The key to selling online is getting traffic and converting viewers in to customers. eBay is a very efficient way of attracting buyers but as your eBay selling develops you should start looking at different ways of driving traffic to either your eBay sales or your own ecommerce website.
Going where the traffic is and plugging into existing communities can be a very successful means of marketing. You might want to dabble with MySpace or other communities (many eBay sellers do) but some have concerns about the type of customers they will attract or what it says about them as a business.
Another option is BT Tradespace (www.bttradespace.com). It’s a new online community for businesses looking for customers. In essence you build a profile with information about your business, contact details and a link to your site. BT Tradespace takes on the mantle of optimising the site for search engines and marketing the community and by aggregating profiles into a single destination it gains traction as a destination for consumers.
You can also blog and podcast easily, as well as rate and review other members. It’s all very web 2.0 but it’s dead easy to get started. It shouldn’t take you more than 10 minutes to get a fully functioning up and running.
BT Tradespace is currently in its beta testing phase and it’s free to join: but it’s growing fast and many developments are planned. If you’re looking for more links into your website to improve their ranking or want to plug into an online community, BT Tradespace is just the thing! And as it develops it may also be a great way of sourcing supply to sell on eBay too.
Here are some example profiles:
https://merrygorounduk.bttradespace.com/default.aspx
