Save Time on your Social Media Marketing

Everyone should know by now that I'm a HUGE advocate of SMM (Social Media Marketing) as a driving source of traffic and search engine rankings for your business. If you don't know what I'm talking about, read my blog article "Why your website needs a Blog" and our Learning Center Article "Social Media - What Is It and How Will it Drive Traffic to Your Business?"

Well, I've come across an awesome tool to organize and streamline your SMM efforts. It's called flock, and it's actually a web browser based on Mozilla Firefox. It aggregates your social websites into a side panel for easy access and updating. I'm currently using it to manage my blogs, Digg, Twitter, Youtube, and del.icio.us. It's lacking a few major ones for now, but I'm sure they'll come. Make sure you check it out at www.flock.com. Read More...

Experimenting with Twitter

Lately I've been playing with a relatively new social networking technology called Twitter. If you're unfamiliar with twitter, here's what it is:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

-Twitter.com

It wasn't long ago that we'd be throwing a football around the office mocking the uselessness of basically a glorified AOL away message...

What a fool I've been! It turns out that twitter is actually a great way to bring awareness to your business and an extremely rapid way to develop your professional network.

I'll be following up this post over the next few weeks discussing the benefits and my results in more depth.

Till then, check out my twitter at twitter.com/AdamMorris. Read More...

EBay Sellers: Check out SquidBids from Squidoo

I remember when MySpace pages were all the rage on the eBay Powerseller forum. Turns out that I was witnessing the beginnings of proof that social networking can drive a significant amount of traffic to your eBay business.

Well now web2.0 allstar Squidoo has Squidbids, "The place for trusted eBay sellers to strut their stuff, showcase their auctions and stores, and get more traffic." I think it'll be worth spending a few minutes creating a SquidBids profile. At the very least, another valuable incoming link to your business can only help your search engine rankings. Read More...

EBay Leverages Web2.0 with Best of EBay

Ebay's been trying to join the Web 2.0 world with a vengeance this past year. We've seen rollouts of blogs, wikis, neighborhoods, and eBay matchups.

Their latest venture, Best of eBay, a Digg.com site for eBay listings, is finally right on the mark! This new technology is finally perfectly in line with their public initiative to "bring the fun back" to core auction style.

Definitely worth checking out... Read More...

Why Your E-commerce Website Needs a Blog

Whether you're a beginner in running your own website to sell products, or a master of the SEO arts, you can boost your traffic and your sales using a blog. Trust me; this works. We actually use it all the time to give our sites a boost.

Why a blog?

1. Search engines believe that content is king. What better place for fresh content than a blog? Put a few links from your blog to your e-commerce website. Google will rank those links fairly highly since the content on the blog is fresh and related to your website.

2. Blogs can be a big part of your linking strategy. If you get links to your blog, it will build the reputation of your blog with Google, who will then in turn pass on some of that rank to your website.

3. E-commerce websites have very little extrinsic search engine value. Sure you can work on your on page elements (keyword density, url optimization, h1 tags, etc), but it's very hard to develop an external (linking) strategy. This actually makes it very easy to beat out your competition. Even if your internal SEO is not quite as good as a competitor, you can beat them fairly easily with content.

What should I blog about?

You can write about anything related to your website. If you sell rims, write about different finishes or fits. If you sell clothes, write about your niche's latest news. You can even take the easy way out and just find content written by others and summarize it on your blog (giving credit to the original author, of course).

How do I set up a blog?

For those of you who have never touched PHP before, I recommend Blogspot (now owned by google). If you can handle installing a script (it's very easy I promise) onto your own host, definitely go with Wordpress. I actually never would have set up my blog here had I known how much cooler wordpress is.

Ok, I have a blog. Now what?

I'm going to be posting an article in the next few minutes as a followup to this in our Learning Center titled "Social Bookmarking, a Blogger's best friend." We used to go through so much arduous work to promote a blog and build traffic to it. That is, until we joined the web 2.0 revolution and realized how easy it is to build a following through social bookmarking. Visit the Learning Center to learn more! Read More...

How to Use a YouTube Video in your EBay Auctions

YouTube is becoming a key to success in e-commerce marketing. First let's discuss how to get a youtube video in your eBay listings. After uploading a video to YouTube.com, they give you the code for their embedded player as shown below:

Simply copy and paste ALL of the text in that box into the html of your eBay listing.

Now WHY would you put a youtube video in your listings? There are three reasons that seem most prevalent:

1. Be able to demonstrate your product. You have much better control over your sales process when your potential customers hit your listings

2. Trust Factors. Putting a video on youtube automatically makes you seem like a more professional company. I've mentioned trust logos in previous posts, and I'll go into them in more detail soon. Long story short, just seeing the YouTube logo at the bottom of the video will add to buyer confidence.

3. Give buyers unique/privaledged insight into your company to make them loyal buyers.

Out of the three reasons I hear most often, I believe #2 is the most relevent. Expect to see a lot more from me about using YouTube to market your internet presence.

Final Word of Caution: If you are selling low dollar high competition products or products where your buyers rarely need to read the descrption to make their purchase decision, be weary of using video on your eBay listings. It might only serve to make the page load slower and give your buyers a longer chance to hit the back button instead of buying.

Read More...

Noteworthy Ebay Developments: Facebook apps, New Homepage, Google vs. eBay battle, ...

A lot of news is coming out around the EBay Live trade show. Here's a few things I took away of interest:

1. EBay is working on a new homepage. The prototype looks like a much more web2.0 experience, and I think they're on the right track with this one. Hopefully they'll be incorporating some of their new community focus into it. I'd really love to see eBay wiki more involved. You can check out their new prototype here: http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200706111436382.html

2. Since Facebook announced developer tools, eBay and some other third party software providers are already beginning to make apps for it. They are fairly simple listing displays and searches thus far. I'll cover them in more detail when I find one that's actually interesting. Expect this to be an area of rapid growth, though.

3. Paypal announced some interesting new tool to assess the riskiness of dealing with payments. Not too much info provided yet, but it might have a large impact on how payments are dealt with by sellers.

4. EBay and google are still battling it out (see my previous post). Rumor has it that EBay shut off their entire adwords campain today, boycotting google ads. Tests around 12 noon eastern time showed this to be the case. I've also heard that EBay has ended talks with Google on adding Google Checkout to EBay's E-commerce platform, ProStores. Unfortunately, I think this is a battle that EBay is going to lose. EBay depends way too much on Google for traffic. More importantly, it's EBay's sellers who ultimately feel the impact. Read More...