eBay has become famous in recent years for blatantly showing the world that their business model is in flux by instituting changes of all sorts, fee hikes, fee reductions, policy changes and management changes that have affected thousands of lives around the country and perhaps even around the world both positively and negatively.

Would this flux have been so obvious, so painful and the subject of so much commentary if eBay was not the world’s largest marketplace? I think not. Most if not all companies go through these growing pains without the level of publicity, scrutiny and speculation that eBay has.

In any event, the fact that the sleeping giant woke up and began stretching has not only made the ground shake but has created the occasional tidal wave as well. Out of the ashes things rebuild. Not always as we like, but if we are to survive, we ride the waves.

It has been said many times that people close their eBay stores and stop selling there because of the fees, the lack of visibility, and slow sales.

I’m not an eBay cheerleader however I see beneath the surface that eBay is still and always will be a most valuable selling tool.

Fees ~

Your fees are the price you pay for doing business in eBay’s playground. eBay isn’t going anywhere. They are and will be the world’s largest marketplace.

No website, no matter how well designed, search engine optimized, or marketed will be able to generate the traffic flow that eBay has proven it can. Your fees are the price of doing business there. Try getting Adsense or any other paid advertising for what you pay in eBay fees and being able to generate sales from that.  Try establishing the same traffic volume. Albeit traffic everywhere is slow at this time because of the economy which we can only blame on corporate greed ~  those who approved mortgages to people who were not really qualified for them in the first place, just so they could turn a fast buck.

How much you spend on eBay fees is dependant on how well you work the system.

Lack of Visibility ~

Again, visibility on eBay is what it is. They want you to run auctions, and items at fixed price, because it works well for their business model. They have place eBay stores at the bottom of the food chain.

Are they going to do away with eBay stores? Not likely. As much as eBay doesn’t want to publicly admit it, stores are an integral part of their business plan because in order for your store to take off, you need to run auctions and listings at fixed price. No eBay stores, that would be less auctions and less fixed price listings that would run. So, stores aren’t going anywhere.

As with pretty much any business venue, it’s up to you to “make it happen” and you need to do that in a way that is good for your business model. And, this includes your eBay store.

Here’s a few things you can do to promote your eBay store that are proven and that work ~

1) Find a designer who not  only designs an original, niche targeted and attractive storefront or full blown eBay store complete with all the bells and whistles, but who also includes expert search engine optimization. This is critical to your success.

2) Start a blog that promotes your eBay store, your listings, is search engine optimized and is properly widgeted to maximize your marketing efforts.

3) Learn the in’s and out’s of using widgets, social bookmarking, and social networking to promote your blog, eBay store and your website to it’s maximum potential. These tools are free but you need to know how to use them effectively to gain maximum exposure.

4) Add your own e-commerce website to the mix. Be sure to settle on a website designer who will include expert design, customization that carries your branding across the board, who also offers niche market search engine optimization, and an RSS feed for your products.

The website is the ultimate sister site to your eBay store. You can sell the same items in both, or different items in each, dependent on your business model and what you want to achieve. If you choose to sell different items in each you can cross promote both stores in various ways.

If you choose to sell some of the same items in each you can give your website customers who might prefer eBay shopping (simply because that is what they are used to) the option of also getting that item in your eBay store.

Why on earth would you want to do this?

Embed the referral code in your item’s link to it’s listing in your eBay store and take advantage of the 75% referral credit on your final value fees. Does that save you money as well as add up for your benefit!!

Slow Sales ~

This is something that is not controlled ~ eBay cannot force anyone to buy your items anymore than Google, MSN, or Yahoo can force anyone to buy items from your website.

However, you may want to recheck the following for any improvement that may be needed ~

1) Presentation ~ is your description clear, detailed, keyword rich, understandable, reading well? Are your pictures clear, closeup, good quality and the best they can be?

2) Is your asking price reasonable? Too high or too low is a big consumer turn-off. Do some research on your competitors who sell “like” items and price your products realistically.

3) Is your search engine visibililty where you want it to be for your chosen keywords? Don’t mistake search engine visibility for page rank, they are two totally different animals. If your keywords are not pulling up high enough for you to do any good, you may need a website, blog or eBay store SEO tuneup.

Well I hope this sheds some light on why it’s a good idea to keep your eBay store open. Your eBay store is a valuable sales and marketing venue ~ make the most of it instead of closing it down in frustration. Learn to turn adverse conditions to positive conditions.

Sometime ago while doing research on a competitor of mine, I came across Merchant Circle and of course being curious, I decided to investigate.

As with many online directories they want you to purchase their paid advertising services. You are hit with these almost as soon as you sign up. Until you know the ropes, just focus on creating your profile and making that as complete and salesworthy as possible.

I’m not knocking the paid services. I’m the type of person that wants to see if the traffic I get from them warrants and justifies the expense first. And building your network up there to a quality network takes some time, as does anything else. So, paid can wait and I’ll focus on my listing and building my network.

What is Merchant Circle anyway?

Merchant Circle is actually a very neat combination of social networking, a 411 directory and the Yellow Pages all in one.

They give you a full and generous (compared to many online listing services that are free) space to list and describe your business in detail.

Your customers / clients can post reviews of your products and services, rate your business and post comments.

You can also, with care, transfer your website testimonials to your reviews area yourself. Not for the dishonest purpose of inflating your reviews and star rating, but if you cannot or choose not to try to contact all your past clients to try to get them to do this for you, this is still a mechanism and a good one at that to carefully transfer some of your more stellar testimonials over.

Merchant Circle also provides you with a customer contact system and a mechanism by which to offer coupons for discounts and sales at your discretion.

The coupons are a great way to offer an introductory deal to those who found you on Merchant Circle ~ similar to Yellow Pages coupons.

Merchant Circle has potential for being a valuable venue to promote your business with it’s strongest potential being at a local level, however, the more you participate in the forums I can see where a national level would be a definite potential as well. I myself have not yet fully tapped into this resource however as I do I will post that information here in subsequent articles.

Another nice thing is Merchant Circel provides you with a badge that links to your listing, as well as a few other widget like tools,  plus an appointment setter tool. There is also an area for you to blog which is an extremely valuable tool that I think is under-used by most people.

I’ve learned and benifitted from posting constant updates on Twitter and so will give the blog aspect of Merchant Circle a definite go.

The members forum is a great place to go for valuable insight, opinions and experiences.

All in all, Merchant Circle gets my vote as a  valuable business promotion venue for my business!

I run 13 BANS affililate stores. They are being developed IMHO kind of slowly, as I do that in between design jobs for clients, kind of like a spare time sort of thing.

However, I have one or two now maximized to where I am completely comfortable with them and just need to promote them more. I’m no longer scratching my head at the myriad of developmental possibilities.

This could *possibly* work for other affiliate marketing sites as well, although my experience is only with BANS affiliate stores because they are my niche and I can only handle so much personal website stuff in addition to my design jobs for clients. So, what I say here applies to BANS stores only, at least for now. They keep me busy enough!

1. Choose your categories carefully
2. Design your store with as much care as you would any website you own, don’t skimp
3. Add regular website pages such as About Us, Policies & Privacy, also some unique information pages relating to the type of products you “sell” in your store ~ quality content works every time.
4. Rename your categories from the default eBay categories to more keyword rich category names again that are in line with your product niche
5. Re-order your categories as needed to create a logical category order.
6. Add a means of contact ~ I use Crafty Syntax on ALL of my sites ~ I totally avoid email spam that way and people have a safe and assured way of contacting me with questions or concerns
7. Do some major SEO on each and every category ~ no rollling your eyeballs please. This is, granted, a MAJOR task, however, it will be worth it to you in the long run.
8. Blog about an item in your store with regularity and make sure your links in your blog post point to both your actual store plus point to the item itself (using your affiliate tracking URL) in case the reader becomes interested in “finding out more”.
9. Add a link or widget or embedded content of your blog to your BANS store.
10. Add the eBay affiliate RSS feed to your store with a subscribe link and/or icon. If you have more than one category in your store that the eBay affiliate RSS feed doesn’t cover in one swell foop, then add a category specific RSS feed to each category in the text above the product pics.

Don’t skimp or skip any of these steps! They are crucial to the success of your affiliate store.!

I’ll entertain questions here, if you have any. I do not answer questions personally, as I simply do not have time. However, I will answer selected questions in new posts that I make here on this subject!

Affiliate marketing can bring you decent success and decent income but as with anything else, you’ve got to treat it seriously as a business and you’ve got to spend a fair amount of time on it when you are in the development phase, like anything else, if you want it to succeed.

If you need someone to design, customize, maximize and search engine optimize your BANS store, contact us using our message button on the right hand menu!

We are finally releasing Vintage Collectible Postcards to the world ~ this is our newest niche market store!

This store was an absolute joy to build, creativity went full tilt here, and the effort to capture the old world vintage feel and look that comes with this wonderful topic.

What’s really nice is that our store is not just about vintage collectible postcards, although that is the main backbone behind the website ~ it’s also all about antique and vintage letters and correspondence, antique and vintage documents (some are unbelievably old!!), vintge ephemera, precious vintage greeting cards and of course, vintage collectible postcards from all over the world, including a plethora of US views!

It is an affiliate website, although from the looks of it you would never know. The trick is to design it as organically as possible, giving the customer an easy to navigate and easy to use interface, well optimized for the search engines, and add quality content on an ongoing basis. In other words, to treat it just as you would any other e-commerce enabled website.

Take a look at our screenshot: (you can click on it anytime and view the real thing!)

It is a fantastic source for collectors of old letters, documents, ephemera, postcards and greeting cards as well as a great tool for genealogy, history, family, local towns and military tracing of the past.

We hope you will have as much enjoyment shopping in our store as we did in creating it!

Public perception of affiliate marketing and blogging to promote one’s business differ from person to person and from “genre” to “genre”, however, on the whole, I still hear many bloggers say that blogs are meant to be informative and NOT for plugging one’s business, and that affiliate marketing websites generally still garner a negative persona.

I beg to differ. Now, this could just be my unique perspective on the issue just like the above is someone else’s unique perspective, so, while I respect their outlook on the topic, I have my own which deserves equal respect.

A blog can be many things to many people. Of course the informative type of blog post is generally well appreciated by all, while the business plug may not be, however, it’s a free world and a blog IS, after all, an excellent tool to use to “get the word out”. A blog can be informative, personal with one’s daily creative meanderings and thoughts, it can be about pets or kids, it can be about someone’s business, it can be about celebrities, gossip, entertainment, gardening, WHATEVER.

I think if anyone is going to label a business oriented blog as “pushy” perhaps they simply should not read that blog rather than bemoaning the sinking of blogging to a new and exasperating level of commercialism on a regular basis. Or petition your congressman or woman to enact legislation banning business blogs. That’s a thought………….

Moving on to affilliate marketing websites.

There’s a different sort of negativity that approaches them. Good God they’re trying to sell something for someone else! We should not allow them in our link exchanges, our Top 100 lists, heck, we should not allow them in our neighborhoods! Such silliness is not only narrowminded it’s all a little old. As in stale.

Now granted, there are some very unscrupulous not very business like people who just throw together a bunch of affiliate banners and call that a website. Seems those folks really go for the blinky look, the more blinking banners the better, very little quality content, and the entire web page or website screams “poorly done affiliate marketing” loud and clear.

However, there are, on the other paw, some very business minded folks out there who put together some seriously good, well designed information or shopping websites that are entirely affiliate marketing sites, and well done too, I might add.

These people take their time to color coordinate, design, organize, write quality content, optimize for the search engines, and make really nice, attractive, well done sites, after having put in alot of work. Why should these sites not be accepted just as equally to any other well designed website, be it informative or shopping?

In my eyes, when I shop on a site that is a well done affiliate site, even though it looks just like site A and site B that are not affiliates, and when I say looks just like I mean it’s esthetically pleasing and attractive and easy to navigate, I’m only too happy to purchase whatever it is that I need to and contribute to that person’s success. For me, it’s the quality of the shopping experience not whether it’s an affiliate site or not.

For these website owners, their affiliate marketing website or websites are their bread and butter. They treat their business like a business. They go the extra several miles of hard work to put together a good website, and they should be treated in all respects simply as just another good website owner.

That’s the beauty of the BANS software ~ at least for me. And I have 13 eBay Partner Network BANS stores! The BANS software lets you customize everything almost down to the nth degree so what you end up with is a really well designed affiliate niche market site that is search engine friendly, customer / shopper friendly, adding as much quality content as you like, integrate it with a blog, and really, the sky is your limit. Or your imagination.

Oh, and by the way, I DO blog them, in business blogs, promoting my business, I DO add them to my Top 100 list, have them listed on the home page of my mall, and to my links pages. In the end, you cannot rely upon anyone but yourself, so I made sure I have equipped myself with all the tools for maximum search engine visibility. They’ve all been up less than a month, and have all been picked up by Google, and have generated sales.

You simply can’t let those roadblocks get to you because you cannot please everyone. You simply have to do what you need to do for YOUR BUSINESS!

We’ve been in business here for 8 years now, both as a design and SEO company and selling online on the Internet. Throughout that time we have gone through many many changes, tried many different things out, some worked, some did not, some worked so-so. We’ve also gone down many different avenues on the streets of the Internet, experimenting with different methodologies and different concepts to see which ones would stand the test of time and be something we could honestly and ethically recommend to our clients and future clients.

We’ve proven that a hand coded HTML e-commerce site could bring in the bacon, provided it was properly SEO’d and properly designed, much less properly marketed. That was before the days of our now commonly used scripted shopping cart websites. We’ve proven that those can bring in the bacon too, regardless of PHP or ASP, again using the underlying principles of correct SEO, marketing, quality content, good pictures, etc.

Having been selling tangible goods alongside our services for the past 8 years, we’ve come to a point where the idea of inventorying the tangible goods has just become more of a burden than anything. Is it because we are getting older? Is it because we yearn for a different tilt to our online business? Less physical stuff, less clutter, more marketing which makes our creativity sharper? Who knows? I’d say conservatively probably “YES” to all.

At any rate, the goal has been accomplished. Out of our current 16 websites, only 1 sells our tangible goods and we are in the process of seriously reducing that inventory now on eBay by auctioning off lots at a time.

The rest are this design site / blog, and our wedding ~ event planning site and blog, plus 13 niche market websites that allow us the luxury of zero inventory however excellent commissions for every sale that results from the traffic we drive to any of the niche market websites.

We’ve just finished the designing of each store, and still have some intense SEO to do, as well as creating quality content, plus marketing them organically. We’ve found that organic SEO and organic marketing are the best possible approaches for us, for our goals, and for our overall approach to our affiliate niche marketing business for the best possible results.

It’s an especially gratifying moment for us, a turning point, if you will, as we take our lives, our company and our vision for the future to the next level. It’s also a profound moment where we see that all our hardwon knowledge, experimentation, and experience have paid off handsomely, even while these stores are still walking baby steps.

We’ll keep you posted on our progress!