January 17, 2011
In an attempt to take back eBay as a good place to find hand made, artist and collective sold goods, I’m going to make a few posts on how to promote your eBay listings. There’s plenty out there already, but much of it is outdated and/or geared for high volume sellers. My posts are going to be for artists and groups of artists who may find it difficult to stand out in the crowd.
Establish a Web Presence
Free information and discussion rules on the internet. If you’re an artist, then you certainly have something to say about how to make things. So say something. Build a blog, and start posting in it. Post photos of your works. Talk about what you do. Even write about your feelings. If it’s there, someone’s going to read it.
Discuss
In the past, forums were one of the best ways to get into discussions about your interests, but now, commenting on blogs is the way to go.
Comment on posts made by artists, poets, and other people you like in general. This is a good way to get in some targetted advertising because you’ll expose yourself to people who are into the same things that you are.
Just one thing: do NOT post a link in your actual posts or listing unless you are answering a question specifically on where to find something. In most blogs, there’s a space where you can put the URL to your website. That’s where you link to your blog, and that’s it.
RSS Feeds
Your blog should have the RSS feed to your eBay store or listings in the sidebar. To find your RSS feed to your listings if you didn’t do the eBay Stores thing, go to any of your items, and click where it says, “See other items,” in the, “Seller info,” block. When you get to the page that shows your listings, scroll down to near the bottom. You’ll see a little orange rectangle that says, “RSS.” Right click, and then click, “Copy shortcut,” and then paste that in your favorite text program. That URL is the address to your listings’ RSS feed.
If you’re using WordPress, your widgets settings will have provisions for inserting an RSS feed into your sidebar. If you’re using Blogger, you’ll need to edit your blog layout, “add a gadget”, and one of the things on the menu will be to insert an RSS feed.
Use the Promotional Opportunities Available
There are free classified ads, picture posts, galleries, and the like. Use them.
Avoid Promotional Traps
There are many mistakes that people make in promoting their websites. Among them are spamming the crap out of everyplace you can find, posting multiple instances of the same link in posts, and discussing nothing but how great your business is every dang where. Don’t annoy people. This will not promote your business, and may even reduce your Google ranking.
There should be no time that you have a duplicate article anywhere unless you are being promoted by other people who like you. That’s not going to happen if you piss people off.
…and that’s about it. If you follow these steps, you’ll gain visibility “organically”. Be aware that it may take a month or two before you are somewhat known, and a year or more before you’re a household name in your genre. Things could however move considerably faster if people like your work. This brings me to the last step:
Prepare for Success
No really, prepare for it, because it might come all of a sudden. You’ll need to know how you’re going to handle a higher load of requests and orders. You’ll also need to figure out which things you want to keep rare, and which you don’t mind becoming the latest fad.
More than anything else, especially if you make jewelry, figurines, dolls, and the like, you’ll also need to figure out how you’re going to compete if some large company gets ahold of your idea and mass produces it. It happens more often than you think. Be ready.
Good luck with your artistic ventures, and don’t forget to post your works on Hand Made at Money’s Mama!
Posted in eBay, Selling Online | 2 Comments » | Tags: ebay, get more traffic on ebay, how to sell on ebay, make money with ebay, promote ebay listings, promote ebay store, promote your ebay, selling on ebay
January 11, 2011
As a long time eBay shopper and seller, it pains me to say that artists and makers of hand made crafts are leaving eBay in droves. Some aren’t even giving it a chance. The reason is the fees and the competition with mass produced goods.
I personally still like eBay for some things. I’m able to move many of my more unique and mystical items fairly quickly there. The big problem though, is the “garage sale mentality”. I wouldn’t try to sell anything there that I couldn’t see letting go for less than $50. Most of what I sell there that goes on the first listing is under $10. As good a webmaster and writer as I’ve proven to be over the years, there is just no way I can compete selling a hand made crystal pendant for $30 that cost me $28 to make against a mass produced crystal pendant made in a factory China for $5 that cost them $0.05 to make.
The fees also add up. After an experimental run selling more than 20 items at a time, after the fees, I made maybe $10 total profit. So that told me to only sell there occasionally for the sake of getting new customers.
Basically, if you have unique items, eBay is good for advertisement. eBay is one of the largest and most popular shopping sites on the net. It’s also very Google friendly. For actually making money though, you’re better off building a blog and just using PayPal‘s “buy now” buttons. The same company gets the money, but with PayPal on your own site or blog, you only pay a transaction fee if the item actually sells.
Since I noticed that artists who sell on eBay can’t make money without outside promotion, and that so many are leaving for Etsy, which isn’t as popular, I made a site where people can post their listings for free, Hand Made at Money’s Mama. I’m trying to do my bit to turn the tide a bit.
On the one hand, I want to help other artists like me make more money, and on the other, I want eBay to see who they’re losing and how much money they’re losing from charging fees for items that don’t sell. In some cases, they’re fabulous items for which the final value fee to eBay would be great. In others, they’re losing people who would start an eBay store, but lose the will to when they’re already being charged more for fees than they’re making from their items getting lost in the crowd.
Either eBay needs to stop charging fees for hand made items unless they sell, or they need to give them priority in the search. Many of us would happily pay the fees and list more and more often if our items were given the traffic they deserve, but they’re not.
It’s a shame to see eBay turn from a favorite of the handmade community to little more than an online warehouse for mass produced, cheap trinkets and sweatshop clothes…a real shame. For now, as I said, listing there is good advertisement, but that’s all it is. So the money you spend there isn’t exactly lost, since it’s gaining you new customers. Just don’t get your hopes up that it will be a good place to host a store.
As with most things, it’s best to roll your own.
Posted in eBay, Money's Mama News, Selling Online, The Mega Sites, What Makes A Website Suck | No Comments » | Tags: art, crafts, ebay, hand made, handmade, marketing, online store, promotion, selling your art, selling your crafts
June 1, 2010
It’s not completely down, but it’s malfuctioning. I don’t know why it is, and can’t find any news on it yet. If anyone knows what happened, feel free to comment.
In the meantime, I’ve been considering possible solutions. WordPress.com and other large, high traffic sites are often targets for spammers and other nasties that less popular domains don’t have to worry about on the same scale. I’m making a list of sites that host WordPress powered blogs for free, in another post. Comment to get added to the list.
Posted in The Mega Sites, WordPress.com | No Comments » | Tags: wordpress, wordpress blog, wordpress down, wordpress hosted blogs, wordpress problems, WordPress.com
April 6, 2010
One of the sites where I teach online courses now has a great affiliate program. If you have an educational or information site, you want to get in on Universal Class.
They review their affiliates before accepting, and have a limit of how many they will allow. So get there and sign up now, while there is still room.
Universal Class is an online learning site where people from all over the world teach people anywhere in the world a wide variety of subjects ranging from core education to career training. They offer Continuing Education Units and certificates. Instructors correspond with students through course chat, email, and forums, and they support a variety of media. So if you have some knowledge that you’d like to share, you may want to become an instructor.
Whether as an affiliate or a teacher, you’ll be helping people by referring them to the site.
Posted in Affiliate Programs | No Comments » | Tags: affiliate program, direct sponsor, direct sponsorship, online courses, partner program, universal class
March 10, 2010
Because of new laws that require that purchases made through affiliates who reside in Colorado have to include sales tax, Amazon.com has deactivated their affiliates from that state. So now, Colorado joins North Carolina and Rhode Island on what’s basically an affiliate blacklist.
This means a massive loss of income for many webmasters unless they jump ship and change states. With more states considering the sales tax for online purchases, no matter which state the buyer resides in though, things look pretty grim for affiliates all over the country.
I’m anticipating dark days ahead for all affiliate programs if things continue like this.
Posted in Affiliate Programs, The Mega Sites | No Comments » | Tags: affiliate program, affiliates, amazon, colorado, discontinued
January 13, 2010
It looks like the problem with quotes and apostrophes in WordPress is back. It seems to be striking at random. Not all sites are affected, but many people are having issues with unwanted back slashes proliferating when they edit their posts.
It’s hard to say if it’s the server’s problem or WordPress’s. I’ll post information if I find a solution that people who aren’t PHP developers by trade can use.
So far, two of my WordPress sites are affected, but the rest aren’t. It’s strange.
Update, January 22, 2010
In order to fix the problem, my host had to turn off magic_quotes on the whole server, not just my directory. I still don’t understand why some sites were affected and some weren’t.
Posted in Problematic CMS, What Makes A Website Suck | 2 Comments » | Tags: apostrophe, backslash, magic quotes, quotes, wordpress
January 11, 2010
The changes in Google‘s algorithm and policies has many megasites squirming. For awhile, many were dominating the “web waves” by providing an easy way for experts in a variety of topics who maybe weren’t expert webmasters, to create visually appealing sites in a jiffy. Even better, many were able to make money through affiliate and ad programs, who wouldn’t have if they had to roll their own websites.
The problem is, as with many things, when the word got out, the spammers and spammists (people who make junk webpages just for the ad revenue) moved in. Tons upon tons of irrelevant, innacurate, and outright false information was posted by people who knew nothing about the topics on which they were writing. In some cases, the information itself was fairly accurate, but it’s just promotion for some kind of scam or scheme. The person who posts it seldom knows much or anything about what they’re basically regurgitating from an advertising page that they copy and paste from their affiliate program.
Thank goodness, Google has noticed, and has started to look out for things like duplicate pages. I don’t know how, but it seems they’re also looking into accuracy as well. I’m sure they don’t catch everything, but I’ve noticed that almost as soon as I get annoyed that a page is crap, I look for the same keywords a few days later, and it’s not on the first page anymore. I don’t think Google has a microchip implanted in my brain, so it looks like maybe, just maybe, they’re reviewing sites or looking at site reviews on social networks or forums.
If that’s the case, then there are a few mega sites that need to start checking themselves before Google does.
Topics I’ve personally noticed are problematic are recipes, braiding, sewing, and craft techniques, and exercise and nutrition. I recently felt actually compelled to post in some areas because the existing articles were just pure lies and bull. I sincerely hope that any how-to, education, or information sites out there start reviewing articles more carefully. If not, having tons of misinformation is going to make them less credible to readers and to search engines, which is going to cost them.
Basically, keywords don’t cut it anymore. If you’ve got a page on how to braid cornrows that doesn’t have instructions on how to braid cornrows, you suck and you’re not going to maintain a high rank or relevance. So check your information before you post it, and check information other people are posting on your site…or else.
Posted in The Mega Sites, What Makes A Website Suck | No Comments » | Tags: answer, answer sites, ehow, encyclopedia, how to, how to site, hubpages, info site, information site, large sites, mega site, online encyclopedia, squidoo, wiki
January 4, 2010
Because broken pages suck, and misalignment sucks.
Little is more annoying to any site member than popups. In that small group of things that are actually more annoying are transparent popovers. I don’t know exactly how these became popular. I’m considering blaming Facebook. Why in the world any site that isn’t Facebook is using them is beyond me. Maybe they don’t read enough of Facebook users’ complaints about the popovers not loading properly, and begging them to go back to navigating to an actual webpage when you click something.
No, instead, a something that would be a popup but isn’t quite, appears in a little square, with the rest of the window grayed out. You type things into it that are supposed to get sent to the site. When you’re done, it’s supposed to disappear, or show an X somewhere so you can close the darned thing, and return to the page you were at.
Instead, things don’t quite work out this way, but you have no recourse with a back button. If what was supposed to happen, didn’t, you have to do it five times to figure that out.
Then you need to send feedback, and guess what? The feedback form is also in a popover, and your report that there is a problem also may or may not get there.
Heck, whether you’re using IE or Firefox, the popover might not even load. You get a gray box error that says some obscure hieroglyphic java something or other doesn’t exist. How do you get it to work? Who knows? Who cares?
Obviously the people who run these sites don’t care about their users…just about having whatever’s supposedly the latest thing. Well this thing has rendered a few websites that I used to like, dead to me.
Posted in What Makes A Website Suck | No Comments » | Tags: annoying, annoying site trends, popovers, sites that suck, things that make people hate your website, things that will kill your website, upgrades from hell, upgrades that suck
December 26, 2009
In case some haven’t noticed, Amazon.com has discontinued their affiliate program for sites in states that are taxing referral revenue aside of what we already pay in income tax. It appears to still be an option for larger sites that can change server locations, but for smaller webmasters, we only still have product links up because there is nothing to replace it.
Information and content heavy websites often get “where to get…” email from our readers. We liked being Amazon affiliates especially when they expanded beyond books because that answered the question and made us look good. Now that it’s gone, many of us still show the links (and make Amazon money) because our readers haven’t suddenly stopped needing books or hard to find supplies.
An example, I wrote a page on how to make real coffee sometime ago. Problem is, where does someone find a cezve/ibrik (Middle Eastern coffee pot)? Even many people in Los Angeles can’t find them unless they get lucky. Amazon.com has merchants who sell them though…nice ones, and a wide selection of them. So this is why I still have their links up. For some items, they’re the only place people are going to find them because they allow the tiny shops in the middle of nowhere to sell their goods.
So now there’s this hole in the market. Over time, people are going to shift to doing direct advertisement for businesses because the Amazon links aren’t making them anything. If not, they’ll just not have links to where people can find the products. That’s what I did before Amazon. I just told people what the things were and where they were most likely to find them.
I noticed that Google has a feature called Google Base that makes it easier for people to find products through search. Businesses can upload their catalogs, and if someone is searching for that product, they get to it much more quickly than the old way of just spidering pages. It’s really neat, and could be applied to Adwords.
If Adwords advertisers could upload their catalogs with an ad blurb and small photo for each product, then the blurbs could display as ads. I think readers would like those ads better because it would bring them specific things they want, with less hassle than going to a site that may or may not have what they’re looking for in stock.
Google should make product boxes. That would make for attractive ads, happy readers, and more money for Adsense publishers and Adwords advertisers.
Posted in Contextual Ads Revenue, Opportunity Knocks | No Comments » | Tags: adsense, adwords, buy now, buy now button, buy this, google, hole in the market, market hole, opportunity, product link, product recommendation
December 20, 2009
Lately, many Google Adsense publishers are finding out that lots of ad space is leading to less ad revenue. Site owners selling themselves cheaply by having ads in multiple places on every page end up getting the lowest bidders and fewer clicks because it means the ads are often less relevant to the site context.
Here and there, I’ve picked up a few tips, and come up with a few of my own based on performance.
1. New sites should not bother giving up their traffic.
Until you start getting more than 100 hits a day, you shouldn’t bother giving up your traffic with ads in top-half spots on your site. If anything, use a banner or link unit at the bottom of the page so that your readers will have relevant exit links to go to instead of just someplace in their favorites.
The exceptions are if you’re getting constant “Where can I buy…” email from your readers, or your site is all about the exit. If you’re telling people where to buy stuff, Google is just bringing them more of that sort of information, which is a good thing. In that case, the ads are actually part of your content, and more is actually more. Max out ad space, but try to do it in a way that is graphically pleasing.
2. Sidebars and rectangles are where it’s at.
For your one prime space per content heavy page, use one sidebar on the left, or one medium or large rectangle. People like sidebars and squares. They don’t really seem to like leaderboards or banners at the top of pages for some reason.
3. Blend in the text colors, but roll your own borders on squares/rectangles.
Remember, you aren’t allowed to make any individual objects next to the ads, but you can use nice looking color or design borders. If you treat the ad space like it’s special, then your readers will too.
4. Get rid of ads that are not performing.
If a month goes by and you notice that a placement is not performing, just get rid of it. It’s probably either invisible to, or annoying your readers. It’s just better gone.
I’ll post more tips as I find them, but this should get you started on a higher clickthrough rate. The basics of what the steady earners are saying though, is that the reason their earnings are staying steady is because they don’t sell themselves cheap. Ads space should be much more scarce on your site so that it takes more money for bidders to get a spot.
Posted in Contextual Ads Revenue | No Comments » | Tags: ad frequency, ad placement, adsense, google, high earning, tips, webmaster
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