Online Selling Tips: Newsletters are an Important Selling Tool

Newsletters are a great tool for you to get the word out to your store viewers. This is a way that you can broadcast any new items or discounts that you have available.

When making a newsletter make sure that it is not too lengthy (viewers want something easy to scan through) and the main point is at the top of the newsletter.

If you have an eBay store, you have an option to create newsletters and track them. If you don’t have a store, make yourself a blog and talk about your items that you have available with links to their eBay pages. Your followers can simply follow your blog or subscribe to it and they will get an email of all of your new post. Although, this is not a newsletter, it will act as one to your viewers.

How do you get people to subscribe to your newsletter? You have to get out and promote your stores link. Go to forums, yahoo groups, blogs, and anywhere else you can think of that will allow you to talk briefly about your store and post a link. DO NOT spam anywhere or anyone about your store, this is a way to drive interest away from your store and not to your store. Also, get involved in eBay message boards and people may check out your store if they like a comment that you make and subscribe to your newsletter.

Think of your newsletter as your ad in a newspaper. Now, go out and start sending newsletters to drive attention to your store or items that you have for sale.

Good Luck!

Online Selling Tip: Do You Use Twitter to Promote Your Site or Product?

Twitter is becoming more of a promotional tool everyday. You can attract a large audience in a matter of seconds. The key to doing so is to have the proper following (audience). The first step to getting the right following is to create a profile on Twitter that will attract people that would be interested in your tweets (updates) by going under “settings“. Start by giving yourself a profile picture. You can either use a personal picture or a graphic that goes with your theme. Once you complete this, choose your profile background by clicking on the “design” tab in your profile.

On the “account” tab you can enter your homepage address, place your website, blog, or eBay store address here. Next you will see a space to give yourself a “one line bio”, Doing this you need to give a brief summary of what you are promoting. This will act as key words in the search function when people are searching for people to follow. After you have completed this step go to find people and search for people that would be interested in what you will be tweeting by choosing the “Find People” tab at the top of the page and then choosing “Search on Twitter” tab. There you will want to enter keywords to find people that match your search. For instance, If you are going to be promoting your blog that you are writing about parenting, you will want to search for words like mom, parenting, children, or kids. If you are selling collectables like beanie babies you will want to use the keyword beanie babies to find people who like them.

Ok now that you have set up your profile and started following others, start tweeting your updates on your sites and tweeting with others on their updates. On top of having a great profile and following others you will need to create a relationship with others on Twitter so that they will follow your updates that you post. No one will follow a one sided tweeter. One way to boost your following is to post a Twitter badge on your blog or personal website (eBay won’t allow this badge on about me page or store page). Your site followers will most likely choose to follow you for updates. You can also put a widget on your site that shows your tweet updates. You can find these badges and widgets by checking out the “Apps” option at the bottom of the page on Twitter or you can create a custom badge on one of the sites below.

http://www.twittown.com/twitter-badges

http://mashable.com/2009/03/30/twitter-badges

http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/twitter

Remember, with anything on the internet, it takes time to establish yourself on Twitter, so don’t get discouraged and walk away, continue tweeting and one day you will start getting traffic and sales because of the relationships that you build with others on Twitter.

Online Selling Tip: Now I have listed my Item, What now?

The real work to an online auction starts after you have successfully listed your item for sell. To get traffic to your listing can be time consuming but well worth it. Here are some tips on ways to get people looking at your listing.

1. Put your link in your signature in emails and forums (if rules allow signatures).

2. Advertise in free online bulletin boards.

3. Post your link on Twitter.

4. Post the listing info on your wall on Facebook.

5. If you have an eBay store you can sign up for Big Crumbs and link your store to your Big Crumbs account and when someone does a search for an item that you are selling, it will appear in the search results.

6. Post about it on your blog or website.

These are ways that I promote my listings. If you think of any other ways please leave a comment.

Online Selling Tip: Writing Your Item Listing on eBay

Let me first say that I am not an expert at online selling but have learned a few tricks along the way. This post is inspired to a conversation with a friend this morning about listing an item on eBay. She is posting her first listing today and asked me what she should say in her description for her item. She said that she had looked around at listings on eBay and saw that there were some good descriptive listings and some listings that had little to no info on the item. So that got me to thinking...what makes a great listing description?


Make use of all of the preset listing descriptions provided by eBay. What I mean by this is, depending on the product you are listing, when you list an item you will see boxes in your item listing screen that has options for you to choose size of product, style of product, condition of product, and more. The options that you choose in these presets will appear at the top of your listing description in a box and it will also help get you listed in a search that a potential customer will do for an item. Here is an example of what I am talking about. I used a book listing since it has a lot of details listed about the item.

A note about listing books is that when you first go under selling and choose books as the catagory it will ask for the ISBN # on the book and that will automatically list the details.

Start your listing description with the name of the product and quanity if you are selling a "LOT" of a specific item.This will make your listing start off clear on what you are offering and there won't be room for confusion from the buyer. In this description you will want to include quanity, accurate name of product, and size. If it is too long of a description, you can use the subtitle area to lost the size of the product.

When entering info in the description box be clear and well understood. Like I said before I am not an expert by no means but I have learned that an unclear listing will get you no buyers. You should start off by listing the same thing that you listed in the one liner description and then give details about the product, tell what the product does and how it will benefit the buyer will have if they bought the item. Don't overdue the description by making unclear statements. If it is a used item be sure to talk about any scratches or damages that the product has. If you don't do this you will be misrepresenting the product and you will most likely will get a return.

Give a clear Shipping Policy. Don't forget to let the buyer know how you will ship the item, what your ETA of shipping the item will be, let them know if insurance is available, and if combined shipping is an option. Again, remember to be very clear about what details you are trying to convey.

Give a clear Return Policy. Let your buyers know what your return terms will be for damaged items, shipping problems, who will pay for shipping a return, and let them know that shipping insurance is nonrefundable.