to know what causes acne, for example, and how to cure the condition using such as home remedies, camouflaging techniques, and more besides.  They have no particular product in mind right now.  But if they see a product along the way they’re very likely to buy it.

ii)  People on the lookout for a product to treat acne, either a specific product they know about already or something they see recommended by other sufferers, preferably people who’ve already found a cure … or know someone who has. 

Now let’s look at just one way to redirect all that traffic to your product listings, in this case for an imaginary product called ‘Acne Away’.

The way to do it is called ‘guest posting’ and simply means submitting content to someone else’s blog, preferably a high profile blog related to your product type.  The more people who visit the blog, the greater the number of people likely to read your post and the more visits will be made to your Acne Away listing. 

Guest posting is a little different to the usual way of posting on other people’s blogs where visitors typically write a short post to compliment whatever someone else has written.  Those short posts, usually at the end of the main feature can prove very profitable and drive traffic, but remember you’ll be sharing that traffic with sometimes hundreds of end-of-page blog posts. 

But most visitors encountering page end posts read the first ten or so and then move away from the blog, so you have to be quick to get your post noticed.

One way to do that is to make a list of blogs relating to your product and visit those sites daily, looking for new content and being one of the first to respond.

Now on to guest posting which demands a little more work and is potentially much more profitable.  It happens where your contribution is the main feature of the page, not just an add-on comment at the end.  Your feature might be read by thousands of daily visitors to your chosen blog.  Provide quality information and a high number of visitors are likely to click on an active link to your own website or product listing.

‘Guest’ is the operative word here, indicating you normally have to be invited to write the main blog post.  And because this form of marketing can attract massive traffic for the writer it’s also among the most difficult to achieve.  But well worth trying.  The process is typically to write to blog owners, telling them about yourself and giving ideas for a post you will write just for them.

You can increase your chance of being invited to guest blog by providing a killer review of your intended post.  I found a great article revealing fifty-two ways to do just that at:

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2011/09/03/52-types-of-blog-posts-that-are-proven-to-work/

Tip:  Look for blogs with hefty membership levels as well as ranking high in search returns and generating regular new visitors and members.  That way just one good guest post can keep you in traffic for years to come. 

Search for high profile blogs on your subject by keying ‘blog + subject’ into Google’s search box.  The biggest blogs should rank top of search returns and sometimes lead to lists of high profile blogs. 

Also key something like this into Google’s search box:

subject (e.g. acne) +  blogs + that + accept + guest + posts

My search for that term today returned three pages of workable listings.

Footnote: This idea for promoting an acne treatment works just as well for countless different product types.  Just change ‘acne’ to your own product type - such as steps for disabled dogs, pacifiers for crying babies, cream for ageing skin - and expect thousands of visitors and hundreds of buyers to your eBay listings.