How to Start an eBay Bidding War

A bidding war is where two or more people bid furiously against one another, each desperate to own a particular item.

Phenomenal results are possible, such as last month, where a postcard by artist A. R. Quinton, depicting a cliff view at Herne Bay, fetched £100 plus. By anyone’s standards, the card was worth about £3 for the view and maybe a few pounds more for the artist.

I checked and found that two serious bidders, one of Herne Bay topographical postcards, the other a Quinton enthusiast, had launched a bidding war that was eventually won by the Herne Bay collector, or was it the seller of this rather common-a-garden postcard?

Such events are not uncommon. My own best selling item this month, a pair of vintage cufflinks with ancient Greek Coins, for which I paid £3 at a flea market, went for £34, with the two final bidders being a collector of cufflinks and another of Greek coins. The Greek coin collector won.

You only need two bidders and it doesn’t matter if they’re interested in the same product or specific parts of your product or listing. The end result is always the same; more money for you.

You’re looking for just two people in the whole wide world, these tips will help you find them.

* List a minimum two items (or themes) in one lot. The trick is to make each item valuable in its own right and appealing to more than one person. The cufflinks and postcard are good examples. I’ve seen other wars raging over two completely unrelated postcards listed together; two books bearing no relation to one another; a pack of artist illustrated playing cards where one bidder wanted the cards and the other collected all things artist related.

* List in two eBay categories to achieve maximum market penetration. You can also list in two shop categories. For the Quinton/Herne Bay postcard I’d list under ‘Artist Drawn Postcards’ and ‘Topographical’.

* Research and use commonly used keywords for your product to attract the highest audience for your item. Go to eBay Pulse pages for common keywords or use software such as Adword Analyzer to study most commonly used key words and phrases for specific subjects. Although developed largely for search engine optimisation and Google advertising campaigns and similar, products like Adword Analyzer are equally suitable for all areas of the Internet, including eBay. Visit our site, www.1st-in-auctions.com/Keywords.html for more ideas on keyword research with tips from top eBayers and other Internet marketers.

* Offer free gifts and bonuses to attract interest from people selling similar items. For example, offer three cufflinks where most offer two (emphasise these things get damaged, lost, stolen); ship items postage free; add complementary items such as matching tie pin (free or otherwise) with cufflinks, free presentation boxes with every batch of wholesale necklaces, and so on.

* Offer a free gift that is valuable in its own right, worth more than the product listed, and not available from any other source. Remember to change the freebie regularly as frequent buyers will have it already. Study and comply with eBay rules regarding gifts, bonuses and discounts. The trick is to find people not necessarily wanting your listed product, but very keen on the freebie.

What In The World Do I Blog About?

If you’re like most people who start a blog, you initially have a bit of writer&s block. Good news- it will likely go away, and you’ll find yourself thinking of new things to blog about frequently. In fact blogging becomes quite addictive.

This was certainly true of me. When I began blogging, I would often struggle with things to blog about. Now, I have the problem of not having enough time to post on all the things I want to talk about!

Here are a few tips to get you through that initial dry spell until you find your blogging voice.

1) Subscribe to other blog feeds for your industry/target market.

If you have a blog about babies and toddlers, you’ll want to have other similar (preferably high traffic) blogs on your RSS reader. It’s a good way to keep abreast of what&s going on in the collective consciousness of people. Just do a Google search for blog + topics of choice, and you’ll come up with plenty.

Keeping up with other blogs in your niche means that you can link to their posts (and you should always link to a blog that inspires your own post!) and add your own “spin” on the subject.

2) Look at trade magazines and newspapers in your niche

Again, going back to the baby/toddler theme, read parenting magazines. Magazines are a great place to look for inspiration…the articles are mostly short, pithy, “quick fix” and solution oriented (similar to blog posts). They also change to reflect what&s going on in the world and with your target market.

Keeping up with the news is also a good idea…you can find news feeds to add to your RSS reader too. When something is happening in the world that impacts your target market, blog it.

3) Keep a notebook (or file on your desktop) of blog fodder

When a thought or sentence hits you, write it down immediately. These sentences can be lengthened into blog posts (and later lengthened into articles…that&s another ecourse!). The more you do this, the more aware you will become of the unlimited topics you can blog about, even in your niche.

4) Milk Your Content

If you’re publishing a newsletter and write articles, then blog a short intro paragraph along with a link to the rest of the content on your website.

5) Product Reviews

Review products that you’ve tried and books you’ve read that relate to your niche. Anything that would help your blog readers make a decision (and we all need that help in a world with too many choices!) is a good thing.

6) Involve Your Visitors

Your newsletter subscribers and blog readers can be marketing partners and content generators for you! How? When they email you with a question, ask their permission to post it (along with the answer) on your blog.

May you soon find yourself in the predicament of so many blog posts, so little time!

Search Engine Submission – What To Look For When Selecting An Australian SEO Company

Every business owner I’ve met has been encouraged at some point to invest in a website; often convinced with hype that if their business didn’t have a website then they might as well pack their bags and retire to the social security queue.

Hype aside, this statement is basically true. Certainly, any business deemed suitable for online marketing will miss out on a flood of new business without the incorporation of a thorough online marketing strategy.

In accepting this, you may choose to have a new website developed with all the bangs and whistles. But beware; unless your site can be found amongst the millions of web pages now shown on the Internet, your time and resources have been wasted.

That’s why a Search Engine Optimiser is essential in maximising your chances of online success. Search Engine Optimisation in it’s simplest form is the practice of fine tuning your website to achieve the highest possible position in the search results when a person searches for information using a search engine.

In this article I will highlight the does and don’ts of selecting a credible and effective SEO company. There are a number of points to be considered when making this decision.

Including:

Q. How can I judge if the SEO Company will produce what they say?

A. In answering this question, be aware of the following when either talking to them or reading their sales pitches.

1. No reputable SEO company will submit your website to more than 30 odd major search engines and indexes. These major search engines and directories feed their search results to the million or so other so called “search engines”. Submissions to a greater number is quite unnecessary and a certain indicator of a lack of professionalism.

2. Be wary of any claim that your site will be submitted to thousands of search engines. It is more than likely that these submissions will be made to what we call FFA websites. These are not search engines at all, but rather a kind of link exchange website. As a result, your email server may be flooded by huge amounts of unwanted email. In short, stay well away from any SEO making such claims.

3. Ask any prospective SEO to detail the successes they have had with their previous clients submissions. In being aware of these successes, your confidence in the ability of the SEO to maximise your website effectiveness will increase.

Q. How can I know if these website submissions are genuinely being done?

A. Unfortunately, in reality, you can’t. Be certain to ask for a list of search engines and directories where submissions will or have been made. Any reputable SEO company will supply you with a written monthly report highlighting the search engines to which your site has been submitted, the submission dates and progress of your website rankings. If, after 3 months, your website ranking hasn’t improved then it is more than likely that optimisation isn’t occurring and even doubtful whether the promised website submissions have even been made.

Q. How long before I can reasonably expect my search engine ranking to improve?

A. Usually, as a rule of thumb most of the major search engines will take up to 3 – 4 months before they will index your website. This is not always the case. Recently, I submitted my website to the Google Directory and indexation occurred the same day. The waiting time for indexation is unpredictable, but be prepared to allow 3-4 months.

Q. Will my SEO Company notify me when a search engine has added me to their index?

A. Yes. You should be notified within days of your website being indexed and at the very least at the end of each month.

Q. How will my SEO company optimise my website for submission to the search engines and Directories?

A. Basically, a good SEO will make your website as search engine friendly as possible. This will involve changing the text and html code behind your website. Simply, when the search engine robot enters your website it finds it very easy to determine what your website is about. The correct keywords and meta tags will have been placed within your site, to ensure that the robot is able to collect and pass off information with speed and accuracy. This results in a much improved rank for your site; higher than would ever have been achieved without optimisation.

Your SEO will also optimise each page differently so that the robot will include more than one page in the search engine. For example, if the robot comes to your homepage and it has been optimised and your primary message and keywords on that page were for new tyres then you would hope that when someone uses a keyword search for “new tyres”, your website would be within the first 30 results. But on the other hand, another page of your website may be about wheel alignments. You would certainly hope that another searcher using a search phrase “wheel aligners” would get results pointing to that relevant wheel alignment page.

Your website success is completely determined by effective search engine optimisation . It is pointless investing time and resources developing a website without consideration to how your prospective clients will find you. It is no different to burning $50 notes.

I hope you have found this short article useful and that I have helped you decide on a great SEO company. Of course, there are many more things to watch out for; but you are now aware of the main ones. Keep them in mind and you will get the results you are after.

Why is my blogs revenue so low?

Those who blog partly because they want to earn some extra money often ask the question:”Why is my revenue so low?” There are people who think that blogs simply can not generate much money. They are wrong! Blog can generate you the same amount of money if not more compared to any other website. Now im talking about PPC (Pay per click) sorces of revenue such as google adsense here.

The main problem I have noticed is that people tend to concentrate on wider markets. If you are running a personal diary kind of blog, the chances are that there are thousands of similar blogs around. The more competition you have, the harder it will be for you to make some cash. Instead try concentrating on smaller markets also known as niche markets. Not only it will be easier for you to develop the traffic, the CPC (Cost per click) should also be higher due to advertisers demand exceeding publishers supply.

Secondly you need to have a unique selling point. You need to give your readers something that nobody else does. This should really help you get returning visitors.

Finally it’s the ads themselves. You should channel your ads. This way you will be able to measure your ad block’s performance. One of the most important things is to experiment. Try different ad formats, colours and positioning. Run your setup for a few weeks, note the performance and try something different. Even if you think you have found the optimum ad setup keep on trying to improve it. In most cases you can always tweak something to make your ad performance better.

If you need help finding traffic for your blog, you can always submit your blog stories to the new personal blog news publishing system designed especially for the blogging community at the blog reporter

SEO Duplicate Web Content Penalty Myth Exploded

The “duplicate content penalty” myth is one of the biggest obstacles I face in getting web professionals to embrace reprint content. The myth is that search engines will penalize a site if much of its content is also on other websites.

Clarification: there is a real duplicate content penalty for content that is duplicated with minor or no variation across the pages of a single site. There is also a “mirror” penalty for a site that is more or less substantially duplicating another single site. What I’m talking about here is the reprint of pages of content individually, rather than in a mass, on multiple sites.

Another clarification: “penalty” is a loaded concept in SEO. “Penalty” means that search engines will punish a website for violations of the engine’s terms of service. The punishment can mean making it less likely that the site will appear in search results. Punishment can also mean removal from the search engine’s index of web pages (”de-indexing” or “delisting”).

How have I exploded the “duplicate content penalty” myth?

* PageRank. Many thousands of high-PageRank sites reprint content and provide content for reprint. The most obvious case is the news wires such as Reuters (PR and the Associated Press (PR 9) that reprint to sites such as http://www.nytimes.com (PR 10).

* The proliferation of content reprint sites. There are now hundreds of websites devoted to reprint content because it’s a cheap, easy magnet for web traffic, especially search engine traffic.

* Experience. I’ve seen significant search engine traffic both from distributing content to be reprinted and from reprinting content on the site.

How I Doubled Search Engine Traffic with Reprint Content

When I first started distributing content for my main site, I was stunned by the highly targeted traffic I got from visitors clicking on the link at the end of the article. Search engine traffic also slowly increased both from the links and from having content on the site.

But I was even more stunned with the search engine traffic I got when I started putting reprint articles on the site in September. I had written quite a number of reprint articles for clients and accumulated a few webmaster “fans” who looked out for my articles to reprint them. I wanted to make it easier for them to find all the reprint articles I had written.

I didn’t want to draw too much attention to these articles, which had nothing to do with the main subject of the site, web content. So I secluded the articles in one section of the site.

The articles got a surprising amount of search engine traffic. The traffic was overwhelmingly from Google, and for long multiple-word search strings that just happened to be in the article word for word.

Why was I surprised with all the search engine traffic?

1. The articles had so little link popularity. The link popularity to the articles came primarily from a single link to the “reprint content” page from the homepage, which linked to category pages, which linked to the articles themselves–three clicks from the homepage. The sitemap was enormous, well over 100 links, so its PageRank contribution was minimal. Since these articles were on the site such a short time I strongly doubt they got any links from other sites.

2. The articles had so much competition. These articles had been reprinted far more widely than the average reprint article, which is lucky if it makes it into a few dedicated reprint sites. As part of my service I had done most of the legwork of reprinting my clients’ articles for them. In fact, I guarantee at least 100 reprints on Google-indexed web pages either for each article or group of articles. So that’s up to 100 web pages, sometimes more, that were competing with my web page to appear in search engine results for the search string.

Why Do Reprint Articles Get Search Engine Traffic?

You would think Google would just pick one web page with the article as the authoritative edition and send all the traffic to it.

But that’s not how Google works. All the search engines look at factors beyond just the content on the web page. They look at links. Google, at least, claims to look at 100 factors total. Many of these must relate to the content on the page, but not all of them.

The whole experience has given me great insight into what factors Google uses in addition to what we would consider the page itself, and the relative importance of each.

* Web page titles (the one in the html title tag) are extremely important as tie-breakers between two otherwise equally matched pages. Most reprinters waste the html title, using the article title as the web page title. Set yourself apart by creating unique five-to-ten-word web page titles that include target keywords.

* Content tweaks. You can also introduce the article with a unique, keyword-laden editor’s note, and finish the article off with some keyword-laced comments.

* Intra-site link popularity and anchor text (that is, for links to the article page from other web pages on the site) are also important. If you can’t link to the page from the homepage, keep it as close to the homepage as possible and weed out extraneous links (try putting all your site policies on a single page).

Reprint articles, like the search engine traffic they bring, cost nothing. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Forget the “duplicate content penalty.” Get in on content reprints and share the search engine wealth.

Understanding Paid URL Inclusion

The Internet contains numerous search engines, some of which offer what is known as “paid inclusion.” This means that you pay the specific search engine an annual fee for your web page to be included in their index.

Of course, every search engine already has an automated program commonly called a “spider” that indexes all the web pages it locates online, and it does this for free. So whether you pay or not, your web page will eventually be indexed by all Internet search engines, as long as the spider can follow a link to your page. The major issue is, then, how quickly your page is indexed.

A search engine that offers a paid URL inclusion uses an extra spider that is programmed to index the particular pages that have been paid for. The difference between the spider that indexes pages for free and the spider that indexes only pages for a fee is speed. If you have paid for inclusion, the additional search engine spider will index your page immediately.

The debate over paid URL inclusion centres around the annual fee. Since the regular spider of these search engines would eventually get around to indexing your web page anyway, why is a renewal fee necessary? The fee is necessary to keep your pages in the search engine’s index. If you go the route of paid inclusion, you should be aware that at the end of the pay period, on some search engines, your page will be removed from their index for a certain amount of time.

It’s easy to get confused about whether you would benefit from paid inclusion since the spider of any search engine will eventually index your page without the additional cost. There are both advantages and disadvantages to paid URL inclusion, and it is only by weighing your pros and cons that you will be able to decide whether to spring for the extra cash or not.

The advantages are obvious: rapid inclusion and rapid re-indexing. Paid inclusion means that your pages will be indexed quickly and added to search results in a very short time after you have paid the fee. The time difference between when the regular spider will index your pages, and when the paid spider will, is a matter of months. The spider for paid inclusion usually indexes your pages in a day or two. Be aware that if you have no incoming links to your pages, the regular spider will never locate them at all.

Additionally, paid inclusion spiders will go back to your pages often, sometimes even daily. The advantage of this is that you can update your pages constantly to improve the ranking in which they appear in search engines, and the paid URL inclusion spider will show that result in a matter of days.

First and foremost, the disadvantage is the cost. For a ten page website, the costs of paid URL inclusion range from $170 for Fast/Lycos to $600 for Altavista, and you have to pay each engine their annual fee. How relevant the cost factor is will depend on your company.

Another, and perhaps more important, disadvantage is the limited reach of paid URL inclusions. The largest search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN, do not offer paid URL inclusion. That means that the search engines you choose to pay an inclusion fee will amount to a small fraction of the traffic to your site on a daily basis.

Google usually updates its index every month, and there is no way you can speed up this process. You will have to wait for the Google spider to index your new pages no matter how many other search engines you have paid to update their index daily. Be aware that it is only after Google updates their index that your pages will show up in Google, or AOL results.

One way to figure out whether paid URL inclusion is a good deal for your company is to consider some common factors. First, find out if search engines have already indexed your pages. To do this, you may have to enter a number of different keywords, but the quickest way to find out is to enter your URL address in quotes. If your pages appear when you enter the URL address but do not appear when you enter keywords, using paid inclusion will not be beneficial. This is because your pages have already been indexed and ranked by the regular spider. If this is the case, your money would be better spent by updating your pages to improve your ranking in search results. Once you accomplish this, you can then consider using paid inclusion if you want to speed up the time it will take for the regular spider to revisit your pages.

The most important factor in deciding whether to use paid URL inclusion is to decide if it’s a good investment. To figure this out, you have to look at the overall picture: what kind of product or service are you selling and how much traffic are you dependent on to see a profit?

If your company sells an inexpensive product that requires a large volume of traffic to your site, paid inclusion may not be the best investment for you; the biggest search engines do not offer it, and they are the engines that will bring you the majority of hits. On the other hand, if you have a business that offers an expensive service or product and requires a certain quality of traffic to your site, a paid URL inclusion is most likely an excellent investment.

Another factor is whether or not your pages are updated frequently. If the content changes on a daily or weekly basis, paid inclusion will insure that your new pages are indexed often and quickly. The new content is indexed by the paid spider and then appears when new relevant keywords are entered in the search engines. Using paid inclusion in this case will guarantee that your pages are being indexed in a timely manner.

You should also base your decision on whether or not your pages are dynamically generated. These types of pages are often difficult for regular spiders to locate and index. Paying to include the most important pages of a dynamically generated website will insure that the paid spider will index them.

Sometimes a regular spider will drop pages from its search engine, although these pages usually reappear in a few months. There are a number of reasons why this can happen, but by using paid URL inclusion, you will avoid the possibility. Paid URL inclusion guarantees that your pages are indexed, and if they are inadvertently dropped, the search engine will be on the lookout to locate them immediately.

As you can see, there are numerous factors to consider when it comes to paid URL inclusion. It can be a valuable investment depending on your situation. Evaluate your business needs and your website to determine if paid URL inclusion is a wise investment for your business goals.