Our eBay store
My seller's profile at eBay (with all customer feedback)
Our online store at Yahoo
Our eBay
store
My seller's
profile at eBay (with all customer feedback)
The following article was written for GoTo Auctions (formerly known as AuctionRover). The rights have reverted to the author.
The Web is open to everyone -- not just to browse and shop, but also to publish and sell. You are already familiar with Web publishing and selling from your experience with auction sites -- posting the descriptions of your items. If you are a successful seller, you probably craft the descriptions of your items very carefully, paying special attention to the title, so people who want that kind of item will be likely to find you.
You also probably have photos of your merchandise posted on the Web -- perhaps here at AuctionRover or perhaps at one of the general Web-hosting sites like Xoom, Tripod, and Geocities (now part of Yahoo). In that case, you are familiar with the rudiments of uploading files and perhaps know how to create simple Web pages.
Step back for a moment and consider what more you might want to do with personal Web space to boost your auction sales.
As a buyer/collector/reseller, you might want to post a list of the items you are interested in buying -- rare items that aren't often found even at a huge Web site like eBay.
Yes, you can post a "wanted" list at eBay. But that discussion board is not easy to find and not often used. (Click on Community; then under Chat, click on More Message Boards, and you'll see the Wanted Board under Chat Rooms.) And the only folks who would ever see that would be very dedicated and persistent people who are eBay members, when you really would like to be visible to the world.
You also might want to post Web pages in neutral territory (not at a specific auction site), pages introduce the whole range of your auction-selling activities, with links to your feedback pages at various auction sites as well as current auctions.
Yes, of course, you could set up an About Me personal page at eBay, so buyers could learn more about you, so you could build trust and hence get more and higher bids. That's not difficult -- just click on My eBay and at the bottom of that page click on Create your own eBay home page using About Me. Then fill out the forms. You don't need to know anything about creating Web pages. All the design details get taken care of automatically. And you can easily add your feedback here to show off the good things that people have said about your auction activities. If you'd like to see samples, at the bottom of the page with the sign-up form, click on "Visit another member's page," then enter the username of a member who you know has a page like Tracy Marks (torreyphilemon) who we highlighted last week.
You can also create a personal page at Amazon.com, that includes a listing of your current auctions (click on Community, then Member Pages to start).
But in both those cases you are very limited in the amount of space you can use and in the format you can use. The pages are automatically generated using fixed templates. And how would anybody who wasn't already at eBay or Amazon ever find you? In fact, the About Me pages at eBay have very complex addresses (URLs) that include a question mark (?). That question mark indicates that the information is being generated on request from a database, and is one of the signals that turn off the crawlers from public search engines. In other words, somebody looking for the kind of merchandise you have for sale would never be able to find your About Me page at eBay from a search engine like AltaVista or Hotbot.
What about the photos you've posted at Xoom or Tripod or Geocities or in the free space your ISP gives you? Those are sitting in public space, so can't they be found by search engines?
Today's search engines index text, not images. (AltaVista' new image searching capability is powerful and interesting, but is not yet to the point where it's of importance in publicizing auctions.) To be found, you are going to need more than photos. You are going to want to post text -- lots of text related to everything you want people to know about you and your auction-selling business.
So do you need to become a Web-design guru? No way. Your main purpose will be to make good, clear information generally available -- to everyone, not just people who regularly use auction sites. And you want that information to be found by people using search engines. The design of such pages should not matter -- just the text content.
Remember, the Web is not a magazine. A home page is not a magazine cover. People pick up magazines at news stands based on what they see on the cover. But on the Web, you only see a page after you've already arrived there, and it's the words, not the graphics and fancy design elements that lead people there. If you can create a document in Word, you can create an effective Web page.
In upcoming articles, we'll take you step-by-step through the process of creating simple Web pages and then we'll cover what you can and should do to make those pages easily findable through search engines.
Other auction articles by Richard Seltzer
Can we help you build an Internet business? Richard Seltzer is an independent Internet writer/speaker/consultant. Click here for details. or send email to seltzer@samizdat.com
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