How to Sell Items on eBay

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When you setup a store, eBay creates your auction site for you.  You'll be able to customize certain aspects of it (title, links, etc.) and it lives on ebay.com's domain. 

There's no programming experience necessary and it can be setup in minutes.  eBay does all the background work and your visitors will use the regular eBay bidding engine, etc.

Click here for details on setting up your store.

Tips on Getting Traffic to Your Auction Site

If you want your auction website to be found in search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. then I highly suggest you create another site in addition to your eBay store.

Now you may ask, "If eBay is setting up my store for me then why do I need to create a separate web site?"

Here's why...

When eBay creates your auction site, the website address will be something like this:

http://stores.ebay.com/your_store_name

Now, you don't have to create a separate site.  You can just promote the auction page that eBay will give you.

However, the problem with that site is that it sits on eBay's domain so if you tried to submit it to Yahoo or other searchable engines and directories it would get ignored because it is considered a duplicate site within eBay. 

Yahoo wouldn't even consider adding this kind of site to their directory because ebay.com is already listed. There's no point in adding all of eBay's stores (sub-sites) when people can just go to the eBay home page and perform a search from there.

There are thousands and thousands of people who have created eBay auction stores to sell their products.  The search engines and directories won't clutter up their index with a bunch of eBay offspring websites that all look very similar.

The key to overcoming this and getting traffic to your unique eBay auction store is to create a separate site with your own domain (yourstore.com) that has content that the popular search engines and directories can find.  Then from this site you can link to your eBay auction store to begin selling your goods.

Here's an example...

Let's say you want to create an auction site that sells baseball cards.

You could create a 10-15 page content-only site about baseball (baseball-fun-facts.com for example).  Within this site you could add facts about the history of the sport, information on various baseball players, stadiums, and so on.  Then you would add this site to the search engines to start bringing in free traffic.

As I mentioned earlier, Yahoo won't list your eBay store in their directory since it's a duplicate of thousands of other similar auction sites. However, they may be more obliged to add your baseball-fun-facts.com website about baseball since it lives on its own, separate domain and it contains unique content about a niche topic.

Now you can use this separate site to promote your store. So in essence, this baseball content website will be acting as a doorway to your eBay auction site.

Here are the steps to getting your auction site up and running...

1) Register a domain name. (SomeName.com)

2) Choose a web hosting option.

3) Now create the pages to your website.  Remember this will be the site that will act as the doorway to your eBay auction site.  You will add it to Google, Yahoo, MSN,  and all the other searchable directories and search engines out there. 

Try to add as much content as possible.  The more content you have, the greater the chance it will be picked up by the search engines. Here's a tutorial on getting search engine traffic.

4) Next setup your eBay store and begin selling your products and services.

5) Link your eBay store to your website and vice versa.

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