Taming the eBay Search Engine

If you know what you're doing, you can quickly find what you're looking for on eBay - and the more you
know about how buyers find you, the easier you'll find it to be found. Here are a few golden searching
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 be 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 - you might find a few items here that have slipped through
the cracks.

Get a thesaurus
You should try to search for all the different words that someone might use to describe an 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, you should click the 'CDs' category to look at results in that
category only. 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.

Don't get too tied up learning the ways of the search engine, though: a surprising number of eBay users
don't search at all, preferring to look through eBay's category system and save their favourites in
their browser. The next email will show you how to make sure these people can find you too.

About the author:
To find the best home based business ideas and opportunities so you can work at home visit:
http://www.pandanwangi.pobs.me
http://www.homebizrevelations.blogspot.com
http://www.healthismorepreciousthanwealth.blogspot.com

How to Use eBay to Grow Your Other Businesses

Most of the people who make money from eBay don't actually make all of that money on eBay. There are all sorts of ways you can use eBay to give your existing businesses a helping hand.

The Supply Side.

If you have any leftover stock or used items from another business you run, then why not sell them on eBay? You can make this a regular thing, using it to get rid of things that won't sell for the premium you ask for in a shop, or items that are no longer in demand in the town or city where your business is based.

You can really make a lot of money this way, if you know what you're doing. You will, of course, already be an expert in the items you're selling, as you use them in your business, and you'll know that the items are of high enough quality to be sellable. This is a whole new market for your old inventory!

Not only that, of course, but remember that your good eBay reputation will make you a great buyer! If there's ever anything you want to get for your business, the chances are you'll be able to get it on eBay for a discount.

The Sales Side.

Here, though, is where the true power of eBay lies. eBay give you an 'About Me' page, where you can write anything you like and link anywhere you like. This means that you can get traffic to your business' website by linking to your website from your About Me page and linking to your About Me page from each auction.

To create an About Me page, just click on 'Community' on the toolbar, scroll to the bottom of the page, and click 'Create an About Me page'. You then get the option to either enter your own HTML or let eBay guide you through the process. All you need to do is write a little about your website, link to it, and you're done - you'll notice that more people start to come to your site straight away.

There are thousands of people who swear by this technique to drive traffic from eBay to their website - with a little persuasive sales copy on your site, they say, you can sell directly to buyers, cutting out the eBay middleman. What's more, all the traffic you'll get will be targeted - because the people who click through were interested in your auction to begin with.

This can be a really powerful technique, especially if you've already got an e-commerce site. Even if you haven't, you might find it worth your time to set up a website that does nothing but list your eBay inventory with a few dollars off each item, with a PayPal 'Buy Now' button for each item. Then simply make the link to your About Me page read 'Visit my website for even more bargains!', and you're done.

Now that you've seen how to drive visitors to your website, maybe you'd like a little help getting your auction in front of buyers. That's why our next email will show you the secrets of taming the eBay search engine.

About the author:
To find the best home based business ideas and opportunities so you can work at home visit:
http://www.pandanwangi.pobs.me
http://www.homebizrevelations.blogspot.com
http://www.healthismorepreciousthanwealth.blogspot.com