Biz Tips Blog: Online Marketing, Visibility and Business Blogging Tips

links for 2006-01-23

• EBay Still 'Best Business Model' In Internet Sector - Forbes.com
  (tags: eBay ecommerce internet)

links for 2006-01-22

• Demystifying the eBay Selling Experience - New York Times
  (tags: eBay ecommerce)

Still Going...eBay Experiment Continues

As January progresses, I continue to work on my eBay project.  We have two programs listed now:

A one hour program on CD about blogging: What the Heck is a Blog: Why Every Professional Should Start Blogging Now! and our 4 CD set of interviews with 4 Expert Bloggers.

My next task is to work on getting our digital products available on eBay so I have to figure out how to deliver them to the winner automatically rather than via manual email.  I know there is a software program to do that and it's a bit pricey so I'm looking at alternatives.

1/12/06 - UPDATE: 5 Single Audio Programs added to eBay

• Bob Bly: Using Direct Marketing Techniques to Sell Thousands of Copies of Your Book
• T.L. Pakii-Pierce: Blogs As Social Marketing Tools
• B.L. Ochman: Is Blogging a Fad that will Pass or a Sea Change in Corporate Communications?
• Paul Chaney: The Evolution of Blogs as Business and Marketing Tools
• Wayne Hurlbert: Using Blogs to Help Your Search Engine Rankings

eBay Experiment Continues

Now that the holidays are over, I'm starting my eBay experiment again and have relisted our set of 4 interviews with Blogging Experts on 4 CDs.* As was pointed out in a comment to a previous post, my lack of success may have been due to starting this experiment on eBay right around the holidays when people are NOT looking for professional development content.

Over the weekend when I have more time, I am planning on adding a couple of more blogging products to our eBay lineup.  Stay tuned.

*Bloggers featured on the CD...(click the link)

eBay Update #2

More follow up on my eBay experiment.

I relisted my CDs, both the 4 CD set and the singles.  The auction for the set was due to expire today and this morning there was one bid for $1.  Since they cost me considerably more than that to produce, I decided to go for it and crafted an email to send to all our prospects who have requested free blog related reports from us, nearly 2000 people at this point.

I pointed out that they had an opportunity to get these blogging interviews for an amazingly low price with the eBay auction and gave them the link to the auction.

It worked.  The winning bidder got the set for $8.51 which is a lot better than $1 in my book.  I've also made "second chance" offers to 2 other bidders so I have the potential to sell 2 more sets.

One of the buyers from the first round I did, is reviewing our Build a Better Blog ebook and may have some clients to refer to us.  So as a lead generator this could definitely work.