Using  YouTube and Other Public Video Sites To Drive Traffic to Your eBay Listings

The eBay Seller's News, July 15, 2008, Volume 8, No. 12

Learn How To Sell More on eBay with The Newsletter for Professional
eBay Sellers by:  Skip McGrath

In This Issue:

Musings

1. Using  YouTube and Other Public Video Sites To Drive Traffic to Your eBay Listings
2. How Far Will The Amazonification of eBay Go?
3. Is The Price of Oil A Two-Edged Sword for eBay and Online Sellers?
4. Niche of The Month: Selling Out-of-Date Electronics on eBay
5. New eBay Wholesale Sources for July 2008

"Give me a stock clerk with a goal and I'll give you a man who will make history. Give me a man with no goals and  I'll give you a stock clerk." 
~ J. C. Penny

Musings

Three big announcements from eBay this week:

1. Sellers won a small victory this week when eBay made some changes to the new feedback policy. Lorrie Norrington announced that starting sometime in August (no date specified) eBay would go back to not counting Neutral Feedback against sellers when calculating your feedback score.
    
2. Lorrie also announced that sometime in the Fall eBay will introduce a system whereby sellers can work out resolutions with buyers and get negative feedback removed.
    
3. eBay has also said they will not enforce the current links policy. In a posting on the eBay forum this week, was the following question and an answer from eBay:
   
   Which links will be allowed under the new Links policy?
   
   We will not enforce the links policy in July as we originally announced on May 19, 2008. We will introduce a revised policy by mid-August, 2008 that will allow links to your ProStore and to non-transactional sites from your About Me page. To give sellers time to adjust, enforcement of the policy will begin four weeks after the revised policy is introduced.
   
   So we will have to wait until August to see exactly what happens. It is interesting that eBay will allow links to ProStores. ProStores has been struggling to grow and this move will give eBay powerful leverage to sell more of them.

A few weeks ago I released my latest eBook, How To Make Good Money Selling Used Books on eBay, Amazon and The Internet. As careful as I am I still missed a couple of typos that were caught by my alert readers. First of all thank you to the several of you who took the time to write and point them out. I have corrected the errors and uploaded a corrected version. Also, one of the stated bonuses was a promise of updated articles that will expand the information in the book and list additional tips, techniques and methods to source and sell books. I have just uploaded two new reports on the download page. So those of you who have purchased the book, please go back to the download page and you can download the latest version as well as the two new bonus reports. There was a big notice at the top of the page recommending you bookmark the page, so I hope all of you did that.

If you haven't purchased the book, and think you might be interested in this great little way to make some extra money -or even do this full time, just click here to read about How To Make Good Money Selling Used Books on eBay, Amazon and the Internet.

The other big news about PayPal is that they tried to roll out a PayPal-Only payment regulation on eBay Australia. Not only did buyers and sellers revolt, they filed lawsuits and complaints to government regulators to block what they saw as an anti-competitive issue and they won. PayPal has now backed away from the policy in Australia. As Australia is often a testing ground for what eBay does in the US, it will be interesting to see what they do here. I know PayPal has its detractors, but I am a huge fan of PayPal. Purchasing PayPal was one of the smartest things eBay ever did. I use PayPal for about 95% of my transactions on eBay and I use the PayPal shopping cart on all four of my websites. Yes - we have the occasional problem, but I also had lots of problems with merchant credit card accounts when I used them -and they were more expensive.

eBay must have too many people with too much time on their hands who sit around thinking up work for themselves. The latest screwball idea is changing the My eBay Page. This is another case of fixing something that isn't broken.

Yes the My eBay page could have used a few tweaks, but eBay chose instead to completely redesign it. Now sellers have to page through their listings and patiently wait for each page to load in order to see their inventory, whereas before you could see it all on one page. Now you can only view ten items at one time. And, that is just one of the drawbacks. Don't get me started -I could write a whole article just on this one topic.

This is a beta test, whereby some people have been selected who can opt out while others were selected who cannot opt out -I really feel sorry for that unlucky group. This is another example of what I have been talking about for some time. Besides just doing research, surveys and asking questions, eBay really needs to invite groups of sellers into the fold to help them work on this stuff. I really don't know what they have against that. It's not as if we are asking for stock options or a piece of the pie; we just want the platform to succeed so all of us, buyers, sellers, eBay management and employees, all succeed together.

Let’s get started with this month’s articles.

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1. Using  YouTube and Other Public Video Sites To Drive Traffic to Your eBay Listings

It's no secret that free video hosting sites like YouTube get millions of visitors a day. What most people don't realize is that search engines like Google and Yahoo look for videos and often advantage them in search results. Some savvy sellers have figured this out and are using video to actually drive traffic to their eBay listings. This doesn't work so well for auctions because auction-style listings only last for a few days and you would have to continually revise your videos. But it can work well for eBay store listings. It can also work to drive traffic to a website.

The technique is called video search optimization (VSO). VSO uses video and social media sites to distribute marketing messages that result in high search rankings and more business.

VSO can work faster than other forms of search engine optimization. Search engines visit video sites every few minutes and videos can appear in top spots on Google, MSN, and Yahoo within 24 hours. The other advantage of VSO is that it results in "organic" search engine rankings which searchers trust more than paid ads or sponsored listings.

Here is how to use VSO to work for your eBay store:

1. Register a new domain name (website address or URL). Simple to spell and easy to remember is best; then "redirect" it so it points to your eBay store address. Your domain name host can help you do this. I use GoDaddy.com, but you can get this service from any domain name host.
    
2. Make a simple video about your product, 1-3 minutes in length. Use an inexpensive video camera to demonstrate your product or service, or turn a power point presentation of your existing photos into a video. Be sure to include the domain name you just registered as a graphic in the video.
    
3. Put together your keyword/key-phrase list that relate to your product.
    
4. When you upload your video, include these keywords in your video title and description. Also, include your new URL starting with http, at the beginning of the video description.
    
5. Upload your video to the top free video hosting sites, blog sites, podcast directories, and social bookmarking sites. Hit as many as you can, aiming for no fewer than 30 sites. This step is time-consuming but worth it since the more sites your videos are posted to, the better your search results.
    
6. Give it 24 hours then sprint to your computer and search Google, MSN, and Yahoo with your keywords. If you've done your work well, you will see your videos on the first page directing people to your eBay store "via your new domain name". Congratulations.
    
7. To maintain top search engine rankings, use this same formula to post short new videos frequently, highlighting other aspects of your products or services. Some sellers post multiple videos each week.
    

Admittedly this is a lot of work, but there is a new service that can automate a lot of this for you. It is called Traffic Geyser. What Traffic Geyser does is save you time with steps 2, 3 and 4 and completely automates step 5. Traffic Geyser charges a monthly fee for their service, but I have set up a 30-day free trial for my readers. This is pretty neat because it only takes a couple of days to get results and you have 30 days to try it, you can make sure it works before spending any real money. Here is the link to get your free 30-day trial.

If you go beyond the 30 days, they have a couple of programs at different fee levels. At first they looked a little pricy to me, but I easily saved the money by reducing my pay per click advertising. I also figured out that all I have to do to make my money back is to sell two additional firepits or EZ Cubes per month.

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2. How Far Will The Amazonification of eBay Go?

I am not sure if "Amazonification" is a real word -probably not. And if it were, I am not even sure that I spelled it correctly, but I think it sums up some of my fears about where eBay is headed.

eBay hasn't stated as such, but it is clear that they have looked at the success of Amazon.com as a model for improving the buyer experience. The DSR system is an obvious takeoff on the Amazon star review system. And ditto for feedback. On Amazon, buyers can leave feedback for sellers, but not vice versa. Next, eBay has limited any ability of sellers to link from eBay to their websites or list their direct email address and phone numbers in their listings. And, eBay has announced it will soon introduce anonymous email so buyers cannot communicate directly outside of eBay.

The "Use PayPal Only" fiasco that eBay unsuccessfully tried to roll out in Australia was probably a forerunner of a system whereby PayPal will process all transactions for sellers much like Amazon does. Amazon charges sellers a per-item fee plus a percentage (15% on most sales). For this service they process the credit card transactions and take all the risk on them. Amazon also forces sellers to adhere to their satisfaction guarantee and they set the shipping cost -not the seller.

With eBay's emphasis on shipping issues, I even wonder if we might see eBay take that step. Could we one day soon see an eBay where we list products and eBay handles the entire transaction, payment and communications and all we do is ship the product? If you had to ask me today I would say that is a strong possibility.

Could sellers still make money with that model? Of course. Lots of sellers including myself make good money on Amazon. But I think eBay is missing a major point. One of the big appeals to both buyers and sellers on eBay is the fun factor. The other one is personalization. People really do like buying products from other people as opposed to doing business with a giant corporate entity. If eBay becomes like Amazon and other fixed-price eCommerce sites and loses the sense of "community," I suspect they could end up losing market share rather than gaining it.

I get the fact that eBay has some problems. There were (and still are) some really bad sellers that were not delivering a positive buying experience. The worst ones were committing out and out fraud. This was not only affecting eBay it was affecting sellers as fewer and fewer people were coming back to the site. As much as we dislike some of the things eBay is doing, the reasons for eBay having to take action were -and are, real.

So yes, eBay had to change, and yes, change is never fun. But as I pointed out in my blog over the July 4^th Holidays (What eBay Could Learn From Boeing Aircraft), I think the biggest mistake was thinking they could do this on their own without the involvement of the community. There are some pretty brilliant people and entrepreneurs among the over 700,000 regular sellers on eBay.

Had eBay reached out and asked for our help early in the process, the changes would have gone a lot more smoothly. Sellers would have more confidence in the new policies and even embraced them if they knew they had a hand in forming them. And maybe we could have come up with ways to improve the buyer experience without gutting the heart and soul out of one of the greatest companies ever.

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3. Is The Price of Oil A Two-Edged Sword for eBay and Online Sellers?

A few months ago I wrote an article about high gas prices helping out online sales. I wrote that buyers would increase their online purchases somewhat because it was cheaper to buy online than drive to the mall.

Yes some people live within a couple miles of a shopping mall, but most people don't. We have some great small stores in my little town, but if I want to go to Wal-Mart, Costco, Home Depot or a shopping mall I am looking at a 46 mile round trip. My car gets about 22 mpg, so that works out to about $7.12 worth of gas. Sure we still drive to the mall once in a while but we tend to plan our trips better and try and do a lot of shopping in one trip, rather than just go on a whim as we used to.

When I wrote that first article, gas was around $3.50 gallon. In our area today it is currently $4.41 and headed higher. The problem now is that gasoline is eating into customer's disposable income. So yes, people may be looking at shopping online to save money, but the other edge of the sword is that people also have less to spend.

People living in, or very near, cities where the jobs are aren't really affected that much. But about 55% of all Americans commute from the suburbs into work. The average car on the road today gets about 20 mpg. At $4.40 per gallon, someone who commutes 100 miles round trip to work is spending $22 per day to drive to work. When you add parking to that it is probably closer to $35 per day for people who commute to large cities. There are 245 working days a year, so that works out to a commuting cost of $8,575 per year.  Someone who makes $35,000 year takes home about $28,000 after taxes. Knock $8,575 off of that and it doesn't leave a lot of disposable income to spend on eBay purchases or anywhere for that matter.

How will these folks get to work and how much disposable income will they have when gas hits $8.00 a gallon? If you think that is far-fetched, that is exactly what we paid in Italy a few months ago when we were there on vacation. My daughter-in-law is in England visiting her family this month. She told us in an email that gas in now over £6.00 a gallon. That is $11.59 per gallon in dollars.

So until Congress does something, high gas prices will be with us awhile. In one respect they could help online sales as people seek to reduce driving, but the real danger is the high cost of gas using up disposable income that people can use for shopping. People will still shop on eBay and other online sites, but that could put a damper on growth for a while.

Of course the advantage of being an eBay or online seller is we don't have to commute to work. I suspect that high gas prices will get more people interested in operating home-based businesses.

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4. Niche of The Month: Selling Out-of-Date Electronics on eBay

Does anyone still use a cassette tape player? Or how about a Sony Walkman or a portable CD player? How about Boom Boxes? You bet they do.  There are about 360 million people in America, but Apple has only sold around 40 million iPods, that still leaves 320 million people who don't have one.  There are millions of people who still have VCR Tapes, CDs and even vinyl records and there is still a market for those products.  And the best news is that Sony, Pioneer and Panasonic overproduced a ton of these items and they are swamping the liquidation and surplus market -and companies in the Far East continue to produce new items.

There are two markets for these products -new and used.  You can source used electronics at garage and yard sales, flea markets and thrift shops.  You can source new unused products from some of the many liquidation companies.

Here is a shot of some closed auctions on eBay for Walkman cassette players:
 

As you can see, these don't go for very big money, but they are steady sellers. I have listed some liquidation dealers below in this month's wholesale sources. Another place to find them is at www.closeoutcentral.com and from the overseas wholesale sourcing sites, www.globalsources.com and www.alibaba.com.

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 5. New eBay Wholesale Sources for July 2008

Alibaba.com, the massive overseas supplier search engine has introduced a new feature called Super Deals.  This is a page where overseas suppliers list featured merchandise in somewhat smaller quantities for immediate shipment.  You can look at the Super Deal Offers Here.

The Back-To-Schools season is not far off.  Dollar Days has a large selection of wholesale back to school items. Many of these products are very low-cost items, so the best strategy is to make up combo packages and sell them in groups.

Empire Discount is a liquidation and surplus dealers of overstock toys.

SBI Closeouts is another large closeout and wholesale liquidation dealers.

Value  Setters Inc. is a large wholesale online buying group for independent retailers and online sellers. They carry a wide variety of merchandise of all types and categories.

Digital Scales are big sellers on eBay and the web. WeighMax is a manufacturer of several lines of scales. Contact them through the website for wholesale pricing information.

Selling hot or popular consumer electronic items is very competitive and can be difficult to source products cheaply enough to make money. But there is good money to be made in parts and accessories. MAT Electronics is a wholesale distributor of electronics parts, cables and accessories.

Although my latest book was about selling used books online, I did include a chapter about selling new books that are remainders and surplus books.  A good supplier for these books is the Book Depot. They have thousands of books in stock.  The key here is to find a niche or a genre that has a good following.

There is no questions that in clothing, the big brand names sell best, but there is still a very substantial market of bargain hunters who will buy good quality off-brand clothing.  A large suppliers of this type of merchandise is Red Tag Clothing. The nice thing about them is they operate in small quantities. You can often buy a dozen or less of an item so you don't have to risk large sums of money.

That's it for this month. We are only going to do one issue in July as we are planning a little vacation time later this month.

See you in early August,

Skip McGrath
The eBay Seller's News

P.S. If you missed the last issue, click here to read it.