Auction Power Guide

Nowadays, a lot of online businesses rely heavily on certain seasons for increased sales volume. As of this writing, the month of September for most industries indicate a significant time for sales — it’s back-to-school in the US; it’s the early start of Halloween and Christmas preparation for Christian nations; it’s the beginning of vacation booking for some travel enthusiasts. If you are an online marketer that could benefit from such events, then you might just want to invest on the trend when the demand is in full bloom, because if you’re not prepared as a seasonal marketer, you will not reap the fruits of a demanding market during this buying season.

Research and well-tested ad campaign techniques are keys to handling seasonal activities in the online market. So when seasonal advertising time is approaching, you should be equipped with the knowledge of knowing the profitable keywords from related websites around a month before the season.

For example, you are planning to sell gift items this coming Christmas such as jewelry, clothes, perfume and toys. You should do a research of shopping sites, such as buy.com, Amazon and ebay.com, and determine their high-paying keywords. Competitive intelligence tools such as KeywordSpy.com can be a big help in this marketing pursuit. It can gather keywords of marketers in all types of industries and allow you to get good ideas on keyword advertising. You can also check its Time Machine feature, this KeywordSpy thing lets you look at keywords other advertisers have used in the past.

So based on our first example, you may look for Christmas-oriented sites in KeywordSpy Time Machine and check their November and December 2007 keywords and ad copies, then see for yourself the keyword advertising strategies which will be helpful in your own site campaign on December 2008.

In short, if your business has various high points throughout the year, try to review the past promotional and marketing campaigns of your industry so you can improve your next target season. I really suggest that you give the Time Machine a shot. This is the only keyword tool feature that I have seen giving months’ worth of advertising information. Would you believe, I found out through KeywordSpy Time Machine that divorce sites such as Divorcesyourself.com boost their advertising during months of February and March? Perhaps this can be credited to the fact that the Valentines madness is in the air during these months, and divorce sites are targeting the emotional spots of “attached people”, by subtly suggesting that they should prioritize their need for divorce to be with their “true love.” So, how is that for an advertising gold mine if you are in the “divorce industry”? You can simply copy the keywords and improve the ad copies of well-performing divorce sites in certain periods and months.

Whoever said that “moving forward” is the best thing to do in this world” is simply not always right especially in this case. Cause in the world of seasonal advertising, it is good to “look backwards” and review the good and bad in the past season, for you to cherry-pick and carry the good ones in the next.

The theory is the same when choosing your keyword and ad copies for your targeted seasons, learn from the sites that did well in the past and enhance what they’ve got. With this, we might just believe in the saying: “It’s always good to learn from the experts.”

Happy selling and have a fruitful season!

Zey Gutierrez
http://www.articlesbase.com/ppc-advertising-articles/studying-historical-ppc-ad-trends-to-optimize-your-seasonal-ad-campaigns-586675.html

Given the average cost (in volume) of eBay is about 18% of gross (considering an average sell through rate of 50% on your listings), I don’t think adding another 15-20% in Adwords PPC is the way to go.

I’ve had the most success targeting eBay users right on eBay versus going off site. Have you tried the eBay Keywords program? Its currently managed by AdMarketplace -http://www.ampkeywords.com/. The average cost-per-click tends to be lower and it is extremely more targeted than Adwords thereby leading to more conversions.

*START EDIT*
I did some additional research and discovered that the eBay Keywords system is no longer active (spoke directly to eBay about this). Admarketplace is still likely a good place to get started on PPC.
*END EDIT*

Are you including anything in your shipments? It is much easier to get business from an existing client base than to land a new client. Maybe a coupon for reduced shipping or something (considering its an eBay store).

Depending on your type of product, there may be some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques you can employ. This can range from articles to microsites about your products. If you are the manufacturer of the product, you have a lot of options in this arena.

Another route, again dependent on your type of product, is to work with Amazon and few of the other resellers out there. I have a friend who was doing about $5M a year on eBay and he has moved nearly 50% of his volume over to Amazon in the last year.

If you are going the route of considering different outlets and your monthly sales are greater than $10K, you should probably consider Channel Advisor – http://www.channeladvisor.com – These guys allow you to sell on multiple eBay channels as well as Amazon and some of the other engines from a single interface.

Finally, and not least, you should have your own eStore outside of the eBay fees. This becomes more apparent as your sales volume increases and you build a return business. I’ve always advised that eBay should be considered a marketing vehicle. You should make every effort to get folks over to a site where you can enjoy the reduced cost of repeat sales versus being hit with new acquisition costs each time you sell something. My company deploys Product Cart and MIVA. Both are good systems and can be setup and hosted fairly inexpensively. Channel Advisor has a cart with their system as well.

Hope that helps!

One mistake that business owners make is that they focus on overall revenue instead of profits. While this thinking is flawed in any business, it can be especially dangerous in an eBay business.

Part of the problem is that this type of thinking is promoted by eBay. For example, you need to reach a certain level of sales volume to qualify for eBay Powerseller programs.

Sellers will also frequently sell products even if they’re not making money on them just so that they can build up their feedback.

I’m here to tell you that if your primary focus isn’t on the amount of profit your eBay business is making then you won’t have an eBay business for very long. It’s not true that if you have enough gross revenue that there will be some net revenue around. Trust me; it’s possible to have a lot of overall sales without making any money.

I remember back when I was more active with selling on eBay that I had a lot of months where I sold tens of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise every month, but when I actually sat down and crunched the numbers, I’d actually LOST money for the month. Then there were times where I sold only a few thousand dollars worth of items, but over half the revenue was profit. Can you guess which method I ultimately stayed with?

When I first started my eBay business, I’ll admit that I had this flawed thinking that as long as I got my sales volume up, I’d make more money. What I found was that the more stuff I sold, the more time it took up to fulfill the orders, more packing materials I had to keep on hand, and the more fees I had to pay eBay. The added cost of all these items wasn’t necessarily added into my acquisition costs.

The flaw in my thinking was looking at how much the item would cost me and then looking to see how much it sold for. If the selling price was higher than cost, even just a little bit, I’d buy it.

Eventually I got wiser (probably because I had to in order to stay in business) and started to focus on what items I could purchase and sell for a nice profit. While my sales volume definitely dipped, I made more money, and actually had more time to pursue other business interests.

So if you’d like your eBay business to still be open this time next year, then make sure you’re focusing on the right numbers – the bottom line, not the top.

Gary Ruplinger
http://www.articlesbase.com/business-articles/why-an-ebay-seller-needs-to-keep-a-close-watch-on-profits-not-sales-volume-145345.html