Auction Power Guide

I have just started my own little business selling fashion and costume jewellery :
www.sophiesjewellerybox.co.uk

I would just like some advice on others experience with starting a new business, and any tips for getting more traffic that have worked for you.

So far I have paid for advertising on google adwords and facebook. Entered my URL on various trawlers and online web directories, got all of the social media sites such as twitter, stumbled upon, facebook and pinterest.
I also leaflet drop, attend fairs and shop events, have set up an online blog, promote on asos marketplace and have written to various newspapers and magazines with my press release.

I understand it takes alot of man hours, hard work and determination, but would just value some tips and tricks from people who have been through or are going through the same as me. I spend around 5 hours a day purely on online promotion and advertising.

I really want to make this work, it’s my passion and hobby, i am 22 years old, and I really would love to hear your stories.

All constructive criticism and feedback is welcomed, and thank you in advance
Sophie x

I noticed that most of your products centered around rhinestone jewellry, so you should concentrate your keywords based around those.

Adwords can be tricky to get right from the get go, these days there are so many different features in there that it can be confusing. I would suggest that you stick to product listing ads (and google shopping). AFAIK Google shopping is still free in the UK and you should utilise them. I work with American clients normally so I really don’t have a clue what the UK rules are. Even though I’m from the UK.

I’m not sure what your profit margins are using Adwords on low cost products – I suppose it really depends on your market, what the typical customer buys (5+ items or just one). I would expect that you will need to get at least 15 customers to your website to make one sale. If you’re paying 15p a click that would mean that your margin would need to be at least £2.25 to break even.

There are various techniques you can use on site to increase the amount of money people spend on your site by cross selling and Adwords techniques to hammer your click costs down.

The free delivery over £30 is a nice touch and will help to increase your average basket value up so customers buy more than one item and you have a better margin.

If you need some tips and specific Adwords related advice contact me through http://www.karimium.com

I used to run an eCommerce site before, I found that a lot of sole proprietors run an ebay store as well – even though it’s not the core part of their business, they use ebay as a lead generation funnel. They’ll sell pieces on ebay – because it’s a big market place and then use it to build a list of prospects and when mailing goods out enclose a phamphlet of their website or even a catalogue.

Enclosed a 20% off ebay purchase discount for the online store and funnel sales onto there.

The ebay method acts like a advertising medium that essentially pays for itself.

Also utilize email marketing to retain a list of customers and email them about latest store updates and send fashion tips etc.

eBay can be a very lucrative marketplace. You need to know that when you build a store on eBay it is not as simple as registering and creating your eBay store pages. There is a lot more involved if you want to achieve success.

Before you even go to the eBay website to open your eBay store and build it, you need to know what you are going to sell. However, even that is not enough.

You need to know how well your items are going to sell. It’s no use going through all the effort of building your store on eBay, and it brings in no sales.

For this you do need to do market research and determine what kind of demand there is for your products, what the competition is like, and what competitive pricing would be.

The next thing you need to consider is your eBay feedback rating. eBay buyers are very wary of eBay sellers with a very low number of feedbacks against their name.

If your eBay id has only a few feedbacks, then spend some time buying and selling items on eBay without an eBay store until you have built up a solid feedback score.

Once you’ve done this, you are ready to build a store on eBay.

The next step is to register and open your eBay store on eBay. Once your store exists, you need to add what they call store inventory auction listings. These are auction listings that do not expire like regular auction listings. Consider those like items you would always have on display on your virtual product racks until someone buys them.

Once you get to this point of building your store on eBay, it is not the point to sit back and wait for sales. You might wait forever and get zero sales.

This is the time that you need to jump in and furiously market and promote your eBay store.

There are several ways you can market your eBay store. One way is to always have regular eBay auction listings that appear in the eBay searches. Always include a link to your eBay store in those auction listings.

Another way of marketing your eBay store is to put out a press release, which you can do free of charge on several websites. Yet another way is to advertise in your local community via flyers, business cards and classified ads.

Another way is to start your own blog where you write about topics relevant to your eBay store and types of products that you sell. You would then include several links back to your eBay store from your blog.

I hope you see that how to build a store on eBay involves much more than following the step-by-step instructions on the eBay website. That is the easiest and quickest part of building your eBay store.

The most work and the secret to your success lies in what you do before and after you have built your store on eBay.

Jason Griffith
http://www.articlesbase.com/management-articles/how-to-build-a-store-on-ebay-122914.html