eBay has recently jumped on the blog bandwagon. They have opened a new section of the website called eBay blogs. This allows a registered eBay user to sign up for and maintain a blog. This is a wonderful new feature and if you are serious about growing your eBay business then you should definitely consider signing up for an eBay blog. It is a very simple process that almost anyone can navigate through and easily set up your own blog. You do not have to have any special html knowledge. Just go to the following url
http://blogs.ebay.com/ and click on the large button that says “Start Blogging”
What Are Blogs
Blogs are basically an online journal. They provide a place where you can easily write news and information about yourself and your auction sales on a daily basis. The word blog is a combination of web and log smashed together to make a new word called blogs. They are one of the latest crazes on the internet because they allow anyone to easily publish their own thoughts and content on the internet.
Blogs are also wonderful for creating a ton of extra traffic and visitors to your auction listings. If you frequently post great content to your blog it will quickly be picked up by the search engines which will create more visitors to your blog and your auction listings for free.
What To Blog About
Many sellers will instantly see the benefit of having a blog. It provides an easy way to interact with your customers. You can provide updated information about your auctions, the products you sell and general info about your business. It might take a little while tog et used to blogging but typically it is very addictive and once you start writing a blog it can easily become a fun daily activity. To get the most from your blog you want to think about writing content that is useful to your customers. For example a eBay sellers that typically sells in one category or one type of product can provide more information about what thy sell. For example a seller who specializes in model cars might take some time to write a few articles or posts about building model car tips. Another seller who sells wedding related goods might write blog posts about wedding planning. The point is you want to make the content useful to your customers so they will come back often. The more you write good quality content and inform your customers the more they will want to purchase products from you. In this way you can quickly establish yourself as an authority on the subject.
One thing you will want to stay away from is having a blog with very little useful content and a lot of sales ads for your auctions. Sure you can occasionally write a blog post to plug a new item you have up for auction but if that is all you do no one will visit your blog. eBay is a very community oriented platform and the more community friendly information you provide the more potential and past customers will come to your blog and possible visit your auction listings.
Promoting Your Blog
Like any other site on the web your blog will have its own unique url or website address. You will want to make sure that you keep this hand and start promoting your blog. There are a variety of ways that you can promote a blog. Some of these would include submitting your website to major search engines, and blog/website directories. You can easily further promote your blog by taking the content or articles that you write on the blog and submitting them to some of the major article directories like this one.
Blog Comments
Another great way to promote your blog and build traffic to it is to comment on other people’s blog. You want to be a little careful about this and only post to other related blogs and post meaningful comments. If you start leaving a bunch of random comments that have nothing to do with the blog or the post in general then people will see this as blog spam also known as splog content.
Blog Tags
Another useful feature that eBay has added is blog tags. When you first set up the blog there are some options to leave details about it. You can also select tags that people will use to find your blog. These tags are basically keywords that people might use to search for your blog. Using the example from above of the seller that sells wedding related items the seller would want to use common wedding keywords in their tags section. They could include tags like wedding, invitations, cake toppers, and wedding planning. Then when another eBay user searches for wedding related blog this blog will show up in the listing and again bring some free traffic to the blog and potential to the seller’s listings.
So if you don't already have a eBay blog now is the time to get started.
Chris is a successful Webmaster and publisher of Auction Power Seller He provides more Auction selling tips and tricks on the website. To Learn more about Auction Listing Tips and other eBay help you can check out his website.
