Secret eBay Marketing Part 2
A lot of people sell info-products on eBay ... I've done it myself ... but often you have to make do with very low dollar amounts: 2 dollars here, 3 dollars there, and unless you're running perhaps 100 or 200 auctions, it really doesn't come to much.
Whereas I've noticed you run auctions selling your Silent Sales Machine on eBay at full price through Dutch auctions. Could you talk about your reasoning behind that ... how you structure the whole sales process on eBay and how it works for you?
Let me start here with the fact that this was all one big experiment for me originally. I played around with many ideas until I found the one that worked. But here's what I found ... and it may save people some time to hear someone that's had some success discussing the topic of selling eBooks on eBay.
There's a right and a wrong way to do it. There's also some ideas out there which I haven't come up with I'm sure. There's people doing it better than me possibly, but I know what doesn't work ... and I will never sell one and two dollar books on eBay one at a time. It's just too much of a hassle to deal with all the delivery, and helping people download ... and if you have even one email with one question from the person that's bought it you've just lost your dollar.
And some people use that as a lead generating system and there may be something to that, but even there you have to be careful not to violate eBay policies.
I don't like the one and two dollar eBooks, because it makes you look cheap. It makes it look like what you have to say isn't of much value. I would much rather play around in the upper end -- 17, 18, 19, 20 dollars for a book selling one title at a time instead of an entire package and I think the way to have success is to make that one title your own book ... because if it's something anyone else can sell and they can make up any price they want, the customer will find it for a penny somewhere else if you're selling it for $18!
It has to be your own book. One thing I did in my Silent Sales Machine book is I emphasized the fact that no one else can sell this book. You won't find it anywhere else on eBay. This is my book. I'm the author. And that's how I started having success.
I don't know that there's a magic formula to sell someone else's book ... resell rights on eBay ... I think that's a risky path because it's all over the place and people know to shop around. There are some things you can do to keep people from shopping and to make them find your product only ... but I think the best way if you want to have success is make it your own product. There are some other options, but sell your own product on eBay ... that's where I had a lot of success. I sold a lot of copies of that book on eBay.
About one and two dollar sales ... when I was playing around on eBay I obviously got some of those as well, and a lot of people chose to pay via PayPal ... and then with the 50 cents minimum and then a percentage PayPal takes, that's a lot of your profit gone already ... so if you're selling a product for two dollars and PayPal takes 50 cents you've already made 25% less.
Yes, the numbers get small real fast. It's not worth your time to sell the low price products on eBay. It just isn't. I want to make profit on any auction that I do ... if you're doing it just to generate leads you can generate leads with a $20 product just as easily as you can with a $2 product, but the leads you generate are people willing to spend $20, instead of the people willing to spend a dollar. Now what kind of customers do you want?
So how did you start marketing your ebook on eBay?
Well the way I started ... I had the good fortune of some common sense, and this is a great story, you'll like this:
The first ten copies of the book I sold on eBay ... the book wasn't even finished yet, I just created the ad and I put it on eBay thinking "If people start bidding I'll finish the book and sell it". And now I've sold thousands of copies of that exact book. So I'm very glad that the people did bid, otherwise I probably wouldn't have even got into this business.
But I sold ten copies of this book Silent Sales Machine in 4 days. People had bid on it, and one of the bidders as fortune would have it was Marlon Sanders. I didn't know who he was, had no idea who he was, and he had an eBay feedback rating of like 3. He'd been on eBay for a couple of weeks just toying around, came across my book, bid on it ... again I had no idea who the guy was.
But the deal I struck with everyone who bid: once the auction was over I sent them an email and said "I have a confession ... the book is only 80% done ... I'll have it done within a few days ... I'll send you a copy no charge, it's free to you ... all I ask is give me a review, let me know what you think".
So you see what I did there was I didn't even have a complete product to sell yet ... I was just testing the waters to see if anyone would be interested in the concepts.
Nobody was upset that there wasn't a product at the end because it's free, they hadn't lost any money, they were going to get a free product in the next couple of weeks ... and it worked beautifully and what I got was feedback from ten customers, one of which happened to be a guru of internet marketing who gave me some fantastic ideas and feedback.
And so I didn't even have a finished product when I started marketing it. And as I say I was testing the waters. And anyone can do the same thing.
I've actually found it quite incredible who you bump into on eBay. I started out just testing my own product cheaply on eBay and it was quite amazing who you make sales too.
Yes, you can build up a lot of relationships very quickly if you're the original author. That gives you so much more credibility to people even if you don't necessarily feel like you're an expert in your topic ... the fact that you wrote the book yourself makes you an expert to 90% of the people out there. It's a great way to establish yourself.
So you've got your reviews and testimonials ... do you use them in the sales letter now?
At SilentSalesMachine.com I've got a very large page of feedback and testimonials that people can read and any time I get positive feedback I'll post it there so other people can see. And I even copied some eBay comments ... there's eBay feedback comments on my testimonials page as well.
Why do you think people buy the same product at the same price from eBay rather than from your web site?
Good question. I don't mention the web site in the auction. That way I don't violate any eBay policies.
I make a very consistent effort to stay aware of eBay policies and not violate them, because that's the life blood of my business and I want to keep them happy. Now I've used eBay as a spring board ... as a great starting point ... but I don't use eBay as much as I used to any more.
It's a great starting point for someone wanting to get into this industry, but once you start seeing a lot of sales there's no need to pay the eBay fees, you can use your own web site. And that's kind of where I've drifted with that product.
How is your eBay sales letter for the same product different to your web site sales letter? Have you changed it a bit for eBay?
Yes -- on eBay it's very important that you have good feedback. And within your sales letter no matter what you're selling, emphasize your feedback. Stress it. Put a clickable link in there that shows people exactly what your past customers have had to say.
And the sales ratios on eBay are much better than the sales ratios on my web site as a result ... and I'll give you an example:
One in fourteen people that visit my eBay auction for that book, place a bid. That's a great sales ratio. Whereas on my web site about one in 27 visitors or one in 22 depending on where the traffic is coming from end up buying the book.
It's the same price, but what I'm doing on eBay is I'm gaining credibility that they can see, that they know is real solid proof. When people visit my web site they don't know if the testimonials are made up or legitimate, there's no way for them to know. When they visit an eBay auction they know those testimonials are legitimate. I can't make those up. That's one of the beautiful things about eBay is the credibility of the testimonials ... of the feedback system that they have.
If you don't mind sharing this -- what's your eBay ID for selling the Silent Sales Machine?
It's kind of ugly to spell out ... but it's basically www.321tix.com and you need two asterixes on either side of that. The reason you need the two asterix before and after the web address is because eBay doesn't allow web addresses as your ID, but if you put asterix before and behind, there's some free publicity for you.
Is there a space between any of that?
No space.
Visiting your eBay pages might be useful for people to see how you sell from eBay, as opposed to how you sell from your web site.
Yes. As I said though I'm starting to pull away from selling on eBay. My theory on that is if you're just starting out: sell on eBay. Sell as much as you can on eBay. But you need to transition to your own web site ... and the reason is I've got enough publicity now and enough people aware of who I am ... and one of the strange phenomenon's you'll start to see is people like hurting people on top. They like leaving negative feedback, or if they know you're getting a lot of publicity they like just doing something to throw you off.
And on eBay it's very easy for someone just to leave just one negative comment and all of a sudden I've lost credibility. So what I did was quit while I was ahead. I have about 400 feedback, no negatives, I went ahead and quit while I was ahead. I felt it would be too easy for a competitor to buy my product or somebody who is upset with me for some reason or another to buy and leave a negative feedback.
I've got way too many people looking at that eBay account ... I've got so many people visiting that link to see how I've done it the last thing I want is someone going there and messing up the whole thing and putting negative feedback in there ... so I quit while I was ahead. I could continue to sell ten or fifteen copies a week of my book from that account, but I'm focusing my marketing efforts on my web site now.
So you've done exactly what you've written ... you've leveraged the massive traffic on eBay to build up a newsletter list, and get traffic to your web site.
I've used it as a spring-board, that's exactly right. And I have other eBay accounts that I don't make public.
I buy and sell regularly on eBay with other accounts and that's one of the things that I emphasize: is have multiple eBay accounts ... you need to have more than one. I certainly do ... and I sell regularly and buy regularly.
But that one particular account ... it got so much attention going to it, I probably have two or three hundred people take a look at it any given day, I don't want any negative feedback on it.
How do you deliver your product when you sell via eBay ... do you manually send out the emails with a download link?
I use ClickBank, and most people are probably familiar with ClickBank. On my web site I use ClickBank. And also for my eBay auctions ... I fire out an email to everyone who won my auctions with a ClickBank link in it and most people took advantage of it.
And I actually had some affiliates then that were able to get paid by referring people to my auction. Which may sound a little odd, and it took a little work for me to figure all that out ... I had people able to refer traffic to my auctions using their affiliate link and then get paid for the sales I made.
Now not everyone took advantage of ClickBank ... some people used PayPal, and unfortunately I never did get PayPal set up to pay my affiliates but that is possible to do, I know people are doing it. You can sell using ClickBank and PayPal and make sure your affiliates are getting paid using both.
Would there be a different way of marketing a physical info-product on eBay as opposed to an eBook?
I can't say that I can think of any major differences really. I think more people will bid on a physical book, than they will on an eBook ... there's still this hesitation about ebooks.
Lack of perceived value maybe?
Exactly. They think "Well, all I'm getting is an email -- why do I want to pay for that?". But I sold a lot of them. I sold a lot of books at $17.95 a piece.
And you run those as Dutch auctions?
That's correct.
And how items do you have in those auctions - is it 50 a go?
I would usually put an odd number in there like 39. Some people will think "He only has 39 left, I better bid". I never used round numbers. If you go to the store they never use round numbers. So I never do either.
It's always $14.95 or $39 ... whatever. So I always use numbers that are off just a little bit. There's something about the psychology of numbers. I never use 50 or 100 or 1,000. I see some people put 1,000 copies and I go "You're not helping yourself there."
Put a smaller number that's just bigger than the number of people you think will bid. I found most of my auctions ended with 20 or 25 bidders most times. I didn't want people to start raising the price, so I put 39 to be well ahead of the number of bids I expected to get.
What ways can you suggest of getting traffic to an info-product auction?
This is a great tip ... it's just come into my head in the last few days again. I've remembered that I used to do this a lot and I never really shared it with other people.
On eBay there's a big advantage to understanding the rules. You can refer people from one auction to another auction of yours, even if it's under a different ID ... so long as you're the owner of both auctions.
For example ... let's say I have a pair of tickets for an NBA basketball game ... some big game. And they're really hot tickets, and I know those tickets are going to get a thousand lookers because these are great tickets.
There's going to be a thousand people looking at that auction. Well at the bottom of that auction I can say "Please visit my other auction where I sell a book about ... " whatever. Or you could say "Please visit my other auction where I have a sports card up for bid" ... you can send traffic over and you can use that as a strategy for your ebooks.
You can even use that as a strategy for ebooks that are all over eBay. Because what happens is you've got a captive audience. You've got someone who's gone right from one of your auctions straight over to another auction and they weren't searching eBay ... it's a two-step marketing program ... and we've all heard of two-step marketing before.
You've got them locked into your offer now, they're not shopping around for other people with that same offer, you've held their hand and taken them from point A to point B and they're not shopping around other people ... they're just looking at your product.
So my first book was that ticket guide we talked about before. I would sell tickets ... I would get a lot of hits and I would hand-hold that person over to that ticket guide. And even though there's other people selling ticket guides on eBay, my shopper didn't know that, nor did they care. They'd just seen my auction.
So where would you put the link in your auction? At the bottom or at the top?...
It doesn't really matter -- a predominant place. If it's your main profit source list it right at the top. If you're just wanting it to be like an add-on and it's not your emphasis in the auction, put it down at the bottom, but you'll get plenty of click-over traffic if you control those hits.
It's all about managing the hits. Very few people look at eBay that way. Most people think of eBay as trying to get maximum bids for one item at a time. I look at it as a swarm of traffic that I'm trying to control and get to the point that I want them to get to without violating eBay policies.
Do you ever add a link "Click here to see all my auctions" or do you tend to redirect people to one particular other auction?
I like to redirect them to one auction. I think it's much more effective. Especially for people that are selling many items at a time.
Which statement sounds more powerful? "Please visit my other auctions". Who cares? So what? You're selling other stuff.
"Click here to find out how to get the best tickets to the next NBA game". People are going to click that link a lot more often than "Please visit my other auctions".
I don't know what you're selling. Are you selling dog toys? ... I don't care what else you're selling.
But if you tell them exactly what you're selling and say "Click Here" ... don't even tell them it's another auction, you don't have to, they'll click it and go right over to your other auction.
That's a good point -- because it gives them a direct benefit.
Exactly. Sell the benefits.
Where can you get a reference for the level of traffic eBay gets?
I use TrafficRanking.com to stay on top of those kinds of statistics, and eBay is consistently on the top. They'll be in the top 20 of any given category every month.
TrafficRanking.com -- that's a free site is it?
Yes it's free. It's a great tool. By the way if you want to check out the credibility of anyone you're dealing with if they claim to know what they're talking about especially if they claim to know how to get traffic, check 'em out on TrafficRanking.com and see where they're ranked.
And I challenge people all the time to check me out. I tell them I'm in the 3,500 most visited sites on the web. And people go "How can you prove that?". TrafficRanking.com.
It still astounds me -- I can't believe the success I've had but I owe it to my affiliates. I owe it to the creativity of the affiliates that bought my product, thought to themselves "I can sell this", and they started selling it. And they keep half of every sale. And they're much more creative than I am and they bring me a lot of traffic. And I appreciate every visitor they bring me. But I'm paying them for it too. In book sales.
Of course they wouldn't send you traffic if your product wasn't selling.
That's right. If it wasn't selling or it wasn't quality it won't work.
Would you say any type of information would sell on eBay if there's an interest for it?
Yes. That's a good question ... because I think you have to start with topics that are of interest to a great number of people. Don't try to write a book on some obscure topic ... and I've had people come to me with some of the most obscure topics that they're interested in and they want to know how to find their niche market. That's the wrong approach.
You need to start with a topic that you know is popular and then become an expert at that topic. And then it's very easy to find those people, especially on eBay.
There's only a handful of topics really -- it's money, relationships, and those two make up 90% of it. 'How to make money' or 'How to make more money' or 'How to manage your money' ... there's a million topics you can have out of money. And relationships. Those make good titles as well.
A growing topic too ... I've noticed this on eBay seems to be self-improvement.
Self improvement, and self-development. Yes -- I've seen those as well. I've never been a big fan of that genre of books ... I have my gurus that I've bought but as an ebook they just don't hold much credibility for me ... I haven't bought many of those ... but I do notice them popping up a lot on eBay.
In many ways that's related to 'make money'.
Oh sure ... or relationships. If people are looking to improve themselves they're looking to have a better relationship, have more money, have a better career, which makes them more money... so for me money is a great topic.
But I've seen some people try to turn their hobby into an eBook. Say some obscure hobby "Bug collecting" or something -- you're not going to sell thousands of copies of that. That may be fun to do, and that's great and you may have a mailing list of people interested in your book, but you're not going to make it big time, you're not going to make hundreds of thousands a year on that book. It's just not popular enough of a topic.
Something very interesting I heard, and the more I think about it the more it appears to be true to me, is that when it comes to information products ... either digital or physical products ... people tend to collect. So there's not really the same level of competition as with different types of products, since if you're interested in something you tend to buy a lot of books about it.
Yes. Info-junkies I call them.
For example -- my marketing book collection is not huge but it's going to keep growing, I will keep buying more books, manuals and tapes.
Right. There's an interesting phenomenon ... when I first wrote this Silent Sales Machine book I encountered some other books which were similar ... I think mine was better but they were similar, they had some similar ideas in them. And my first thought was "Those are my competitors".
Well as I've come to find out now that's the furthest from the truth. Those are my best sources of leads. And we've cross-marketed our products ... and I've sold a bunch of theirs, and they've sold a bunch of mine, and we've both made more money and our customers are happy because of the phenomenon you've just mentioned -- the info-junkie phenomenon ... where you're interested in a topic and you're going to buy books related to that topic even if there's some cross over of the same information inside of them ... the fact that there's one or two new nuggets of info in each one, you'll buy it.
If it's from a different author, if it's a new title, if it's got some new information in it ... you'll buy it. And that's a great phenomenon to keep in mind. Don't look at your competitors as enemies, look at them as sources of fantastic leads, fantastic warm leads ... that are ready to buy your information.
I'm slightly concerned this is a huge subject ... I was going to ask you how you structure your ads for eBay?
How about a brief philosophy of selling on eBay? Rather than giving you specifics ... my philosophy of selling on eBay. There's a few "Do Nots". Don't use huge fonts. Don't use more than two or three colors. Don't include a picture that takes more than 5 seconds to load.
Here's some Do's ... Do think benefits. Do use HTML code to make it look nice. To make it look professional. And it's worth your time to learn a little HTML to do that.
It's very easy isn't it?... For example I just do the formatting in Dreamweaver ... or you can use FrontPage or anything similar ... and then just copy and paste the code into the eBay box.
Exactly. I love FrontPage for eBay auctions and that's what I use. And Dreamweaver like you said is another great product -- buy a simple HTML tool and just copy-paste. What You See Is What You Get right over into eBay and it looks fantastic.
It looks so much better than just typing up the text. You're not going to sell anything that way -- you're not going to sell anywhere near as much as you could otherwise I should say.
And be honest with people. That's one of the great sales techniques -- is tell them exactly what to expect, exactly what they're going to get, be 100% open and honest with them and most people are 100% open and honest right back to you and leave you good feedback, and you're building your business.
It's very easy to smell a scam -- especially on eBay, it's kind of ridiculous at times ... you see people promising the world and they've got one or two feedbacks and one of them is a negative -- they're not going to do anything on eBay, people aren't stupid. You can't pretend that they are and build a business. You've got to treat them as adults, that are intelligent. You're not going to grow a business if you can't do that.
I read something online, and not surprisingly this guy was scammed on eBay. He bought something from someone who was hiding his feedback rating. As you say being open and honest -- if someone's got something to hide, then it should make you think twice.
Yes. I've never understood why people would hide their feedback rating on eBay. It totally defeats the purpose of eBay. From my vantage point eBay is all about the feedback rating system. There's so much credibility to be earned there. It takes time, it takes energy, and it's an honest look into someone's business.
So would you structure an eBay ad for an info-product, the same way you would do it on a web site, just with a few tweaks for eBay?
Right, and emphasis on feedback. On eBay emphasize your feedback, and keep it positive. Beg, borrow, and do whatever you've got to do to get people to leave you positive feedback ... don't let them leave you negative, and don't leave them negative.
There's never a good reason -- remember I mentioned have multiple eBay accounts? On the one that you use to sell a product, especially an information product ... but any product ... the one you're using to sell never, ever, ever leave someone negative feedback using that account. Because you're just asking for it. They're going to come right back at ya.
And they're going to leave you negative, and what have you accomplished? Nothing. So use a different account to buy, and that way if someone rips you off you can leave them negative feedback and warn the world. But don't let that negative feedback touch your selling account. It's suicide.
So just to run through it -- as usual have a headline, bullets with lots of benefits, instead of testimonials you would link to your feedback?
I would emphasize my feedback.
Can you actually list your feedback within a page?
Yes you can. I've seen people do that. I never did it myself but you can list actual feedback comments from your other customers on that specific product. Especially if you're selling multiple products, it's good to help the customer find the specific feedback that relates to the product you're selling.
If you're selling 50 different products on eBay, just leaving a link back to your feedback doesn't help the customer see that you have other happy customers buying that specific product.
So you can help them by leaving feedback for that exact product.
Rather than generic feedback about yourself ... pointing towards what people have actually said about that product in mind?
Exactly. And that's totally within eBay's rules to do that, to put feedback right in your auction.
So eBay doesn't mind if you copy and paste text from your feedback listings into your sales letter?
That's completely acceptable.
Okay ... so what would you say is the best way to structure your auction title to bring the most traffic?
I still debate with myself over what the best ways to do this are, because I get different results at different times. The first thing I need to say is you only need to sell eBooks in one category on eBay.
There's only one information product category that's allowed, and you can find it very easily by pulling up any information product on eBay and looking at the category it's in. It's in Information Services.
And oddly enough as I experimented around, the Weird Stuff category on eBay is the hottest category you can put a product in. So if you can sell something in the Weird Stuff category that gets a lot of hits, and direct that traffic over to your eBook that's ideal.
It's hard to get people to look at an eBook product just pulling it up through the eBay search engine. You don't get a lot of traffic that way. I got traffic to my eBooks on eBay several ways.
I would use other auctions to direct traffic over. Believe it or not I used Overture. Then it was known as Goto.com -- and I would buy keywords that related to my products and I would send people right to my eBay auction.
It worked fantastically. I used Overture key words to send people over, because then the thing I emphasized in my auction was "You can buy this information from somebody you know nothing about, or you can buy under the protection of eBay ... here's my feedback ... here's other people that have bought this book from me ... here's what they had to say ... now here's my information..."
Who are you going to believe? The guy that you don't even know who he is, that has a little web site out there that has these testimonials that could be made up, or that could be legitimate. Nobody really knows. Or are you going to buy from me ... real, live, feedback.
And one thing you can do as well: you can harness those eBay registrations. Because not everyone who goes to the Overture keyword is going to be registered for eBay ... you can help them register and get $5 and then they bid on your stuff. Even if they lose the auction or if they don't end up bidding you've got their $5 because you helped them register for eBay.
So would you mention eBay specifically in your Overture classified ad?
Well you have to make sure that whatever link the people are being clicked over to pertains to the word that you've bought. Overture is very strict about that.
They're very strict about making sure that there's integrity in their system so if you buy a word, and for me I bought "eBay Book" for example. You want to make sure that the site they're going to pertains to an eBay book. So if you're going to send them to a little web site first, it's got to have information pertinent to it.
Again you can make it a two-step process. Two-step marketing is fantastic. So you can send them to a little page that invites them to register for eBay, tells them a little bit about your eBay book, then has a link on it to click to your auction where they can see a live auction for your book and buy it from you.
And you've got a few different ways to make money from that person. You've also got an invitation to your newsletter on that mini-page maybe, so ideally the person comes over, they sign up to eBay, they join your mailing list, and they jump over to your auction where you've got a lot of credibility and you've got a great chance of ... remember the sales ratio's of eBay? They're much higher than the sales ratio of a web site.
So you have an eBay page specifically set up for people coming from Overture?
Yes I did.
You mentioned some sort of special wording at the start of that auction. You emphasize 'Rather than buying from other people ... you're buying from eBay with the feedback rating and the security of eBay'?
Specifically, I offered live verifiable feedback on my products that they could review and actually contact the people that had bought my product if they'd like. I said "Who else offers you the opportunity to do that before you buy their ebook?".
Basically challenging them to contact my previous customers and oftentimes they did ... and how could you possibly have more credibility than that?
That's a really interesting concept of rather than sending people from Overture to a website ... rather sending them directly to an eBay auction.
Right. I suggest you have a little page between eBay and Overture. And on that little page you can do a lot of things that you can't do on eBay: you have an invitation to join your newsletter, you can't do that on eBay ... not within your auction.
You give them the opportunity to buy the book right now, that's fine -- you can skip over the eBay fees ... that won't bother me ... that won't bother the customer to have the book right now ... that's fine. So I've got a ClickBank link there where they can buy the book now.
I also invite them to go visit my auction. If they want to visit it that's fine. I tell them they can read the feedback there, and then I challenge them with an unprecedented amount of credibility.
People aren't used to that much credibility on the web, they're used to having to make a leap of faith and believe that all those testimonials are real and believe that all those numbers are real. I'm laying it all right there for them. I'm giving them the email addresses of people who have just bought my book in the last few days that they can contact and ask "What do you think?".
So it's quite a short landing page ... or is it actually a sales page?
It's a very short page ... it's very short, it was maybe two screen-fulls scrolling down at the most. I found if I could get people to that page I had an extremely high conversion rate. Everyone who visited that page either joined my list, bought my book, or emailed me for more information ... we just had a tremendous conversion rate. It's a fantastic way to start out promoting a product.
For someone who has either their own info-products, or products with reprint rights and they want to sell them on eBay ... what would you suggest?
My first suggestion would be start small, and don't spend a lot of money. There are too many ways to waste a ton of money trying to promote a product. Don't be pulled into any of those ways.
An eBay auction costs you 35 cents. Experiment around with selling a few copies on eBay, and figure out a way to distinguish yourself -- that's where the magic starts to happen once you've got a captive audience.
If you're selling the same book that hundreds of other people are selling on eBay, and you hope to sell a bunch of it and get rich, it's not going to happen. They're not going to look you up in the search engines on eBay and find your product. It won't happen that way.
You've got to figure out another way to distinguish yourself. Even if you have a lot of competitors you can do it but you can't do the same thing everyone else is doing and succeed, you've got to have a slightly different approach ... and even the smallest changes that distinguish yourself can make you a lot of money because you've now got a captive audience.
So becoming a unique eBay character in a way?
Exactly.
Something I heard that many people don't do on eBay, but which is recommended -- just offering a guarantee for your product on eBay.
Oh definitely. That should be standard part of anything you sell on the web. I even have on my book Silent Sales Machine ... I've got a five times your money back guarantee. If you use this system for six months and don't make a certain amount of money I'll give you five times your money back. Just because I'm showing a great deal of confidence and I know it can be done, and I want to encourage people to do it ... and that guarantee gets me a lot of sales too.
So you say differentiate yourself from all the other eBay sellers and that will help you make more sales?
And find creative ways to get traffic to your auctions. I firmly believe that I could take any product -- if you gave me the most common, ordinary product being sold on eBay right now for a dollar ... let's say there's 500 other people selling that same $1 product ... you could give it to me and I could find creative ways to sell it for $10 to way more people on eBay using the ideas that we've discussed.
If you distinguish yourself, if you put a professional ad together, if you find traffic from other sources, if you build up your credibility and your feedback ... I'd be the number one seller of that cheap little product and I'd sell that for a lot more money than anyone else on eBay.
Because people just aren't that creative about selling their items -- they expect people to type the title in the eBay search window, find their auction among all the other auctions which are selling the same thing and then bid on theirs hopefully instead of somebody else's. That's the old-school way to market on eBay.
As a quick example, let's say you were given a product which has been around for quite a while -- Internet Cash Machines.
It's a good product, but it's been seen by an awful lot of people now. If you were to take that, how would you choose to position or present it on eBay to really stand out and make more sales ... and make higher priced sales?
Good question. That product has been seen by millions of people, right? But there are also hundreds of thousands of people getting on the web for the first time every day ... a good majority of them are going to end up on eBay because it's one of the most popular sites on the web. So I wouldn't hesitate for a moment to promote a product which is that popular ... if I had the time I'd do it myself. And here's how I'd do it:
I would sell other items on eBay that get a lot of hits. And in the auctions that are getting a lot of hits I would invite people over to check out this really cool book that I've read that changed the way I looked at the internet, called Internet Cash Machines.
They click on that link, they go to my other auction where I'm selling that book for $14.99, not 50 cents, and a good number of people would buy that book from me right there. From the auction.
They've not shopped around for "Internet Cash Machines" on eBay and if they do they're going to buy it from somebody else for 50 cents ... but a good majority of them aren't going to do that, they're going to see my feedback, they're going to see what I personally think about that book, and they're going to buy it from me for $14.99 and they're going to be happy they did because they've now got an opportunity to get on my mailing list ... and I'm going to offer them other products in that great niche, etc.
Another way I would market that book is I would go to Overture.com and I would buy a few key words that direct people to a mini web site that then redirects people to my eBay auctions for that book. And again I've got a captive audience. I've held their hand from step 1 to step 3, I've held their hand all the way through ... and I'm selling a bunch of books that's already been sold millions of times over.
Even with products with reprint rights, people forget that there's always new people coming on the web, and as you say you can pull people from different interests and put the book in front of them.
Everybody's interested in making a little more money. There's very few people that aren't.
So you could sell dog bones ... if it's getting a lot of hits, sell it. Go to the store, buy a bag of dog bones, break even buying the bag of dog bones on eBay ... you know you buy it for $5, you sell it for $4, that's fine. If it's getting 1,000 hits that's a great product.
At the bottom of your dog bones auction offer people to jump over to your other high margin auction. Your Internet Cash Machines book for example. You're making all your money back and then some by selling 5 or 10 copies of that book from your break-even front-end product. Two-step marketing ... it's magic ... it's a beautiful thing.
A lot of people sell info-products on eBay ... I've done it myself ... but often you have to make do with very low dollar amounts: 2 dollars here, 3 dollars there, and unless you're running perhaps 100 or 200 auctions, it really doesn't come to much.
Whereas I've noticed you run auctions selling your Silent Sales Machine on eBay at full price through Dutch auctions. Could you talk about your reasoning behind that ... how you structure the whole sales process on eBay and how it works for you?
Let me start here with the fact that this was all one big experiment for me originally. I played around with many ideas until I found the one that worked. But here's what I found ... and it may save people some time to hear someone that's had some success discussing the topic of selling eBooks on eBay.
There's a right and a wrong way to do it. There's also some ideas out there which I haven't come up with I'm sure. There's people doing it better than me possibly, but I know what doesn't work ... and I will never sell one and two dollar books on eBay one at a time. It's just too much of a hassle to deal with all the delivery, and helping people download ... and if you have even one email with one question from the person that's bought it you've just lost your dollar.
And some people use that as a lead generating system and there may be something to that, but even there you have to be careful not to violate eBay policies.
I don't like the one and two dollar eBooks, because it makes you look cheap. It makes it look like what you have to say isn't of much value. I would much rather play around in the upper end -- 17, 18, 19, 20 dollars for a book selling one title at a time instead of an entire package and I think the way to have success is to make that one title your own book ... because if it's something anyone else can sell and they can make up any price they want, the customer will find it for a penny somewhere else if you're selling it for $18!
It has to be your own book. One thing I did in my Silent Sales Machine book is I emphasized the fact that no one else can sell this book. You won't find it anywhere else on eBay. This is my book. I'm the author. And that's how I started having success.
I don't know that there's a magic formula to sell someone else's book ... resell rights on eBay ... I think that's a risky path because it's all over the place and people know to shop around. There are some things you can do to keep people from shopping and to make them find your product only ... but I think the best way if you want to have success is make it your own product. There are some other options, but sell your own product on eBay ... that's where I had a lot of success. I sold a lot of copies of that book on eBay.
About one and two dollar sales ... when I was playing around on eBay I obviously got some of those as well, and a lot of people chose to pay via PayPal ... and then with the 50 cents minimum and then a percentage PayPal takes, that's a lot of your profit gone already ... so if you're selling a product for two dollars and PayPal takes 50 cents you've already made 25% less.
Yes, the numbers get small real fast. It's not worth your time to sell the low price products on eBay. It just isn't. I want to make profit on any auction that I do ... if you're doing it just to generate leads you can generate leads with a $20 product just as easily as you can with a $2 product, but the leads you generate are people willing to spend $20, instead of the people willing to spend a dollar. Now what kind of customers do you want?
So how did you start marketing your ebook on eBay?
Well the way I started ... I had the good fortune of some common sense, and this is a great story, you'll like this:
The first ten copies of the book I sold on eBay ... the book wasn't even finished yet, I just created the ad and I put it on eBay thinking "If people start bidding I'll finish the book and sell it". And now I've sold thousands of copies of that exact book. So I'm very glad that the people did bid, otherwise I probably wouldn't have even got into this business.
But I sold ten copies of this book Silent Sales Machine in 4 days. People had bid on it, and one of the bidders as fortune would have it was Marlon Sanders. I didn't know who he was, had no idea who he was, and he had an eBay feedback rating of like 3. He'd been on eBay for a couple of weeks just toying around, came across my book, bid on it ... again I had no idea who the guy was.
But the deal I struck with everyone who bid: once the auction was over I sent them an email and said "I have a confession ... the book is only 80% done ... I'll have it done within a few days ... I'll send you a copy no charge, it's free to you ... all I ask is give me a review, let me know what you think".
So you see what I did there was I didn't even have a complete product to sell yet ... I was just testing the waters to see if anyone would be interested in the concepts.
Nobody was upset that there wasn't a product at the end because it's free, they hadn't lost any money, they were going to get a free product in the next couple of weeks ... and it worked beautifully and what I got was feedback from ten customers, one of which happened to be a guru of internet marketing who gave me some fantastic ideas and feedback.
And so I didn't even have a finished product when I started marketing it. And as I say I was testing the waters. And anyone can do the same thing.
I've actually found it quite incredible who you bump into on eBay. I started out just testing my own product cheaply on eBay and it was quite amazing who you make sales too.
Yes, you can build up a lot of relationships very quickly if you're the original author. That gives you so much more credibility to people even if you don't necessarily feel like you're an expert in your topic ... the fact that you wrote the book yourself makes you an expert to 90% of the people out there. It's a great way to establish yourself.
So you've got your reviews and testimonials ... do you use them in the sales letter now?
At SilentSalesMachine.com I've got a very large page of feedback and testimonials that people can read and any time I get positive feedback I'll post it there so other people can see. And I even copied some eBay comments ... there's eBay feedback comments on my testimonials page as well.
Why do you think people buy the same product at the same price from eBay rather than from your web site?
Good question. I don't mention the web site in the auction. That way I don't violate any eBay policies.
I make a very consistent effort to stay aware of eBay policies and not violate them, because that's the life blood of my business and I want to keep them happy. Now I've used eBay as a spring board ... as a great starting point ... but I don't use eBay as much as I used to any more.
It's a great starting point for someone wanting to get into this industry, but once you start seeing a lot of sales there's no need to pay the eBay fees, you can use your own web site. And that's kind of where I've drifted with that product.
How is your eBay sales letter for the same product different to your web site sales letter? Have you changed it a bit for eBay?
Yes -- on eBay it's very important that you have good feedback. And within your sales letter no matter what you're selling, emphasize your feedback. Stress it. Put a clickable link in there that shows people exactly what your past customers have had to say.
And the sales ratios on eBay are much better than the sales ratios on my web site as a result ... and I'll give you an example:
One in fourteen people that visit my eBay auction for that book, place a bid. That's a great sales ratio. Whereas on my web site about one in 27 visitors or one in 22 depending on where the traffic is coming from end up buying the book.
It's the same price, but what I'm doing on eBay is I'm gaining credibility that they can see, that they know is real solid proof. When people visit my web site they don't know if the testimonials are made up or legitimate, there's no way for them to know. When they visit an eBay auction they know those testimonials are legitimate. I can't make those up. That's one of the beautiful things about eBay is the credibility of the testimonials ... of the feedback system that they have.
If you don't mind sharing this -- what's your eBay ID for selling the Silent Sales Machine?
It's kind of ugly to spell out ... but it's basically www.321tix.com and you need two asterixes on either side of that. The reason you need the two asterix before and after the web address is because eBay doesn't allow web addresses as your ID, but if you put asterix before and behind, there's some free publicity for you.
Is there a space between any of that?
No space.
Visiting your eBay pages might be useful for people to see how you sell from eBay, as opposed to how you sell from your web site.
Yes. As I said though I'm starting to pull away from selling on eBay. My theory on that is if you're just starting out: sell on eBay. Sell as much as you can on eBay. But you need to transition to your own web site ... and the reason is I've got enough publicity now and enough people aware of who I am ... and one of the strange phenomenon's you'll start to see is people like hurting people on top. They like leaving negative feedback, or if they know you're getting a lot of publicity they like just doing something to throw you off.
And on eBay it's very easy for someone just to leave just one negative comment and all of a sudden I've lost credibility. So what I did was quit while I was ahead. I have about 400 feedback, no negatives, I went ahead and quit while I was ahead. I felt it would be too easy for a competitor to buy my product or somebody who is upset with me for some reason or another to buy and leave a negative feedback.
I've got way too many people looking at that eBay account ... I've got so many people visiting that link to see how I've done it the last thing I want is someone going there and messing up the whole thing and putting negative feedback in there ... so I quit while I was ahead. I could continue to sell ten or fifteen copies a week of my book from that account, but I'm focusing my marketing efforts on my web site now.
So you've done exactly what you've written ... you've leveraged the massive traffic on eBay to build up a newsletter list, and get traffic to your web site.
I've used it as a spring-board, that's exactly right. And I have other eBay accounts that I don't make public.
I buy and sell regularly on eBay with other accounts and that's one of the things that I emphasize: is have multiple eBay accounts ... you need to have more than one. I certainly do ... and I sell regularly and buy regularly.
But that one particular account ... it got so much attention going to it, I probably have two or three hundred people take a look at it any given day, I don't want any negative feedback on it.
How do you deliver your product when you sell via eBay ... do you manually send out the emails with a download link?
I use ClickBank, and most people are probably familiar with ClickBank. On my web site I use ClickBank. And also for my eBay auctions ... I fire out an email to everyone who won my auctions with a ClickBank link in it and most people took advantage of it.
And I actually had some affiliates then that were able to get paid by referring people to my auction. Which may sound a little odd, and it took a little work for me to figure all that out ... I had people able to refer traffic to my auctions using their affiliate link and then get paid for the sales I made.
Now not everyone took advantage of ClickBank ... some people used PayPal, and unfortunately I never did get PayPal set up to pay my affiliates but that is possible to do, I know people are doing it. You can sell using ClickBank and PayPal and make sure your affiliates are getting paid using both.
Would there be a different way of marketing a physical info-product on eBay as opposed to an eBook?
I can't say that I can think of any major differences really. I think more people will bid on a physical book, than they will on an eBook ... there's still this hesitation about ebooks.
Lack of perceived value maybe?
Exactly. They think "Well, all I'm getting is an email -- why do I want to pay for that?". But I sold a lot of them. I sold a lot of books at $17.95 a piece.
And you run those as Dutch auctions?
That's correct.
And how items do you have in those auctions - is it 50 a go?
I would usually put an odd number in there like 39. Some people will think "He only has 39 left, I better bid". I never used round numbers. If you go to the store they never use round numbers. So I never do either.
It's always $14.95 or $39 ... whatever. So I always use numbers that are off just a little bit. There's something about the psychology of numbers. I never use 50 or 100 or 1,000. I see some people put 1,000 copies and I go "You're not helping yourself there."
Put a smaller number that's just bigger than the number of people you think will bid. I found most of my auctions ended with 20 or 25 bidders most times. I didn't want people to start raising the price, so I put 39 to be well ahead of the number of bids I expected to get.
What ways can you suggest of getting traffic to an info-product auction?
This is a great tip ... it's just come into my head in the last few days again. I've remembered that I used to do this a lot and I never really shared it with other people.
On eBay there's a big advantage to understanding the rules. You can refer people from one auction to another auction of yours, even if it's under a different ID ... so long as you're the owner of both auctions.
For example ... let's say I have a pair of tickets for an NBA basketball game ... some big game. And they're really hot tickets, and I know those tickets are going to get a thousand lookers because these are great tickets.
There's going to be a thousand people looking at that auction. Well at the bottom of that auction I can say "Please visit my other auction where I sell a book about ... " whatever. Or you could say "Please visit my other auction where I have a sports card up for bid" ... you can send traffic over and you can use that as a strategy for your ebooks.
You can even use that as a strategy for ebooks that are all over eBay. Because what happens is you've got a captive audience. You've got someone who's gone right from one of your auctions straight over to another auction and they weren't searching eBay ... it's a two-step marketing program ... and we've all heard of two-step marketing before.
You've got them locked into your offer now, they're not shopping around for other people with that same offer, you've held their hand and taken them from point A to point B and they're not shopping around other people ... they're just looking at your product.
So my first book was that ticket guide we talked about before. I would sell tickets ... I would get a lot of hits and I would hand-hold that person over to that ticket guide. And even though there's other people selling ticket guides on eBay, my shopper didn't know that, nor did they care. They'd just seen my auction.
So where would you put the link in your auction? At the bottom or at the top?...
It doesn't really matter -- a predominant place. If it's your main profit source list it right at the top. If you're just wanting it to be like an add-on and it's not your emphasis in the auction, put it down at the bottom, but you'll get plenty of click-over traffic if you control those hits.
It's all about managing the hits. Very few people look at eBay that way. Most people think of eBay as trying to get maximum bids for one item at a time. I look at it as a swarm of traffic that I'm trying to control and get to the point that I want them to get to without violating eBay policies.
Do you ever add a link "Click here to see all my auctions" or do you tend to redirect people to one particular other auction?
I like to redirect them to one auction. I think it's much more effective. Especially for people that are selling many items at a time.
Which statement sounds more powerful? "Please visit my other auctions". Who cares? So what? You're selling other stuff.
"Click here to find out how to get the best tickets to the next NBA game". People are going to click that link a lot more often than "Please visit my other auctions".
I don't know what you're selling. Are you selling dog toys? ... I don't care what else you're selling.
But if you tell them exactly what you're selling and say "Click Here" ... don't even tell them it's another auction, you don't have to, they'll click it and go right over to your other auction.
That's a good point -- because it gives them a direct benefit.
Exactly. Sell the benefits.
Where can you get a reference for the level of traffic eBay gets?
I use TrafficRanking.com to stay on top of those kinds of statistics, and eBay is consistently on the top. They'll be in the top 20 of any given category every month.
TrafficRanking.com -- that's a free site is it?
Yes it's free. It's a great tool. By the way if you want to check out the credibility of anyone you're dealing with if they claim to know what they're talking about especially if they claim to know how to get traffic, check 'em out on TrafficRanking.com and see where they're ranked.
And I challenge people all the time to check me out. I tell them I'm in the 3,500 most visited sites on the web. And people go "How can you prove that?". TrafficRanking.com.
It still astounds me -- I can't believe the success I've had but I owe it to my affiliates. I owe it to the creativity of the affiliates that bought my product, thought to themselves "I can sell this", and they started selling it. And they keep half of every sale. And they're much more creative than I am and they bring me a lot of traffic. And I appreciate every visitor they bring me. But I'm paying them for it too. In book sales.
Of course they wouldn't send you traffic if your product wasn't selling.
That's right. If it wasn't selling or it wasn't quality it won't work.
Would you say any type of information would sell on eBay if there's an interest for it?
Yes. That's a good question ... because I think you have to start with topics that are of interest to a great number of people. Don't try to write a book on some obscure topic ... and I've had people come to me with some of the most obscure topics that they're interested in and they want to know how to find their niche market. That's the wrong approach.
You need to start with a topic that you know is popular and then become an expert at that topic. And then it's very easy to find those people, especially on eBay.
There's only a handful of topics really -- it's money, relationships, and those two make up 90% of it. 'How to make money' or 'How to make more money' or 'How to manage your money' ... there's a million topics you can have out of money. And relationships. Those make good titles as well.
A growing topic too ... I've noticed this on eBay seems to be self-improvement.
Self improvement, and self-development. Yes -- I've seen those as well. I've never been a big fan of that genre of books ... I have my gurus that I've bought but as an ebook they just don't hold much credibility for me ... I haven't bought many of those ... but I do notice them popping up a lot on eBay.
In many ways that's related to 'make money'.
Oh sure ... or relationships. If people are looking to improve themselves they're looking to have a better relationship, have more money, have a better career, which makes them more money... so for me money is a great topic.
But I've seen some people try to turn their hobby into an eBook. Say some obscure hobby "Bug collecting" or something -- you're not going to sell thousands of copies of that. That may be fun to do, and that's great and you may have a mailing list of people interested in your book, but you're not going to make it big time, you're not going to make hundreds of thousands a year on that book. It's just not popular enough of a topic.
Something very interesting I heard, and the more I think about it the more it appears to be true to me, is that when it comes to information products ... either digital or physical products ... people tend to collect. So there's not really the same level of competition as with different types of products, since if you're interested in something you tend to buy a lot of books about it.
Yes. Info-junkies I call them.
For example -- my marketing book collection is not huge but it's going to keep growing, I will keep buying more books, manuals and tapes.
Right. There's an interesting phenomenon ... when I first wrote this Silent Sales Machine book I encountered some other books which were similar ... I think mine was better but they were similar, they had some similar ideas in them. And my first thought was "Those are my competitors".
Well as I've come to find out now that's the furthest from the truth. Those are my best sources of leads. And we've cross-marketed our products ... and I've sold a bunch of theirs, and they've sold a bunch of mine, and we've both made more money and our customers are happy because of the phenomenon you've just mentioned -- the info-junkie phenomenon ... where you're interested in a topic and you're going to buy books related to that topic even if there's some cross over of the same information inside of them ... the fact that there's one or two new nuggets of info in each one, you'll buy it.
If it's from a different author, if it's a new title, if it's got some new information in it ... you'll buy it. And that's a great phenomenon to keep in mind. Don't look at your competitors as enemies, look at them as sources of fantastic leads, fantastic warm leads ... that are ready to buy your information.
I'm slightly concerned this is a huge subject ... I was going to ask you how you structure your ads for eBay?
How about a brief philosophy of selling on eBay? Rather than giving you specifics ... my philosophy of selling on eBay. There's a few "Do Nots". Don't use huge fonts. Don't use more than two or three colors. Don't include a picture that takes more than 5 seconds to load.
Here's some Do's ... Do think benefits. Do use HTML code to make it look nice. To make it look professional. And it's worth your time to learn a little HTML to do that.
It's very easy isn't it?... For example I just do the formatting in Dreamweaver ... or you can use FrontPage or anything similar ... and then just copy and paste the code into the eBay box.
Exactly. I love FrontPage for eBay auctions and that's what I use. And Dreamweaver like you said is another great product -- buy a simple HTML tool and just copy-paste. What You See Is What You Get right over into eBay and it looks fantastic.
It looks so much better than just typing up the text. You're not going to sell anything that way -- you're not going to sell anywhere near as much as you could otherwise I should say.
And be honest with people. That's one of the great sales techniques -- is tell them exactly what to expect, exactly what they're going to get, be 100% open and honest with them and most people are 100% open and honest right back to you and leave you good feedback, and you're building your business.
It's very easy to smell a scam -- especially on eBay, it's kind of ridiculous at times ... you see people promising the world and they've got one or two feedbacks and one of them is a negative -- they're not going to do anything on eBay, people aren't stupid. You can't pretend that they are and build a business. You've got to treat them as adults, that are intelligent. You're not going to grow a business if you can't do that.
I read something online, and not surprisingly this guy was scammed on eBay. He bought something from someone who was hiding his feedback rating. As you say being open and honest -- if someone's got something to hide, then it should make you think twice.
Yes. I've never understood why people would hide their feedback rating on eBay. It totally defeats the purpose of eBay. From my vantage point eBay is all about the feedback rating system. There's so much credibility to be earned there. It takes time, it takes energy, and it's an honest look into someone's business.
So would you structure an eBay ad for an info-product, the same way you would do it on a web site, just with a few tweaks for eBay?
Right, and emphasis on feedback. On eBay emphasize your feedback, and keep it positive. Beg, borrow, and do whatever you've got to do to get people to leave you positive feedback ... don't let them leave you negative, and don't leave them negative.
There's never a good reason -- remember I mentioned have multiple eBay accounts? On the one that you use to sell a product, especially an information product ... but any product ... the one you're using to sell never, ever, ever leave someone negative feedback using that account. Because you're just asking for it. They're going to come right back at ya.
And they're going to leave you negative, and what have you accomplished? Nothing. So use a different account to buy, and that way if someone rips you off you can leave them negative feedback and warn the world. But don't let that negative feedback touch your selling account. It's suicide.
So just to run through it -- as usual have a headline, bullets with lots of benefits, instead of testimonials you would link to your feedback?
I would emphasize my feedback.
Can you actually list your feedback within a page?
Yes you can. I've seen people do that. I never did it myself but you can list actual feedback comments from your other customers on that specific product. Especially if you're selling multiple products, it's good to help the customer find the specific feedback that relates to the product you're selling.
If you're selling 50 different products on eBay, just leaving a link back to your feedback doesn't help the customer see that you have other happy customers buying that specific product.
So you can help them by leaving feedback for that exact product.
Rather than generic feedback about yourself ... pointing towards what people have actually said about that product in mind?
Exactly. And that's totally within eBay's rules to do that, to put feedback right in your auction.
So eBay doesn't mind if you copy and paste text from your feedback listings into your sales letter?
That's completely acceptable.
Okay ... so what would you say is the best way to structure your auction title to bring the most traffic?
I still debate with myself over what the best ways to do this are, because I get different results at different times. The first thing I need to say is you only need to sell eBooks in one category on eBay.
There's only one information product category that's allowed, and you can find it very easily by pulling up any information product on eBay and looking at the category it's in. It's in Information Services.
And oddly enough as I experimented around, the Weird Stuff category on eBay is the hottest category you can put a product in. So if you can sell something in the Weird Stuff category that gets a lot of hits, and direct that traffic over to your eBook that's ideal.
It's hard to get people to look at an eBook product just pulling it up through the eBay search engine. You don't get a lot of traffic that way. I got traffic to my eBooks on eBay several ways.
I would use other auctions to direct traffic over. Believe it or not I used Overture. Then it was known as Goto.com -- and I would buy keywords that related to my products and I would send people right to my eBay auction.
It worked fantastically. I used Overture key words to send people over, because then the thing I emphasized in my auction was "You can buy this information from somebody you know nothing about, or you can buy under the protection of eBay ... here's my feedback ... here's other people that have bought this book from me ... here's what they had to say ... now here's my information..."
Who are you going to believe? The guy that you don't even know who he is, that has a little web site out there that has these testimonials that could be made up, or that could be legitimate. Nobody really knows. Or are you going to buy from me ... real, live, feedback.
And one thing you can do as well: you can harness those eBay registrations. Because not everyone who goes to the Overture keyword is going to be registered for eBay ... you can help them register and get $5 and then they bid on your stuff. Even if they lose the auction or if they don't end up bidding you've got their $5 because you helped them register for eBay.
So would you mention eBay specifically in your Overture classified ad?
Well you have to make sure that whatever link the people are being clicked over to pertains to the word that you've bought. Overture is very strict about that.
They're very strict about making sure that there's integrity in their system so if you buy a word, and for me I bought "eBay Book" for example. You want to make sure that the site they're going to pertains to an eBay book. So if you're going to send them to a little web site first, it's got to have information pertinent to it.
Again you can make it a two-step process. Two-step marketing is fantastic. So you can send them to a little page that invites them to register for eBay, tells them a little bit about your eBay book, then has a link on it to click to your auction where they can see a live auction for your book and buy it from you.
And you've got a few different ways to make money from that person. You've also got an invitation to your newsletter on that mini-page maybe, so ideally the person comes over, they sign up to eBay, they join your mailing list, and they jump over to your auction where you've got a lot of credibility and you've got a great chance of ... remember the sales ratio's of eBay? They're much higher than the sales ratio of a web site.
So you have an eBay page specifically set up for people coming from Overture?
Yes I did.
You mentioned some sort of special wording at the start of that auction. You emphasize 'Rather than buying from other people ... you're buying from eBay with the feedback rating and the security of eBay'?
Specifically, I offered live verifiable feedback on my products that they could review and actually contact the people that had bought my product if they'd like. I said "Who else offers you the opportunity to do that before you buy their ebook?".
Basically challenging them to contact my previous customers and oftentimes they did ... and how could you possibly have more credibility than that?
That's a really interesting concept of rather than sending people from Overture to a website ... rather sending them directly to an eBay auction.
Right. I suggest you have a little page between eBay and Overture. And on that little page you can do a lot of things that you can't do on eBay: you have an invitation to join your newsletter, you can't do that on eBay ... not within your auction.
You give them the opportunity to buy the book right now, that's fine -- you can skip over the eBay fees ... that won't bother me ... that won't bother the customer to have the book right now ... that's fine. So I've got a ClickBank link there where they can buy the book now.
I also invite them to go visit my auction. If they want to visit it that's fine. I tell them they can read the feedback there, and then I challenge them with an unprecedented amount of credibility.
People aren't used to that much credibility on the web, they're used to having to make a leap of faith and believe that all those testimonials are real and believe that all those numbers are real. I'm laying it all right there for them. I'm giving them the email addresses of people who have just bought my book in the last few days that they can contact and ask "What do you think?".
So it's quite a short landing page ... or is it actually a sales page?
It's a very short page ... it's very short, it was maybe two screen-fulls scrolling down at the most. I found if I could get people to that page I had an extremely high conversion rate. Everyone who visited that page either joined my list, bought my book, or emailed me for more information ... we just had a tremendous conversion rate. It's a fantastic way to start out promoting a product.
For someone who has either their own info-products, or products with reprint rights and they want to sell them on eBay ... what would you suggest?
My first suggestion would be start small, and don't spend a lot of money. There are too many ways to waste a ton of money trying to promote a product. Don't be pulled into any of those ways.
An eBay auction costs you 35 cents. Experiment around with selling a few copies on eBay, and figure out a way to distinguish yourself -- that's where the magic starts to happen once you've got a captive audience.
If you're selling the same book that hundreds of other people are selling on eBay, and you hope to sell a bunch of it and get rich, it's not going to happen. They're not going to look you up in the search engines on eBay and find your product. It won't happen that way.
You've got to figure out another way to distinguish yourself. Even if you have a lot of competitors you can do it but you can't do the same thing everyone else is doing and succeed, you've got to have a slightly different approach ... and even the smallest changes that distinguish yourself can make you a lot of money because you've now got a captive audience.
So becoming a unique eBay character in a way?
Exactly.
Something I heard that many people don't do on eBay, but which is recommended -- just offering a guarantee for your product on eBay.
Oh definitely. That should be standard part of anything you sell on the web. I even have on my book Silent Sales Machine ... I've got a five times your money back guarantee. If you use this system for six months and don't make a certain amount of money I'll give you five times your money back. Just because I'm showing a great deal of confidence and I know it can be done, and I want to encourage people to do it ... and that guarantee gets me a lot of sales too.
So you say differentiate yourself from all the other eBay sellers and that will help you make more sales?
And find creative ways to get traffic to your auctions. I firmly believe that I could take any product -- if you gave me the most common, ordinary product being sold on eBay right now for a dollar ... let's say there's 500 other people selling that same $1 product ... you could give it to me and I could find creative ways to sell it for $10 to way more people on eBay using the ideas that we've discussed.
If you distinguish yourself, if you put a professional ad together, if you find traffic from other sources, if you build up your credibility and your feedback ... I'd be the number one seller of that cheap little product and I'd sell that for a lot more money than anyone else on eBay.
Because people just aren't that creative about selling their items -- they expect people to type the title in the eBay search window, find their auction among all the other auctions which are selling the same thing and then bid on theirs hopefully instead of somebody else's. That's the old-school way to market on eBay.
As a quick example, let's say you were given a product which has been around for quite a while -- Internet Cash Machines.
It's a good product, but it's been seen by an awful lot of people now. If you were to take that, how would you choose to position or present it on eBay to really stand out and make more sales ... and make higher priced sales?
Good question. That product has been seen by millions of people, right? But there are also hundreds of thousands of people getting on the web for the first time every day ... a good majority of them are going to end up on eBay because it's one of the most popular sites on the web. So I wouldn't hesitate for a moment to promote a product which is that popular ... if I had the time I'd do it myself. And here's how I'd do it:
I would sell other items on eBay that get a lot of hits. And in the auctions that are getting a lot of hits I would invite people over to check out this really cool book that I've read that changed the way I looked at the internet, called Internet Cash Machines.
They click on that link, they go to my other auction where I'm selling that book for $14.99, not 50 cents, and a good number of people would buy that book from me right there. From the auction.
They've not shopped around for "Internet Cash Machines" on eBay and if they do they're going to buy it from somebody else for 50 cents ... but a good majority of them aren't going to do that, they're going to see my feedback, they're going to see what I personally think about that book, and they're going to buy it from me for $14.99 and they're going to be happy they did because they've now got an opportunity to get on my mailing list ... and I'm going to offer them other products in that great niche, etc.
Another way I would market that book is I would go to Overture.com and I would buy a few key words that direct people to a mini web site that then redirects people to my eBay auctions for that book. And again I've got a captive audience. I've held their hand from step 1 to step 3, I've held their hand all the way through ... and I'm selling a bunch of books that's already been sold millions of times over.
Even with products with reprint rights, people forget that there's always new people coming on the web, and as you say you can pull people from different interests and put the book in front of them.
Everybody's interested in making a little more money. There's very few people that aren't.
So you could sell dog bones ... if it's getting a lot of hits, sell it. Go to the store, buy a bag of dog bones, break even buying the bag of dog bones on eBay ... you know you buy it for $5, you sell it for $4, that's fine. If it's getting 1,000 hits that's a great product.
At the bottom of your dog bones auction offer people to jump over to your other high margin auction. Your Internet Cash Machines book for example. You're making all your money back and then some by selling 5 or 10 copies of that book from your break-even front-end product. Two-step marketing ... it's magic ... it's a beautiful thing.
