Driving traffic to your website and eBay auctions with Ads
December 10, 2007
Now that I have a few websites up and running, it’s time to make them work for me. Usually, anyone that works for you is going to cost you money and that’s not what we want with these sites. Our goal is to make money, right?
When I first started selling on eBay my goal was to just get the items to sell for a decent price, cover my costs, learn a few things and maybe make some extra cash. I soon learned that when you have more than a few auctions running, it’s all about getting traffic and getting those items to sell. You definately don’t want to continually relist those items and incur listing fees if you don’t have to.
After digging into eBay I learned that there are several ways to make money without having to sell anything on eBay at all. Yes, I’m talking about affiliate links. While the eBay affiliate program is a great way to make some extra money, you have to get people to your site and your auctions in order to find your links. That can be a job all by itself.
Search Engine Optimization, often referred to as SEO, is a requirement for getting traffic to your site and your auctions. Gone are the days of just putting up a web site, flood it with phrases and keywords and hope your site is picked up by a search engine. It now takes some work. Your website has to have fresh content, relavent content, inbound links, outbound links and keywords that people are searching for. All of that takes some work and time. Don’t be fooled by all of those auctions on eBay that guarantee traffic to your site by buying their eBook. Yes, some work as I mentioned in previous posts, but there is nothing that you can do overnight…. well, almost.
Everyone has seen ads on websites that seem to be relavent to the site, most served up by Google. Those ads can both make you money, and cost you money. Google Adwords is Google’s program for advertising that will allow you to place ads on other websites and in the Google search pages. The beauty of Adwords is that you set a budget per day or per month and there should be no surprises when you get the bill. That’s were people tend to make their mistake, that simply key in some phrases, keywords and let the ad go. They believe that the traffic will start flowing in… boy are they mistaken.
Google Adsense is Google’s ad serving program that serves up the ads you created in adwords. The ads are displayed on sites that are relavent to your ad content. The site owner makes money for each ad this is displayed on their site AND clicked. Hopefully that click will drive traffic to your site.
Sorry to digress, but it’s important to understand how it all works together. So how to do you drive traffic to your auction with Ads? First, I’ll assume you have a website, have some fresh content on the site and keep it updated fairly often.
eBay used to allow people to use Adwords to place ads and have those ads directly link to their eBay store or Auction. eBay now frowns on that and in fact, will not longer give you affiliate credit if you do that. Instead, you need to direct users from another site(your own) to your eBay store.
Using Adwords can be a very good way to get traffic to your site and also send traffic to your eBay auction. Our main website, Webposter.com, uses eBays store tools to display our current auctions on the right side of our website. When users visit our site, they are immediately able to click one of our auctions and bid. Through the affiliate toolkit, we also are able to get a commission on any other items the user may bid on and win. We drive traffic to our site using Adwords ads and those promote the items we are selling on eBay.
Placing an Adwords Ad is pretty straight forward. Once you get your account setup, you create a new ad compaign. You’ll need a catchy title, some brief ad copy, and a place to direct individuals. You’ll also need keywords that are relavent to what you are selling. This is where most people make their mistakes. They simply add as many keywords as possible, set their default bid amount and let ‘er rip. HUGE MISTAKE.
Tomorrow I’ll take you through how to pick your keywords and get the traffic rolling to your site and hopefully the sales
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