Small Etailers can make it on their own!

Great article by David Kesmodel in the WSJ (subscription).

For those of you without subscription access, the article talks about the increasing number of online retailers who are looking for alternatives to eBay. Many are going out and building (or having others build) their own website. As we all know, websites and shopping carts have dropped dramatically in price and complexity over the last few years and are now accessible to virtually anyone who wants to open an online storefront.

The big problem with severing ties to eBay is getting traffic. One customer mentioned in the article, OldDogNoNewTrick.com (love the name), puts business cards in with every product sold through eBay referring the customer to the stand-alone site! Great idea.

You can probably make more money outside eBay IF you get your visitors cheaply enough (it is all about customer acquistion cost, after all!).

Search engines are probably the most cost effective way to get new customers, and that's where BetterPPC comes in.

In addition to making sure your site is easy for the search engines to "crawl" - meaning use a lot of plain text, not images, and always have a "site map" - meaning a directory of your site on one page where each section is noted by a hyperlink that the spider can crawl, you also want to take advantage of pay per click advertising on the search engine (and partners') pages as well.

You need to do three things to get up and running after you setup an account:

1. Choose keywords that relate to your products.
2. Decide how much you want to pay per click.
3. Write your ad copy

After a week or so, you should have a good idea of whether your advertising is profitable. The easiest way is to just compare ad costs to profits and make sure it is a positive number! Another easy way to track profitability is to use either Google or Yahoo!'s built in free tracking.

The next step is to start to refine your ad copy by creating and testing more ads, and the results will be amazing. Use BetterPPC to test a variety of different ideas in your copy, and our patent pending process will have you on your way to higher profits in one week. You can start here - www.betterppc.com

So if you are trying to "break away" from eBay (or at least open a new sales channel), read David's article, get your own website, start advertising, and use BetterPPC!

Joe Agliozzo