I wouldn’t call myself an eBay guru, but I do use it from time to time to sell good used items that we no longer need.  In most cases, we tend to sell electronics because I’m a gadget lusting geek that has mastered the justification of trading up and selling hand-me-downs in order to buy new shinier things.

With over 10 years experience in working with the design and marketing of ecommerce sites much of my time spent has involved writing good copy.  In a fiercely competitive environment, good content makes all the difference when trying to sell products or services.  Knowing how to write good sales copy doesn’t come from a book, school, or any online training course.  It comes from testing.  Anything that can be measured can be improved.

For a fun exercise, I’ve decided to change how I write my sales copy when selling my most recent items on eBay.

Anyone that has used eBay before either to buy or sell an item knows that a portion of the buying decision comes from trust.  Either trust in the seller to truthfully describe the new or used item or trust in the buyer to supply payment.  Luckily, eBay has many systems in place to protect both the buyer and seller but still when a buyer is presented with multiple sellers that offer the same item, what makes your item different than all the rest?

Reputation of the seller is one of the main factors that a buyer will use to decide on whether to purchase an item from that seller.  But, one of the most looked over methods to sell an item quickly and for the most value is not only in the reputation or even the item itself that is being sold.

Writing Ad Copy That’s Personal

My theory was simple .  Could I sell an item on eBay quicker and for a higher amount if I put more thought into the description content and personalized it.  For a successful test, I would put two auctions out for the same exact camera at different times but with different descriptions.

What do you mean Personalize it?

Of course I don’t mean for you to reveal a family secret or something.  Instead, it’s important to appeal to the buyer on a personal level, especially with a used item.  Other than the basic item specs that can be found at any electronics forum or website, the buyer probably has other questions such as:

1. Why is this item being sold?

2. Why should I believe you?

3. What makes you so different?

4. Why do you need to sell this item?

5. Will I get any added benefit (monetarily or emotionally) from buying this item from you?

Telling a Good Story

A thought provoking, understandable, or even funny story behind what is being sold can make all the difference in making the buyer remember you.  Everyone likes to hear a good story, so long as it’s kept brief.

The Experiment

I chose to put up for auction at two different times and under the same eBay account a Nikon Coolpix S230 digital camera.  For the first posting, I used eBay’s convenient product matching to auto-populate much of the cameras specs and even the picture.  After looking at what other sellers were offering this camera for used I chose to start the bidding at $90 and offer a “Buy It Now” price of $120.  Don’t forget about the “Buy It Now” price point, I’ll get back to that later.

The Control) An auction for the Nikon Coolpix S230 Digital Camera listing all specs and a very basic description that wrote: “Camera less than two months old, in perfect condition!”

The Result) After a 3 day auction, this ad received 3 bids and reached $98 dollars.  I canceled the auction explaining that the item was no longer for sale and then posted a new auction, but this time with a different description.

The Variable) An auction for the Nikon Coolpix S240 Digital Camera listing all specs and a description that included a brief story about how, why, and where the camera was originally bought.  Why we are selling it…  I made a little funny about how this camera was for my wife as a “push present” to take pictures of our first newborn baby boy and how she wanted a camera of her own.  I also explained that we need to sell this camera because now my wife would love to get a new iPod Touch instead and so here we are, selling this camera! (True Story)

The Result) After a 3 day auction, this ad received 13 bids and the winning bid totaled $152.50 not including shipping!  I even had prospects interested in the camera email with questions and also make a funny personal comment about my situation and how similar it was to experiences they too have had in the past.

That’s right, making my sales ad copy increased my sales by nearly 40%!

I can’t truthfully say that I’ve conducted a flawless experiment here, but this approach to writing good sales ad copy has helped me both professionally and personally in online selling.  Making a personal connection with the prospect can be more profitable than any other combined online marketing effort if executed properly and respectfully.

I would love to hear your comments, thoughts, or questions about this and I recommend you try this approach when trying to sell your next item.

An article by Urvaksh Karkaria in the Atlanta Business Chronicle recently sparked my interest and the comment I made on his article tempted me to write a bit more about the subject of using Twitter as a business tool.

Obviously, this is a broad topic and doing business on Twitter could mean many things.  For this rambling, I would like to talk about using Twitter to promote your business or brand.

Since 2007 when I started using Twitter, I’ve seen the brave new world of life streaming evolve and watch new behaviors form naturally as would any social community.  The things we do on Twitter today, such as Retweeting, hashtags, @mentions, and more all began because someone (who know’s who?) decided they would try something new that solved a problem and it caught on after becoming socially acceptable.  For example, there was a need for Twitter users to “tag” their mini-blogs with some sort of keyword that would help their tweet be more easily “indexed” since a Twitter search engine (formerly Summize) was born.  The very nature of coming up with creative new ways in order to better communicate in a non-self serving way is grounds enough for a tipping point to occur and usher in a new trend.

Why don’t more businesses that join Twitter realize this and take the same approach?

Many businesses have joined because someone essentially proclaimed, “There’s GOLD up in them hills!”, and so the decision maker for that business begins panning for that gold asking the nearest tech-savvy person of the office to open an account and get Tweeting.

In order to successfully conduct yourself online personally or professionally in the online social world, you must first earn the right to be self-serving. Period.

Let’s take, for example, a real life business networking gathering.  For any of you who have ever attended a business networking event, surely you have encountered at least one person that has awkwardly approached your with business card in hand and immediately started giving you “the pitch.”  This always amuses me, especially being from the south.  Some would say, the difference in doing business in the North compared to the South is that when doing business in the North you do business first and then maybe you’ll become friends where in the South you become friends first and then maybe you’ll do business.

That’s right folks, I said it.  The Twitter community and most any other social networking platform is how business is done in the South.  Can I get some support from my fellow ATLien’s?

Back to my original point…

Walking around a business networking event and throwing your “pitch” out there like a machine gun with business cards as bullets is equivalent to how I see so many businesses use Twitter to promote their brand.  Businesses that mass follow anyone just to get a follow back or repeatedly tweet self-serving messages has degraded my own experience of Twitter since I began using it.  It has a name too…

SPAM

My suggestion to any business out there that has been on Twitter or has recently joined is to try to take on the same approach that the early-adopters of this new communication platform did by trying to:

1. Solve a problem
2. Add value
3. Interact with the community
4. Spark debate
5. Ask questions

Perhaps you have a story or an opinion about how to use Twitter to promote your business.  If so, let’s hear it.  Please comment and retweet this message, I hope to make this page a resource for some great feedback on non-spammy ways that businesses can use Twitter to promote without degrading the Twitter experience for us all.

With so many businesses pulling back in today’s shaken economy, especially with advertising dollars, maybe you could be taking advantage of the situation by setting your goals to thrive, not just survive.

Below are 5 Steps to set a good foundation for consistent growth for an online business looking to expand.  To learn more, stay tuned for an upcoming video interview with Brent of ThriveAmerica.com and yours truly.

STEP ONE : Identify your Biggest Pains

Don’t act desperate and just try everything out there that claims to make your business succeed. You’ll drown. You know your business better than anyone, so decide what key “pains” you have right now and focus on solving them first. Keep an open mind, however. Recognize new opportunities without getting sidetracked.

Action Item: Do a mind map or make a drawing of some sort to help get your ideas on paper. You’ll be surprised how much better you feel after getting everything on paper.

STEP TWO : Know Your Competitor

If the sites you consider as your competitor is getting over 4x the traffic you are, they probably aren’t your competitors. They will be, however, if you dissect valuable information from a competitive analysis and learn more about your market. Focus on data such as, where your competitor is getting traffic from, what keywords your competitor is using, and visitor trending.

Action Item: Compare your site’s traffic to a few of your competitor’s websites by using Alexa, Compete, or Quantcast. Pay particular attention to trends that might tell you something.

STEP THREE : Study Keywords

Keywords will tell you how to best direct your online marketing campaign. Not only can you find where the largest search volume is, but you can also find what most professional SEO professionals would consider “low-hanging fruit,” terms that get decent traffic but have low competition to rank well on search engines. Finally, a keyword study can help identify a niche that you might not have even originally considered.

Action Item: Start out with at least 5 seed keywords. These keywords should be a somewhat vague assumption as what you imagine someone would type to find you or keywords that you would consider to be the most beneficial to be ranked #1. Use keyword discovery tools such as Wordtracker, Trellian, or KeywordSpy to help you find even more relevant keywords and even niche keywords or “low-hanging fruit.”

STEP FOUR : Time to Test and Drive Qualified Traffic

It’s time to put the competitive analysis and keyword study to use. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing is a very quick way to quickly bring traffic to your site and begin collecting valuable data from real live and qualified prospects.

Action Item: Start a Google Adwords campaign and commit to an advertising budget that you feel comfortable with for at least two weeks, preferably one month. Load up your first campaign with the seed keywords you’ve started with and additional keywords you’ve discovered. Follow Google’s instructions carefully. Now may be the time for you to look for professional help in setting up and managing a well run PPC campaign.

STEP FIVE : Optimize your Site for SEO and Conversion

Hopefully you’ve seen some success in your test! Now that you have some data to analyze, you can use it to improve On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO to drive organic search engine traffic to your site. Focus on making your site convert. Is there a call to action? Can the visitor see how to contact you easily? What is the value? What makes you different from any other competitor? Is it being advertised?

Action Item: Use a reputable free website seo optimizer to show how you can improve On-Page SEO for your site. Follow the instructions carefully or get a trusted seo company to do the work for you. Use other great web analytics tools such as ClickTale, CrazyEgg, or RobotReplay to further analyze your visitors behaviors on your site. Start out by finding where bounce rates are highest and identifying conversion funnels.

This of course isn’t all there is, but these 5 simple steps are a great way to get a solid foundation for a long lasting growth oriented online marketing campaign.  Please comment!

If you have brand new internet marketing, you probably must to read tones of internet marketing e-books to start your business if you want to become a good internet marketer. Probably you have questions about pervasive practices which everyone “in the know” take for granted, but which you find confusing.

I realized this when I got into this conversation with a lawyer to twitter last week, and I opened my eyes to how people perceive the internet marketing, when they are no longer involved in it. Below are some questions and detailed answers.

1. Does anyone read those long sales letters?

I wrote a few myself, but does anyone really read that?

The answer is: “No, buyers read them.”

Get the difference? If it’s something that will resolve your problem, you’ll be very interested in what it says. Buying is often a big decision, which requires sufficient information for the buyer to feel comfortable.

I will use this analogy to explain: Say you are looking for a mate, and the only way to selection one are writing letters to you about themselves. Now, you think you prefer a brief letter, or a long one which describe in detail what it would be possible to know about your potential mate?

If you aren’t looking for a mate, a long and detailed letter “Why should you choose me” will seem too long because you aren’t in the market for a mate. Or, if it is clear from the beginning of the letter that the type of mate is not for you, you’ll skip that particular letter without reading and look at the letter from another mate. If the second appears much more a good game for you, are you reading more? Something tells me you are. In fact, not only you’ll read everything, maybe you will reread just to make sure that mate it’s right for you.

However, there is another reason why buyers wouldn’t read a long sales letter: they already trust the marketer and are convinced they’re already sold. These people hit the sales page and head down as fast as they can to buy.

How is that possible? Marketer has spent a lot of time and effort creating relationships with customers and building trust with them. This is why blogs, email marketing and internet marketing e-books are good. This is often called content marketing or relationship marketing.

2. Why do not show our real site?

One of the things you see everywhere is a particular byproduct of marketing to marketers: you can not actually see the site used by marketers to make millions. This type of internet marketing is only a small part of total internet marketing. Most marketers are too busy making money with their sites and don’t even want to join the “guru” of business.

The reason you can’t see marketers actual sites is not because the marketer is a big liar. And not because what they are doing is evil.

The reason is simple and obvious once you understand: they hide their sites because to reveal them would cause to lose its advantage in this market.

It is human nature to follow someone else who do what already works in such a way that will work for you. Now, if you work better than the other guy, don’t you deserve your earnings?

Not only is natural and normal, it’s smart. If you plan to create an eCommerce site now and you do not have to look at Amazon for an example how to do it right, you might be an idiot.

3. Are those references and case studies for real? How do we know that they are not false?

If you’d like to earn a lot of money on long-haul, do you think you can survive and prosper long if you have fake testimonials and case studies? This is the reasons why there are no URLs for those recommendations: on a sales page, the only link that should be there is the buy button. Any other link can distract the reader and then he will leave the page.
In internet marketing the case study is nothing more than conversations with clients who have succeeded with the product being sold.
In these talks, the aim is to demonstrate that it is possible to succeed with this product. Because others succeeded, you can also. But you will not see the domain or web page or the keywords revealed. “Protection of magic words” applies to the case studies.

You can see screenshots of money earned, or in another market, another kind of unverifiable evidence. For example, if I sell SEO ebooks on how to be on the 1st page on Google, I will have screenshots with sites which are #1 in Google in my SEO ebook. Is there any way to prove its certainly real proof? In most cases, no. This means that evidence is false? In most cases, no, it’s real. I would not be in business very long if I pretended images that could be easily found elsewhere.

We are all familiar with “before and after” images used by miracle diet marketers. In some photos, you can say is the same person, but in others look like two different people. Or they look “photoshopped”. It is possible to do the same with screenshots and totally lie about earnings and numbers. But when thousands of people bought a product that does not work, the marketer wouldn’t be in business very long.