Ebay stores were designed to help increase your overall sales on Ebay. While your store might receive some limited promotion from the Ebay site, it’s really up to you to promote your Ebay store and to drive traffic to it. If you rely on Ebay alone, you will eventually hit a glass ceiling that you’ll need to bust through. You could start your own blog to promote your store, but that requires a long term commitment. An easier solution is to use Squidoo lenses to promote your Ebay store. The stand alone page format of Squidoo is the perfect way to add a non-dated “lens” to advertise your store products.
If you’re at all familiar with selling on Ebay, then writing a Squidoo lens should come naturally to you. As a seller, you’re already writing lengthy, enticing product descriptions to help sell your product. A Squidoo lens is just an extension of that, but also can be a collection of your items by niche, keyword, or by store page.
Think of your Squidoo lenses as billboards for your Ebay store. Each billboard has to have a unique message that the reader will be able to interpret in just seconds. When buyers are using search engines, the title of the lens should be clear, and the lens should deliver exactly what the title implies. If you sell kitchen gadgets, then your lens should tell people exactly about specific aspects of kitchen gadgets. You could separate lenses by brand, by type of product (like wooden spoons, mixers, or mixing bowls), or even by color. The more specific you get with the focus of your lens, the more likely you are to land a sale through the lens. The more lenses you create, the more likely you are to increase sales on Ebay.
The other major reason Squidoo is perfect for Ebay sellers is the Ebay module. This module can pull a feed from your store based on the keywords you input into the module. So, if you sell kitchen gadgets, and you’d like to make a lens on wooden spoons, you could make separate Ebay modules for bamboo wooden spoons, Calphalon wooden spoons, large wooden spoons, or any other types of wooden spoons you have in your store. This can send targeted traffic to your store which you’ll receive a commission from if they make a purchase. Even if the buyer clicks through to the main Ebay site and makes a purchase, you will still get a commission from that sale on your Squidoo lens. This can add to your overall Ebay income, and direct a whole new market of buyers right into your store.
Seven Things to Make Sure You Add to Your Ebay Store Squidoo Lens
- Use more than just the Ebay modules. While these are great at sending targeted traffic and they do stay updated with your latest items if filtered by keyword, the Ebay module is ignored by search engines. That means you’ll need other content besides this module (see the SEO for Ebay stores lens).
- Include a link to your Ebay store on the lens. Use a keyword phrase that you would like to rank for in search engines like “kitchen gadgets.”
- Link to individual Ebay store pages. You have 5 custom store pages and also your store categories. Link to these pages using keyword phrases that match the names of the pages to see an increase in traffic.
- Add photos to your lens. People need to see photos of your products, and lots of them. You can even create your own custom graphics directing people into your store, like a banner or button.
- Include the uses for the product you are selling on the lens. Don’t just show them the product, tell them why they need it and how it’s useful to them.
- Link to all of your other Ebay store lenses. This can help your other lenses be found by search engines, and also create traffic flow between the lenses.
- Use a tag that’s specific to your store in the tags section. This could be the name of your store, or the products that you sell. This way, more of your lenses will show up in the discovery module, and you’ll have your own tag page on Squidoo for that term.
After you’ve created your network of lenses, you can start to promote them on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites. From there, the next natural step would be to build your own blog to promote your store as well.
Besides on Professional Squids and Squidoo, I also have an Ebay blog to help increase your store sales even more. Head to the Ebay Seller Tips Blog today for free advice and additional training. Some of the most recent topics include using Squidoo and Ebay, handling problems with buyers, and using the DSR system to your advantage.
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