Promoting your online business

[ojleap]

Hi all.

Just wanted peoples advise on how they currently promote their online businesses.

We currently have:

• Ebay Shop where the majority of our business comes from (around 85%)
• Our own online website (15%)
• Tazbar (0%)
• Ebid (back again, currently 0%)

I also use GoogleBase (I have posted more information on this in the promotions forum), as well as mailshot customers (using MailBlaster coupled with AUTHSMTP).

Has anyone got any really good tricks on getting some good promotion going? We are in a saturated market so Adwords and the Yahoo promotion campaign (name escapes me atm) are useless, and I have never trusted click-pay systems.

Any ideas appreciated - and if I can offer any help to anyone who wants it I will be more than willing to do so...

ATB
OJ

[merlin]

just link from web pages to ebid etc.you can create loads of free web pages and even add a ebid search box to them so people can just browse from your pages through ebid listings so they don`t need to join ebid unless they see something they like

[Rednosty]

We did this in this thread!

http://helpdesk.ebid.net/showthread.php?t=94631

[ojleap]

Haha, apologies, not been here for a while so obviously missed loads...

[*artsbanquet*]

Could you possibly do links exchange with people with websites who sell similar items to yours(but who are not direct competitors?)

[ojleap]

Possibly, its something we have looked at, but unfortunately, for every 100 emails you send with link requests, only one gets read - it takes an age to pull the information together and then do something with it.

One thing Ebay offers (excuse me for keep singing their praises, but we have had a lot of success over there so it makes sense to offer other practical possibilites here) is the ability to link to other shops - so when you are they sell something, the buyer is given a cross promotion to allow them to look at your items and your cross promotion companies too... I have had some success using this before, and just started building back up (think of it as a webring).

ATB
OJ

[slinkyri]

Possibly, its something we have looked at, but unfortunately, for every 100 emails you send with link requests, only one gets read - it takes an age to pull the information together and then do something with it.

One thing Ebay offers (excuse me for keep singing their praises, but we have had a lot of success over there so it makes sense to offer other practical possibilites here) is the ability to link to other shops - so when you are they sell something, the buyer is given a cross promotion to allow them to look at your items and your cross promotion companies too... I have had some success using this before, and just started building back up (think of it as a webring).

ATB
OJ

promoting other items you are selling is a big problem over here unfortunately.......

http://helpdesk.ebid.net/showthread.php?t=94616

I have been promoting the same items for a year now. Questions to support have proved pointless - it seems they CAN'T do it for love nor money.

[ojleap]

Its a shame really, but hey, we are comparing a huge company (EBay) to a company being run by two guys part-time... not much to say beyond that really...

More of a shame as I'm sure the guys don't need this as much as EBay need to keep funding their shareholders - so its probably ticking over for G&M nicely whereas Ebay continually need to come up with new ideas and promotions...

[*artsbanquet*]

One thing Ebay offers (excuse me for keep singing their praises, but we have had a lot of success over there so it makes sense to offer other practical possibilites here) is the ability to link to other shops - so when you are they sell something, the buyer is given a cross promotion to allow them to look at your items and your cross promotion companies too... I have had some success using this before, and just started building back up (think of it as a webring).

ATB
OJ

I actually removed that cross promotions thing from my Ebay auctions as I didn't want to promote my competitors stores on my listings.

Is it really a good thing? Wait a second. I think you mean that when an item is sold, other items available from you are also available for your buyers to see.

But did you know that on your buyers page, if you don't remove the "cross promotions with other stores" function, your competitors items are also displayed? I didn't realize this till someone mentioned it on the forums there. You can't see it unless you are the buyer and looking at the page from their computer.

[ojleap]

Hi *artsbanquet*

I don't actually cross-promote with our competition, what I try to do is find companies that sell comlementary products - in our case, perfume, shoes, boots, handbags, jewellery etc. That way, we all benefit from each other whilst not actually stepping on each others toes...

ATB
OJ