Internet Marketing Toolbox

I’ve been an (occasional) eBay member since September 2002. I say “occasional” because in that 5 year period, I’ve purchased a grand total of just eight items!!!

Over the years, I’ve had several quick thoughts about eBay… basically, to me it is (was) just one gigantic second-hand shop… with lots of pre-loved items gathering dust on it’s digital shelves.

Another not so positive thought I’ve had often about eBay involves the number of Adwords ads populating my Adsense pages far too often… annoyingly preventing other “real” ads from being displayed and earning me money It seems from these ads that you can almost buy anything at eBay…

And is it popular or what!

Crikey - with a page rank of 9 and an Alexa rank of 19 for ebay.com they must be doing something right! The UK and German eBay sites are in the top 100 at Alexa as well… Even our localised Aussie version has a PR of 7 and Alexa rank of 303.

How negative is your perception of the world’s largest online marketplace? Is it justified, or is it about time to rethink your attitude towards eBay?

Come On… Get to the Point!

OK… sorry. I DO tend to rave on a bit. Here’s my point…

The other day I was referred to eBay Pulse which shows the latest movers and shakers on the site… the things that people are looking for at that point in time.

And the two MOST WATCHED items on ebay.com caught my attention…

1. Dont Buy Another Get Rich Quick SCANDAL* Make $$ EBOOK - HOW ONE INTERNET IDIOT Makes $1800 an hour
   
2. How We Made $20,000 in our 1st 45 days on Ebay ebook - Written from PERSONAL Experience - 5900+ positive fb

The “most watched” items are both ebooks… and almost on topics you could see lots of Internet Marketers trying to flog.

Look at the purchase history to see multiple sales every day! A result that most IM’s can only dream about!

Now while being on the “most watched” list at eBay Pulse would boost the sales of these two particular items a little… I don’t think that is WHY these two ebooks are selling so well. Other factors must be in play here.

After all… Who’s heard of eBay Pulse before now? The link to it is buried in their “helpful” links section… so most “normal” consumers wouldn’t end up there on purpose:)

So what other factors are operating here?

Maybe there IS a good market for ebooks on eBay! Take a look at the other ebooks for sale and you’ll see some standard MRR IM products there (and probably a lot of stuff in breach of licensing terms too) and some of it available at totally ridiculous prices.

But eBay’s made it dead easy (and fairly cheap) to market and sell digital goods that you own the rights for through their system. With instant payment through PayPal, and instant download for digital products, it seems almost too good to be true!

My first thoughts after seeing all of this are:

1. the LAST THING you want to do is try to flog the same old tired IM products for $0.99 each, so
   
2. you must have your OWN UNIQUE CONTENT to justify charging more to make some reasonable money from it all
   
3. why struggle on generating traffic to your own site if you are promoting your own digital product, when eBay has the traffic and the people looking for them
   
4. it’s a lot easier than getting a top 10 listing at Google, and
   
5. people are there with a BUYER’S MINDSET!

Considering how INexpensive eBay listings are, and how easy it is to get started selling digital goods… Can you guess what I’m going to be trying my hand at as soon as I can get things sorted?

Just gotta work out how to tie in the back-end and up-sell - sorry… after-sales support

I’ll let you know how it all goes, but first I need to create my own unique, digital product.

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