Ebay may very well be one of the best list building and traffic generation tools available on the Internet.  So many marketers underestimate its potential and really drop the ball when it comes to incorporating it into their overall marketing strategy.  It is not just about selling old trinkets around the house and video games that you no longer play.  Ebay is a very powerful web site that can be used very effectively for market research, keyword research, lead generation, product sales and Internet traffic generation, all either for free or for significantly less than what you would pay from other sources.

One way to use Ebay is as a market research and keyword research tool. By simply creating a free account with them, you get the ability to search through all items that are available for sale.  By doing an “advanced search” you can do a search only for items in which the auction has already ended.  To do this, simply check off the option “completed items only.”

To do market research and keyword research on Ebay, simply do a search for all the completed items with some of the keywords in your target market.  This search will reveal to you what prospects are paying right now for items in your market as well as what keywords successful sellers are using to drive traffic to their auctions.  As you can probably imagine, this type of information is incredibly valuable to those who actually use such information to their advantage … which, by the way, is highly recommended.

Ebay can also be used for effective list building by making product sales. If you offer a low priced product (i.e. under $20) using their “Buy It Now” feature may very well work for you.  Even if you offer a higher priced product, you can still make money selling the product with their service.  However, you might be better off using their Classified Ads feature.  Please note that a new policy has come into effect that if you sell downloadable products online through Ebay, you MUST list that item as a classified ad.  Therefore, if you want to sell your downloadable products, make sure you either list it as a classified ad, or make it a physical product by putting it on a CD.

Ebay is also one of the most underutilized traffic generation web sites on the Internet today. Think about how much keywords in your target market go for on Google Adwords and Yahoo Sponsored Search.  By utilizing the power of Ebay to your advantage, you can generate targeted prospects for significantly less than what it would cost using a pay per click search engine.  For example, one common strategy for traffic generation is to offer a low cost downloadable report.  When your prospects purchase that report, you then send them to a download page where they download the report that they purchased and also provide them with an offer for the main product that you want to sell.

This is a great marketing strategy because you have already gotten the prospect to buy something from you. It is much easier to get a prospect that has already spent money with you to spend more money, than it is to get a prospect who has never spent money with you (and has joined your list for free) to spend money with you for the first time.  A certain percentage of prospects who buy your low cost report will also purchase your main item.  In addition, on your listing page, you can refer your prospects to check out your “About Me” page on Ebay.  On your About Me page, you can make an offer for anything you like, even a link to the main product you promote.

Keep in mind that Ebay is one of the HIGHEST visited web sites on the internet today boasting hundreds of millions of users from all across the world — ALL on that web site looking to BUY stuff.  Where else can you go to find a congregation of BUYERS for the products and services that you offer?  This is why if you are not using Ebay as part of your Internet marketing strategy, you need to strongly consider using it.

If you are interested in learning more highly effective ways to drive traffic to your websites than you should definitely consider The Analyzed Marketing website traffic generation program.  It will open your eyes to numerous off line and Internet marketing techniques available that can increase website traffic free and at a low cost!

Increase Website Traffic Using Free And Low Cost Internet Marketing Techniques!

I hope you have found this article informative.  I would love to hear your comments.

To Your Success,
Mark Garland

P.S. If you did indeed enjoy this post, than I would appreciate a digg to the top right, or possibly pass this on to friends who might like it?

Google Trends is definitely one feature that the statistic loving Internet marketer is going to love.

While Google Trends is currently still in testing mode, it looks as though Google Trends is basically very close to completion. Of course, everything that Google releases is generally in beta for a long time.

Providing a search term receives or has received enough searches in the past, visitors can enter this term into the Google Trends page and be presented with a graphical representation of the number of searches that have been conducted over the past 24 months or so.

While this gives some very useful information on the patterns of particular terms, it unfortunately doesn?t provide any actual figures. Whether this will change when Google Trends goes live or not remains to be seen. In the meantime, though, there is some relatively useful information to be found.

Pick a topic relevant to your own site and look at the search trends. If you find that the topic you searched for is depleting in searches then look for alternatives. Of course, be careful to use another tool to ensure that changing is the sensible thing to do.

You can also compare search terms to see which ones are more popular.

You can view how the time of year affect the search volume that certain keywords have.

Alternatively, if you?re just interested in discovering the rise or fall in popularity of specific terms then go to http://trends.google.com and give it a try.

Whether this will become one of Google?s biggest successes remains to be seen. This is unlikely because the information is mostly used by webmasters and there are many tools out there already that provide more comprehensive information. The good point about this information is that it is probably the most accurate there is.Aviva recommends that you promote your website by submitting it to AvivaDirectory.com

Source: Business Goals

One of the easiest and fastest way to make money online is through affiliate marketing. This is when you send visitors to someone else’s product sales page, they make the sale and deliver the product, and you get a percentage of the sale price as your commission (usually 50% or more for digital products).

The benefits of this are

1. You can get started almost immediately because you don’t have to create a product, write the sales page, design the website, develop marketing materials, or set up the ordering, billing & delivery system.
2. You have almost no investment of time because you don’t have to do the customer support or deal with billing or technical issues.
3. You have nearly zero risk because you already know the product sells. So if you send visitors you will get paid.

Looking at these benefits, it’s clear that affiliate marketing is the way to go!

The downside is…

After all your hard work of generating traffic to the sales page, you will never see any of those visitors again. Most of them will not buy on their first visit, which means you’re losing over 90% of the traffic right off the top. And of the 10% or less that do buy, the product owner will be able to sell to them again, but you will not.

What’s the solution?

Simply put, you need to capture the name and email of your visitors *before* sending them to the product sales page. This way you can follow up with them and keep sending them back to the sales page to increase your chances of making the sale. And if you’re really on top of your game, you’ll then send to a pre-sales page in between.

Here’s what these affiliate marketing strategies will do for you:

1. You’ll be building your own list of potential customers that you can market to again and again.
2. You’ll be pre-selling them by providing valuable information and then casually linking to the product sales page in the context of this information.

In order to set a system like this up, you will need the following affiliate marketing tools:

1. A Video Squeeze Page (with video)
2. One or more content-rich Pre-Selling Pages
3. At least a 5-Part Email Followup Series

The video squeeze page is where you’ll direct your traffic instead of directly to the product sales page. It captures the name and email of your visitors and puts them into your autoresponder, which then begins sending out the 5-part email series. Then it redirects them to your pre-selling pages after they subscribe to your email series.

All of this together increases your chances of making the sale by up to 500% so it’s well worth the effort of setting it up. And once it’s set up, it runs automatically - you just keep sending visitors to the squeeze page.

If you don’t have the time or expertise to set it all up yourself, you can use something like Affiliate Silver Bullet. Services like this design the enter system (the video, the video squeeze page, the email series, the content pages, etc). The benefit is that it’s much less expensive then you could do it yourself, and it’s instantly set up. The downside is that other people will be using the same affiliate tools as you. But the internet is pretty big, so this isn’t much of a concern.

The other route you can take is to hire people on Elance to create and implement the various aspects for you. Either way, it’s an important step that you need to take if you’re going to be serious about your business.