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Tips and Tricks for Using eBay Search

07 2008 Tuesday

By Clint Herman in Featured

If you know what you’re doing, you can quickly find what you’re looking for on eBay. Here are a few golden rules.

Be specific: If you’re searching for the first edition of the original Harry Potter book, you’ll get further searching for ‘harry potter rowling philosopher’s stone first edition’ than you will searching for ‘harry potter’. You’ll get fewer results, but the ones you do get will be far more relevant.

Spell wrongly: It’s a sad fact that many of the sellers on eBay just can’t spell. Whatever you’re looking for, try thinking of a few common misspellings - the chances are that fewer people will find these items, and so they will be cheaper.

Get a thesaurus: You should try to search for all the different words that someone might use to describe your item, for example searching for both ‘TV’ and ‘television’, or for ‘phone’, ‘mobile’ and ‘cellphone’. Where you can, though, leave off the type of item altogether and search by things like brand and model.

Use the categories: Whenever you search, you’ll notice a list of categories at the side of your search results. If you just searched for the name of a CD because you want to buy that CD, you should click the ‘CDs’ category to just look at results in that category. Why bother looking through a load of results that you don’t care about?

Don’t be afraid to browse: Once you’ve found the category that items you like seem to be in, why not click ‘Browse’ and take a look through the whole category? You might be surprised by what you find.

Few people realise just how powerful eBay’s search engine is - a few symbols here and there and it’ll work wonders for you.

Wildcard searches: You can put an asterisk (*) into a search phrase when you want to say ‘anything can go here’. For example, if you wanted to search for a 1950s car, you could search for ‘car 195*’. 195* will show results from any year in the 1950s.

In this order: If you put words in quotes (”") then the only results shown will be ones that have all of the words between the quote marks. For example, searching for “Lord of the Rings” won’t give you any results that say, for example “Lord Robert Rings”.

Exclude words: Put a minus, and then put any words in brackets that you don’t want to appear in your search results. For example: “Pulp Fiction” -(poster,photo) will find items related to Pulp Fiction but not posters or photos.

Either/or: If you want to search for lots of words at once, just put them in brackets: the TV example from earlier could become ‘(TV,television)’, which would find items with either word.

So once you’ve found your bargain item, bid for it and won it, what if it all goes wrong? Don’t worry - eBay has a thorough dispute resolution procedure, and we’ll cover it in some depth in the next article, so you’ll be prepared if the worst happens.

Clint Herman is a successful eBay seller with over 6 years experience selling on eBay. He also loves teaching others how to sell on eBay. He is the author of “How to Get Started Selling on eBay,” which is a beginner’s guide to selling on eBay designed for people who are new to selling on eBay. The guide is available at http://www.beginnersauctionguide.com/ar.html

Optimizing YouTube

07 2008 Tuesday

By Mree Vu in Featured

Why is making videos an effective way to market your business and/or product? With hundreds of videos being uploaded to YouTube daily, it’s not surprising that thousands of videos are also being viewed daily. Many viewers watch YouTube as their main source of information, news and entertainment.

For those unfamiliar or new to internet marketing, YouTube is a popular video website service where ANYONE can upload videos for the viewing public. Although videos can be in any category with virtually unlimited topics, if you want to utilize YouTube to market your business or product, there are certain “tricks of the trade” that can be helpful.

Let’s face it, the point of uploading your video is to have people view it. Whether it’s to inform, educate or entice, your message won’t get delivered if no one is watching your video. So how can you increase your odds of having your video appear on page one, two or three on YouTube?

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of YouTube, if you are looking to market using videos, you should be aware of a few things. First of all, it takes four to five weeks to build your presence on YouTube. Don’t expect to make sales after uploading one video in one week. Making videos is also another way to let your viewers know you before they ever pick up the phone to contact you. If they like you and/or your message, you will have a better chance of connecting with the viewer.

Viewers like to watch your videos or channel many times before they will even contact you. So it’s a good idea to have 10 videos or more in your arsenal. The more videos you have, the better your chances of someone watching them.

Also, since a prospect may wait two weeks to contact you, if they are serious and they are watching YouTube everyday, they will continue to see your videos pop up as they surf around. Generally, when they see many videos from one person, it will pique their curiosity and they will view your videos or channel. Having multiple videos will help build your presence on YouTube.

Now, back to making YouTube work for you. Prior to Google’s purchase of YouTube, video rankings were based on the number of views. Thus, the more views you had on your video, the higher percentage you had of that video being on the top pages of YouTube.

In response to that, what some entrepreneurs did to increase their chances of being on page one was purchase views from vendors. Sometimes these were real viewers, but more often than not, these were just numbers put up on the videos to make it appear as if real people were watching the video.

For example, if you see a video that was uploaded five days ago and there are 5,000 - 10,000 views, it is most likely that the views were purchased.

Since Google now owns YouTube, the previous rules no longer apply. Instead, searching for videos on YouTube is similar to Google’s search engine. For instance, if you were to type in GLOBAL RESORTS NETWORK, YouTube would display all the videos matching that title. Your video may appear on page one or page twenty.

So how do you get your videos to appear on the top pages? Google is now looking at the RELEVANCE of your video. So, in addition to the TITLES, Google also looks at the DESCRIPTION you’ve written for that video. If your description has little to do with your title, your video will mostly likely not be on the top pages.

For example, if your title is HOW TO SHOP FOR A SPONSOR, and your description talks about vacations, it’s obvious that the two do not compliment the other. Your title or key words you used in your title should appear several times in your description. So do yourself a favor and spend some time writing your descriptions. It should be a short summary of your video and should reflect your title.

You can also include some basic information about your product and/or company in your description. But it shouldn’t be the main thing you include in your description unless you are making a video just about your product or company.

Here are some additional tips for your descriptions. Always include your contact information (name, email, phone number, and website) at the beginning of your description.

Here’s how you should include your website: HTTP://WWW.YOURWEBSITE. If you don’t include the HTTP://, a hyperlink will not be created. You want your prospect to be able to click on it and go directly to your website.

Sometimes watching videos is an emotional response. Remember when I mentioned that some marketers will purchase views for their video? They do that because when a viewer is presented with SO MANY videos, most will likely click on a video that has more views. If you have hundreds or thousands of views, the viewer will think that since the number is so high, it must be a video worth watching.

You can find many vendors to purchase views from through the search engines. But if you do purchase views, be sure to place them carefully on your video. Put them on videos that have been uploaded 3-4 weeks ago. A video uploaded 3 weeks ago with 1,500 views is more believable than a video 5 days ago with 5,000 views.

There’s no time like the present to start marketing on YouTube. So start making your videos and don’t forget to include value added information. And lastly, HAVE FUN with your videos!

Mree Vu is a top team trainer and is dedicated to mentoring her team to success. Discover Mree’s steps to success. Visit her at: http://www.stellarsuccess101.com

Top 3 Google SEO Linking Strategies

07 2008 Tuesday

By Michael Small in Featured

Times have changed. Just a couple short years ago, about 60% to 70% of your website ranking success depended on links. Now up to 85% of your page’s search engine rank on Google relates to how it is linked. More specifically, the quality and number of inbound links.

Google looks at everything from the “authority level” of the linked sites to their “PageRank” and even the IP class they use (Internet Protocol designation.) While we don’t have hours to get into every little detail, I have provided three simple surefire ways to get hundreds of top rate inbound links to any page or your site you wish. And this is the absolute fastest way to get on top of Google and stay there for the long haul. So, here we go…