First up, I need to apologize for not posting this three days ago as promised, life has been so busy and then for some unknown reason the phone lines are down at home, I'm using another internet provider from another line to connect to the internet to post this, so I'm glad that I've finally found a way to settled down to write and post my take on marketing on and with eBay as promised.
The Internet is the new gold mine of th 20th and 21st Century. Though the dotcoms have come and gone, and crashed like Humpty Dumpty, you have to admit that in every way the internet has made a couple of people very rich, it has helped to create successful businesses where many are failing and even the big company's like Walmart, Asda, Tesco, Littlewoods, PC World and lots others are actually making a large percentage of their sales on-line now rather than in stores. eBay's success on the other hand is even a bigger story. This auction based platform has one thing that makes it unique, instead of selling to your neighborhood, it opens up a wider arena and sells to the world! You can't beat that. eBay has captured a large percentage of the worlds regions and peoples as registered users and lots of money can be made off of this traffic
So about 5 years ago I decided to take some time off direct MLM and safelist hosting, to concentrate on building an eBay presence. I started with opening an account, exploring the site and buying some cheap stationary items I had run out of at home.
After a while I realised that a lot of people were selling their old items from their cellars and attics so I started doing the same. Once I mastered how to write the eBay ads and felt comfortable with it I started looking for other items to sell.
I can tell you one thing, with a lot of research, hard work and persistence I made quite a bit of money, which actually came in handy as we lost one of our parents during this time and the money made helped towards the funeral costs. ( If you have any Nigerian friends and know our culture well you would appreciate that things can get very tight when it comes to paying for things like this.)
I had to stop selling when I lost my mum and went back to Nigeria with the kids for eleven months. By the time I returned things had changed a bit I wasn't the same person, and running eBay at that level again would have meant so much hard work, which I knew I couldn't cope with. We had moved house and the post office was no longer 5 minutes walk it was 15 mins run and carring heavy items to post daily in their 10's or 20's was no longer appealing.
This lead me to spend my time researching about internet marketing all over again. I decided to make a go at it and discovered that my dear internet had evolved beyond recognition, but its all for the best. Now we have Web2.0 and you better believe it that Digg, Stumble Upon and Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, YouTube and Flickr are all here to stay. They all play a big part in leveraging your efforts to drive traffic to your webpages. I've been learning for the last year and have now narrowed my internet marketing efforts to a couple of core businesses and eBay is still one of them. The only difference is I think I'm doing it a bit smarter this time. I'll explain...
One of my favorite things to do is collecting paper money, so I started blogging about this about eight months ago at Paper Money Collecting considering that the idea of blogging was completely new to me, I think I've done pretty well as I am now No.2 in Google for my chosen keywords (blowing my own horn! was actually No. 1 for a while!) Anyway I now decided to search for a software I had come across over a year ago but didn't need then, I desperately needed it now. This easy to use script has made it possible for me to build a paper money store from eBay and I am able to send very targeted traffic to the site via the blog and viola, sales are made. Thus I spend time writing about something I enjoy and I'm able to make some money from my effort via eBay. I don't have to spend time ordering, packing and posting stuff, someone else does this.
The good thing about the Build A Niche Store script is that you can use it once bought to build 100's of stores if you so wish. The support is great and it also has a very vibrant community of users. I am now building more stores and using the same model of content bringing traffic which equals sales to build this business.
More about Build A Niche Store and eBay to follow shortly.
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