How to use eBay auctions to drive traffic to your site

by Peter Tarrida del Marmol

Copyright 2005 Peter Tarrida del Marmol Many eBay auction sellers rely only on eBay for generating 100% of their online income. Many of these people are running a successful auction business; however, they could do even better. They are missing a huge opportunity to turbo-boost their business profits and reduce their listing fees at the same time. If you feel you are one of these people, these are the steps you should follow to optimize your net auction business: 1.Create a website. If you can write an eBay ad, then you can design a website. It is not rocket science. You can download many free web templates from the internet and customize them easily with any HTML editor. If you type the words "free web templates" in Google, for example, you will get more than one million results! 2.Register a domain name and hire a web hosting service. These services start at about $40 per year, depending on the web space and special services you require. Once you have set up your hosting account, you must publish your site. 3.Register an account in Paypal in order to allow online payments from your website. Paypal's payment buttons and shopping cart options are easy to use and allow you to set up your site very quickly. 4.Use allowed strategies in your eBay auctions to drive traffic to your website. You don't have to pay listing fees and commissions for the sales that come from your website, so your objective should be to use eBay only to generate traffic and monetize your sales from your own website. But everybody knows that eBay does not allow placing outbound links in the auction ads, so how can you turn the massive eBay daily traffic into a continuous stream of visitors to your site? Here comes the interesting part... The first method is to put a link to your site on your "about me" page and then link your auction ad to it. This is allowed by eBay. Your auction visitors will be directed first to your "about me" page, and then driven to your website. A second way to gain traffic is advertising your business using a picture or logo on your auction ad that includes your website's URL. By doing this, you will be using eBay as a very cheap way of advertising online. All your auction visitors will see the name of your site and will be invited to type your URL in their web browser. To optimize the number of visitors to your auctions, make sure to use popular words in your auction's title. Another easy technique is to write your site's name without the "http://" or "www" in a paragraph of your eBay ad. This should be done carefully. The paragraph should not look like an ad for your site, but as a natural explanation. For example, let's say your website is www.auctionearnings.com. You could include a paragraph like this in your ad: "You can find more information regarding this product at AuctionEarnings.com, as well as free articles and free e-books that will contribute to increasing your knowledge on your subject of interest." Finally, and in my opinion, the most efficient way to gain massive traffic is to create an information product and give it away on eBay. Sell it for one penny and send an email to your customers with a link to your download page. Attention - very important! You MUST capture your customer's name and email address in order to build your own customer list, so that you can promote other products in the future using auto-responders. At this point, you will be taking control of your own business and you will not have to depend on eBay anymore to monetize your sales. About the author: Peter Tarrida del Mármol has succeeded on using eBay to generate traffic for his affilliate internet business. To learn more, click on: http://www.auctionearnings.com