How Twitter Hashtags Can Help eBay Sellers To Sell Something On eBay- By OBVA Social Media Virtual Assistants

Social media is growing up faster than anyone can imagine. Businesses today use various social media applications like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn to market their business. Same with eBay businesses.  In this post, we will discuss how eBay sellers can use  Twitter Hashtags to sell something on eBay.  Since, hashtags are doing really well, it is a good idea to explore how an eBay power seller can use hashtag to market his listings. Hashtags helps following relevant and real time tweets about any relevant product, service or any other subject. The tweets become more searchable and thus keyword targeting becomes easier.

Ebay sellers using Twitter would know the ‘#’ symbol, which is the hashtag used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. Hashtags are simply a way to tag tweet with subject matter/Keyword to make it easy to be found. Anyone can create a hashtag simply by placing the ‘#’ sign in front of a word. eBay sellers can effectively use hashtags to increase exposure, find relevant conversations to join with or retweet and ultimately, grow twitter accounts and your eBay business. This would eventually result in search engine optimizing of your web store . For example in this image you can see new listing link is also been mentioned along with #eBay new listings, so if you are going to update a new listing you can make use of this style.

Which hashtags to use?

Before starting on the hashtag, it’s best to know what the current popular hashtags are.  To use your hashtags in the most effective way, it’s best to keep up with these trends. You can check out sites like What the Trend, Twubs, Hashtags.org, and Tagalus.  The following search is from What the Trend site and gives the exact details of a seller. If a buyer is searching for you make sure that you are on top of the search by using hashtags.

To focus on data for popular hashtags you can also take notice of the tags being used by your followers and then search those tags on Twitter to see what kind of tweets is associated with your follower’s tags. The key to promoting your store and sell something on eBay through the use of hashtags is to identify the tags that are already popular within your community and use them, putting your message in front of everyone who follows that hashtag. To identify the keywords, do a keyword research.

Observe and start using your hashtags

After identifying these niche hashtags, observe them for a few days to get a feel for the types of messages that are shared to them. If you are a beauty store owner and if questions are being asked regarding some particular beauty products that you sell, answer them with the hashtag threaded in your response to increase your presence and knowledge. Getting in early on a trending topic can boost your exposure dramatically, which makes this effort worth some serious consideration if you’re hoping to significantly increase your Twitter following.

Create your own hashtags if you want to address your target customers. If thinking of offering a new listing in your store or some new auction with a price much cheaper than your competitors,  you can  create your own hashtag .

How to market your listing using hashtag?

Use a URL shortening service to shorten your store link and then you prepare your hashtags so that they will be posted to your Twitter account.  It is better to place your hashtags after your link. The reason for this is that it is not as distracting for Twitter friends and followers to read. To submit your tweets with hashtags, first remember that you want to allow space for your followers and customers to retweet your work. So make sure that you create a hashtag that will be retweeted and you get more customers to your eBay store. Your tweets should not appear as spam. Therefore, do not put too many hashtags in one tweet. Two to three hashtags should be your limit. And from time to time you can also tweet without hashtags also.

If you observe the tweets made by Consign Center and The Snobbery you can observe how effectively they have used #ebay for promoting their business.

Start exploring hastags and using them for promoting your listings on eBay.

You can contact us if you want any assistance in marketing your eBay store and listings. Our Social Media Virtual Assistants will be glad to help you. Also, you can contact us if you would like to talk to our outsourcing manager to know more about outsourcing your eBay store to a expert VA.

5 Best Keyword Research Tools To Overcome Your Competitors In eBay/Amazon Business – By OBVA Virtual Office Assistants

Keyword research is very important when it comes to being where your potential customers are looking for businesses like yours. You may be the best amongst your competitor, but it’s of no use if your prospects cannot find you. Therefore COMPREHENSIVE KEYWORD RESEARCH is unavoidable to sell something on eBay/Amazon. Virtual Assistants from OBVA share the powerful and effective tools you can grab the best keywords so that you create the right content to search engine optimize and target your customers.

Research Tool #1 :SEMRush

SEMRush is a great tool to chase your competitors. It is an enhancement of SEO digger and SEO quake. Thus it uses a large database that can pull out the relevant, potential and accurate keywords based on your query.

Advantages

• You can see the phrases that both you and your competitors rank well for.
• Finding out the organic keywords that drive traffic to your competitor’s site.
• Finding the top sites to advertise.
• Finding out the top ranking site for specified keywords.
• It uses a keyword crawler on 30 million strong databases.

Limitations

• One of the disadvantages noted is that the data is up to 4 weeks old.

Thus it uses a large database that can pull out the relevant, potential and accurate keywords based on your query.

Research Tool #2 : SpyFu

Like other tools, SpyFu  also helps you in finding the niche keywords for building good SEO for your site.  This is an effective tool for PPC, by finding your competitors keywords, their rankings, landing pages etc. This tool comes in paid version. You can use a 3 day trial for test drive at $6.75.

Advantages

• Thus it helps in spying your competitor’s keywords.
• This tool also helps you in comparing the market size share with your competitors.

Limitations

• This tool is lit bit expensive if you are a small business owner.
• The accuracy is not reliable.

Research Tool #3 : KeywordSpy

KeywordSpy is the best research tool in market. If effectively used, you can rapidly increase your sales for sure. It comes both in free and paid version. Just the type the keyword or the competitor site you want to target. It will list out the keywords showing PPC rankings, the competitors competing for the keyword, it’s position of search ranking in Google etc..

Advantages

• Thus using this tool, you will able to find which keyword drives more traffic that in turn increases your ranking in major search engines like Google.
• By knowing the PPC for each keyword, you can use increase your bid amount if you use effectively in your site.

Research Tool #4 : Google AdWords

This is the common and widely used brilliant tool for PPC for chasing your competitors. This is a free tool. You can sign up for an account in Googleadwordskeyword.  You will find a keyword research tool to find your niche competitors for your domain.

Advantages

• This tool can greatly help you select the appropriate domain name for good SEO.
• Laser focusing your targeting competitors based on country wise.
• You will get immediate results of which keywords are doing well and which doesn’t.

Limitations

Using this research tool alone won’t make good results.  The reason is the conversion rate determines your business profit. Hence even if there is more traffic to your site, if your conversation rate is less, then you will not find any profit in your business. Hence it is advisable to use other effective keywords research tools with this to increase your income.

Reasearch Tool #5: Word tracker

Word tracker is the cost effective tool having a greater demand in the market. Both paid and free versions are available so that you can test drive your website to trust the quality and efficiency of this tool.

If you are launching a new website or creating a niche blog related to your business then you can use this tool for your business. This tool comes with 100% money back guarantee to be ensured for its quality output.

Advantages

You also have the facility of doing a ‘Reverse search’, that will provide you the keywords that your competitors are using to compete with your site.

It uses a special formula called KEI(Keyword Effectiveness Index). For any keyword, the higher the KEI, the popularity is high. Thus if the KEI of your keyword is high, your chance of ranking in search engines is also high.

Limitations

The only limitation is that their database of search volumes is relatively low.

Day by day the competition is rising up to the peak in online business platform.  You as an entrepreneur may not have time in focusing all the tasks.  You can take assistance from Virtual experts as they are reliable, affordable and cost effective than regular employees.  If you need assistance to run your business, please contact us. We at OBVA do Internet Marketing Research, social media marketing, niche blog content writing and other services to our clients. We never work for your competitors.

5 Hottest eBay Selling Tips To Increase Your Selling This Festive Season

What buyers may look for this holiday season and which store do they expect to buy? As many stores target their customers by introducing more offers and discounts, how you as an eBay seller, are going to stand out of the crowd and increase your turnover? Here are the 5 hottest tips that we follow for our clients stores  to increase the selling.

Follow these tips to increase you selling this holiday season.

Tip 1# Find and Sell Hottest Items That People Are Looking For:

Few items will always have a huge demand in the holiday season.  Find those items and try to sell them in your store with great deals. For e.g., If you are toy shop owner, try to search for the most wished items that people are looking for. A recent research states that Video Barbie dolls are the best selling this year. So do a research and find out the items that people are crazily looking for this holiday season.

Tip 2# Promise To Ship On Time:

Though many sellers sell items with  great deals, it is known to anyone that packages could mess up due to this holiday season. Hence they would always look for a store that ship items within 24-48 hours. This is the second factor that customers would see after choosing which item to buy. So promise your buyers that you would ship items within the specific time. If you can’t manage shipping, you can delegate your routine shipping label printing to experienced Virtual Assistants to take care of your shipping so that you can ship items in 24/7 hours. Include this in your listing as it would entice your customers to choose your store.

Tip 3# Include Free Shipping Option:

Free shipping option is another hot tactic followed by many retailers. Some are also offering discounts in shipping or include coupons for expedited shipping. The NRF’s data says, that some 5% of merchants will offer such a deal for orders placed as late as the last day of season. Hence push your sales by offering free shipping for orders and discounts in shipping for multiple orders.

Tip 4# Have Your Customers Spread The Word For You:

As we know, word of mouth is the best form of marketing, why not encourage your customers to talk about your offers and deals on their Social Media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, blogs, etc? For example, you can offer free coupons or gift vouchers to your customers who can tweet your offers. By this way you can promote your store and you can have more customers. This technique have been used by very big companies like Microsoft and Facebook.

Tip 5# Avoid Selling Poor Quality Goods:

Since manufacturers are selling goods directly to their customers there may be shortage of inventory due to peak season. You must be prepared with inventory. Do not sell poor quality fake items. Because, any customer who loves your product will never go to other sellers. In this peak season, any new customer may come to store and purchase items. If they love your items, then there’s a chance that they may turn into long term returning customers. So make use of this by selling the goods directly from manufacturer. For this, you can take an inventory report daily and find out the best selling items and have them in extra stock so that you may not suffer.

With the above said tips I hope that you would be able to increase you sales this holiday season. For every sales do a market research and find out the hot trend and hottest items that sell in market. You can use effective eBay marketing tools to find the best selling items. If you find any difficult in doing it delegate it to professionals. We at OBVA do research for our clients and get them more sales and profit during holiday seasons. You can join our community by liking our Fanpage or following us in Twitter.

Last-Minute Tips To Generate More Leads To Sell More In Amazon/eBay This Holiday Season!

It’s exactly just few days left for Holiday season.  Still many of the eBay and Amazon sellers or other small business owners are striving hard to drive more sales.  According to the Ponemon Institute, a full third of holiday shoppers plan to spend more money online than in-store in 2011. Therefore you need to spend more time in promoting your business online to attract your local and global audience.

We at OBVA would like to share Last-Minute Tips how to sell something on eBay/Amazon  this holiday season:

Spread Your Offers In Social Media:

Promote your ads/offers using paid advertising campaigns in Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ to entice more visitors. Attractive offers like Buy two get one free, bonus gifts for every purchase etc..can boost more sales. Also, Flash news about one time offers like “Barbie dolls with gift wrapped for free shipping only today”, Foundation creams with Free shipping for first 20 international customers”  will turn you customers to click the buy buttons. You may not have time to involve in such creative and attractive offers to your customers. Delegate such tasks to Virtual Assistants quickly to end your deals.

Word Of Mouth Spreading Through Referral Marketing:

Once you come with attractive offers, encourage your customers to be your walking advertisements. This with no doubt can increase your sales.  Implementing this will not only increase your sales but would maintain a high volume selling in the coming year 2011.  “Refer your friends and get 20% discount on your next purchase can increase your sales” or ” Share it to your friends and get a free gift coupon today!” can get you high ending sales volume. Here are  Top 3 Tips To Convert Your New Customers To Repeat Customers  that might help you.

Mobile And Email Marketing:

According to a recent research it has  been estimated that more than 420 million smart phones will be selling in this year 2011. Hence make use of this effectively, by sending message alerts with special offers and discounts to your customers may change their buying mood to your store. Email marketing is another best way to promote your business with great offers. More than one-third of online shoppers say they would not make a purchase without a free shipping offer. Hence make this is a subject to increase your selling. Here are few Tips To Encourage Your Customers Share Your Amazon/Ebay Business .

Though many store owners may be enticing their customer with more offers, stand out of the crowd by making your offers clear, focused and easy to understand.  Your offers should be clean, brief, to the point and should turn any customer to click on buy buttons. If you do have time to write such exclusive offers, you can hire experts to quickly generate more leads. Here are few “ Holiday Selling Tips That No Seller Will Share With You” which you can use to increase your sales. No matter if it is too late to choose your Virtual Assistant, delegating to experts always help. Happy Selling!

2 Great Offers Rolled Out By eBay For Powersellers– Sell More On eBay This Holiday Season!

If you are looking for information on How To Sell Something On eBay, then you are at the right blog!

Discount offer #1 announced by eBay:

On Dec 1^st eBay announced  that “All PowerSellers: Save up to 32% on USPS shipping this holiday season” This program offers Commercial Plus™ Pricing—savings of up to 32% off of retail pricing—when you pay for postage and print labels from eBay Labels. If you haven’t signed up yet, enrollment is easy—you can do so the next time you use eBay Labels.  eBay Top-rated sellers and Platinum or Titanium PowerSellers qualify for this discount year-round.

Who are Powersellers? eBay’s “Powersellers” are a group of sellers who are distinguished by the amount of volume they produce in online sales. These Powersellers are the very small group of eBay sellers that do at least $2,000 per month in sales on eBay and maintain a 99% positive feedback rating. If you want to know more about how to become one, here is a post on “Top 10 Secrets That You Should Know To Become A Powerseller.”

Discount offer #2 announced by eBay:

Another discount that eBay announced for the holidays is the 20% Final Value Fee discount, which is just one more way to save!

During holidays everyone is willing to do more business and get more profit.  Apart from making the most of each offer, a seller should also concentrate on how to write effective listing, take good care of customers, maintain positive feedback and claims, etc. You may need to do huge volume of listing, packing and shipping each month, you may consider delegating the tasks to eBay virtual assistants who can help you do the tasks for in time. You can then concentrate more on important aspects of your business and monitor the whole show.

During holiday season, one aspect that needs utmost attention from eBay sellers is feedback. Try to avoid these “7 customer service mistakes that can result in a negative feedback.” Always try to resolve the issue by contacting the buyer on time. Here is “eBay Feedback Revision Tip” that can help you get your feedback revised.

Once the shipping labels are printed, eBay sends automated emails to your customers. You can add wishes like “Merry Christmas” or “Happy New Year” to add to the customer experience.

We will certainly keep you posted with more news and offers from eBay and Amazon. You can subscribe to our blog RSS here, like us on Facebook,+1 on Google and friend us on Twitter, and we would love to interact with you more often. If you are thinking of delegating your store, check out our performance reports from eBay/Amazon clients here. We offer completely customized eBay store and Amazon store services.

5 Top Reasons Why You Must Outsource Your Amazon And eBay Store – By OBVA Virtual Assistants

Starting an Amazon or eBay business not only needs you to invest lot of time and energy, but also needs some skills.. Every seller puts his best effort to succeed in online business, then why most of them fail? Common reasons are, more unwanted feedbacks, more irate customers and less business due to the negative feedback left by customers even when you have done your best to make them happy. It is just that they had to wait a bit longer, than they expected, as you were busy doing other stuff, like listing, research, etc. After all, every task is important and it is equally important that each task is done on time. Therefore, it is smart to delegate your responsibilities to dedicated experts. Virtual Assistants at OBVAshare the 5 Top Reasons Why You Must Outsource Your Amazon And eBay Store to experts-

Reason #1 : You May Not Have Time To Do Regular Market Research On Your Own – And Market Research Is Unavoidable

Market research is the base for any successful online business. It is required both during the initial planning phase and also for ongoing learning. Once you come with the products to sell, you need to know what would be the niche keywords for your business, who are your competitors, your target customers and how is the competitionfor your product. This is a detailed process and the result will highly impact your business either positively or negatively. If you find the right keywords then with no doubt you can rank high in the competition. On the adversary if the keywords you choose are not right then your business will be a complete loss. What if your business turns out to be a failure due to wrong marketing? The best way is to delegate your product research to Internet research professionals who can find out niche keywords for your products, their competitors, sale through prices etc. so that you have facts and figures at your finger tips, that help you take right decisions.

Reason #2 – A Professional Can Write SEO Optimized Listings Faster And Better

This is the second phase. SEO plays a prominent role in making your listings visible to the target market. Writing search engine optimized listing will certainly increase your site traffic. So when you sell hundreds or thousands of products then you need to write effective keyword rich item title, description that should be clear, concise, informative and self explanatory. If you are not an experienced SEO expert, then it’s wise to delegate the product listing writing to SEO experts who can write SEO listings for your products to get more business for you.

Reason #3- Dedicated Professionals For Customer Service Which Avoids Late Reply And Negative Feedback

Many new eBay/Amazon businesses rise up or rank well soon in the competition.  The question is “Does it maintain its consistency?” When you see many successful Amazon sellers or eBay power sellers they work very hard to strive in the competition. How do they finally succeed? They always work hard to maintain their DSR rating and feedback.  Their target is to keep their customers happy. So if their customers are not satisfied they would soon work on a better solution to keep them happy which is the best tactic for any successful business. Also, when any customer comes to your store, only your store feedback will help them decide to become a buyer or just a visitor. What you want them to be? Just a visitor or a lead? If you have less experience in maintaining 100% positive feedback, delegate your store customer service to customer service professionals who can promptly solve your customer’s concerns and keep them happy and satisfied because in online business, feedback makes all the difference.

Reason #4 – Better Marketing Because Marketing Needs Time Commitment And Experience

Marketing helps you considerably boost your sales. You need to create your business profile in major social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc.. Your customers should be informed about regular product updates, new products and offers, etc. Therefore, you need to commit yourself in spending part of your time daily in marketing your site. Do you have the time to do this? The best way is to delegate your site marketing to social media virtual assistants. for promoting the listings on social media, and they can help you with other forms of marketing too.

Reason #5- You can balance life better!

We all earn to make our life better!. But when you put all the burden on yourself to make your business a successful one, then you will find no peace even though you may be  making good money.  If you see any successful business owner, they  spend their time only in developing the core areas of their business. What about their other tasks? They simply delegate routine tasks to professional virtual assistants. If you never tried out delegating before, drop us an email  to schedule a call on how we can help you.

Part 7 – Here is A Top eBay Marketing Tool “Deal Finder” – By eBay Virtual Assistants At OBVA

eBay Virtual Assistants at OBVA are sharing the best of eBay marketing tools like Turbo Lister, Terapeak, eBay listing analytics, Selling Manager,BayEstimator, Bay Research Labs BayEstimator, based on what we use for our client store.

Today the tool we have chosen is eBay’s Deal Finder

What is Deal Finder:

Every savvy shopper does a little comparison while shopping. To make sure that  holiday season to be a great one sellers can start using the tool eBay Deal Finder . According to eBay Deal Finder is “To truly find the best deals, we built Deal Finder to compare the current selling price of an item on eBay to the lowest price we can find for the same item”.

Features of Deal Finder:

We can just set the price limit and then search for the item you want using categories and keywords. Not all items found on eBay.com are displayed in Deal Finder. For an item to be displayed in Deal Finder it must meet the keyword and category constraints as well as have zero bids, no reserve price, less than four hours left, free or fixed rate shipping and a total price that is below the selected criteria. Make sure that you choose the right keywords of your store. If you have any difficulty in doing it delegate the task to professionals. eBay will display items that meet your criteria, with those closing soonest at the top.

Sellers can find this tool very helpful for sourcing bargain items that have been overlooked for some reason. Any seller’s items can appear on Deal Finder. The only requirement is that the item meets the keyword and category.

The opportunity to buy items cheaply and resell them for a profit is huge. You can also find out about wholesale lots which is much cheaper. Just type ‘wholesale’ or ‘lot’ into the search bar and get the answers. Its that simple.

Limitations:

There are few limitation for this tool. Such as

• No Shipping Prices are included while searching.
• Doesn’t include Third Party Sellers rates.
• Sometimes, the eBay Deal finder does comparisons on products that are not exactly the same.

Deal Finder is very efficient at what it does do. It will be interesting to see whether eBay makes further changes to it in the future. Have you started using this tool? Then we would love to hear your thoughts and experiences with Deal Finder. You can join us in our  Facebook Fan Page, Follow us on Twitter or leave some comments on how this tool has helped you. We appreciate your feedback.

Part 1 – Turbo Lister – Top eBay Marketing Tool Series Post By eBay VirtualAssistants At OBVA

eBay Specialized Virtual Assistants at OBVA understand very well how difficult can eBay marketing be, when you don’t know the exact process to follow, tools to use, and what works what doesn’t. Therefore, we are always keen to share some useful posts which can help you better market your store while you start using useful eBay selling tips to become a top-rated eBay seller .

In today’s post, we would like to introduce the top effective tools that you can use for better marketing of your store.

Here the list goes….

Part 1-  Turbo Lister -Marketing tool for eBay

What is Turbo Lister:

According to eBay Turbo Lister “Turbo Lister is a FREE listing tool to help you create professional-looking listings and upload thousands of items in bulk. Try the new eBay Turbo Lister, the next generation listing tool.” It does speed up the auction listing process and can store auction templates with all the category details. This is a tool that can be used offline to prepare as many items for sale as you want. You can add items into it whenever you are free and can upload them all in one batch. When you know which time the listing gets more bid, you can plan your listings accordingly. So, this tool can be a real powersaver if you are managing your eBay store yourself. And, if you are good at delegating your routine tasks, like listing your item, this tool can help your VA save lot of time they spent on listing. If your VA is an experienced eBay store manager, then you may not need to worry at all.

Features of Turbo Lister:

• Free and very easy to use
• Turbo lister can be used online or offline, in both the ways.
• You can upload about 1000 items within 15 to 20 minutes with one click.
• You can preview the ads before you go live on eBay.
• During special promo sale, you can save hundreds or thousands of dollars in listing fees!
• A copy of the auction remains with TL and contains all of the listing information such as categories, postage etc.
• You can add a free photo using the eBay photo service

Few limitations for Turbo Lister:

• Your ID and password in TL and eBay must be the same as this information is used when then listings are uploaded to eBay.
• While using TL, sometimes catching errors occurs while uploading due to shipping issues or other reasons and listing as to be started from scratch, which is frustrating.

Turbo Lister is an efficient program that lets you create and track all your eBay listings. You can  list items individually or you can bulk upload into Turbo Lister for selling on eBay.It is a great tool, but then it’s a tool, which needs human monitoring to make sure that the tool is doing its job without errors. We use Turbo Lister for our client store listings and monitor each listing once its live to ensure the tool has not made in errors. If you are doing all your eBay tasks alone, without delegating, chances are you are not getting enough time to think on ways to increase your product portfolio, do cross selling, and to get your customers come back to you again. We recommend delegating for better business. In the upcoming posts, we will share more tools which can make your eBay selling easy. You can grab our RSS feed for the latest updates. You can like our Facebook Fanpage and follow us on Twitter  and Google+ to make sure you don’t miss out on the posts.

How to Increase Sales with eBay Markdown Manager – Shared By eBay Virtual Assistants Of OBVA

eBay Virtual assistants have written various posts for eBayers. Are you new to Ebay? Have you heard of  Markdown manager? According to ebay pages “Markdown Manager – a free promotional feature- developed exclusively for Store owners that helps drive buyer excitement to your listings”.  We at OBVA would like to give an overview about this tool so that you can make use of it to increase your turnover.

What is Markdown Manager?

eBay’s Markdown Manager is a  tool that eBay Store sellers can use effectively when they offer discounts on their items during special periods like Christmas, New Year etc. This tool has a special feature that it  shows both the original cost price and the discounted selling  price . This helps your customer to know how much discount they are getting from your store than from your competitors. Thus, Markdown manager is an effective tool to entice your customers and explode your turnover.

Features of Markdown Manager

• Free to use
• Quick and easy to create sales
• Easy to manage and schedule.
• You can give discounts for specific listings or items or you can apply to all store inventory or fixed price listing
• Free shipping discount can be applied to any listing
• If you have a Basic Store, you can offer discounts for 250 items in a day.  2,500 is the limit for Premium Stores
• 5% to 75% is the range of the sales percentages you may use

Few Limitations of Markdown Manager

• Price sales cannot be applied to auction style listings
• 1 Day Minimum Sale Duration
• 24 hour wait time from when an item goes off Sale to when it can go back on Sale.

If you want to make use of Markdown strategy for your eBay Store, you have to consider the following:

Find the best Markdown method for your items. Make sure that you test the ideas before going in for wholesale changes.

Limit the items that are on sale in your store. And if you want your whole store to be on sale then identify it as a clearance sale and schedule it during traditional clearance sale periods specific to your product category for example Christmas, New Year etc. So the idea of using Markdown manager is to attract more customers to your stores and convert them as your long term buyer.

Markdown strategy will not work out, if you are already giving discount sale in eBay. If you have to increase your regular pricing in order to make a Markdown strategy work, then carefully consider how this will work in your category.

Check other stores which are using this so that you can get an idea on how to use this strategy effectively for your store. You can offer discounts in shipping and handling charges during the sale period to attract new customers.

Using Markdown Manager every eBay seller can boost up their sales. Virtual Assistants at OBVA have written posts on eBay Auctions, How to become a topseller in ebay business, How to write effective listings, Search Engine Optimize Your eBay Listings to help you increase your sales in eBay. You can subscribe our RSS feed so that you may not miss our blogs posts on successful Ebay selling J.

If you need assistance to run your eBay store, please contact us. We never work for your competitors.

Part 6 – 5 Linkedin Applications That Can Be Used For EBay And Amazon Business- Shared By OBVA Social Media Virtual Assistants

Social Media Virtual Assitants at OBVA have posted blog on “5 Ways eBay Sellers Can Use LinkedIn For Business“. And also on 6 Facebook Applications Which Can Be Used for eBay/Amazon Business and 5 Twitter Applications That Can Be Used for eBay/Amazon Business

Everyone is increasingly focusing on LinkedIn to get more focused traffic to their website/blog. Many influential bloggers have written about how one can use Linkedin to promote their small or big business. I will add a link to the best reads at the bottom of the post. I do not intend to write what is already written by so many bloggers on “How you can use LinkedIn for business”. I will try to be more focused on sharing how as an Online Business Owner at eBay, Amazon,etc. ,you can use Linked Applications for more effective Social Media Marketing.

This post will give 5 effective applications of Linkedin which can be used for eBay and Amazon business. Social media examiner has also shared an article on “How LinkedIn Apps Can Promote Your Business.

The following are  5 applications that can be used for eBay and Amazon business-

1. Company Buzz

Company Buzz is a Linkedin application which displays real-time tweets relating to your eBay or Amazon (or other search term).  Also, the tool taps information and allows you to see historical plots of your search term and receive the most popular words associated with your topic.  For example, if I searched “Virtual Assistants” using the application, I would be able to see real-time tweets that included my search term, a graph of the history of “Virtual Assistants,”. In short “Company Buzz” can allow for you to know what is being said about your company, product, or industry in an instant. With help of this application you can make changes in your social media marketing strategy to meet the changes in the way people perceive the brand/product that you sell at your online store. It is always smart to keep your ears open to what people are saying about your business, especially when you work in an online environment.  Isn’t it?

2. Blog Link

As a eBay or Amazon business owner if you have a blog that tells about your products or if you write product reviews in your blog, you would want to connect with more people and make people aware of your blog/website and then gradually direct that traffic to your webstore. You can connect your blog to your LinkedIn profile and get the most of your relationships. Blog Link helps you and your professional network (eBay or Amazon business) stay connected. This application will automatically pull in the latest blog posts from around your network so you can stay up-to-date on the latest posts from your trusted connections.

3. Events

LinkedIn has an event application that works well to target your niche market while also building an engaged event community. This application will let you know about the new events which are going to take place and the detail about it. If you download this application you will also be able to add an event PLUS add  details about the events (like who is organizing or who are going to attend etc.) Offcourse, try to create event which are relevant to your market, for example, eBay and Amazon training, etc. If you would like to participate in relevant events, LinkedIn will suggest relevant events to you based on keywords you have used in your profiles. (Industry, Product, etc).

4.  SlideShare

Slide share is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations. And recently they added its application to Linkedin. Here with this application you can share our presentations on your product. .Obviously, this will be worth the effort if you sell expensive stuff. With the SlideShare application, you can view the presentations of all your connections. And you can also find experts for certain industries and topics, and share important presentations with your own connections and the rest of the LinkedIn network. Slide share is available both in Facebook and linked in. Upload to any one — SlideShare, Facebook or LinkedIn and it will shows up instantly on all three.

5. Tweets

Many eBay or Amazon business people work hard to share great information(mostly about their listings) with their community on Twitter. For eBay or Amazon business people, it makes sense to republish your tweets with your LinkedIn profile. Tweets application lets you do just that. But before linking together Twitter and LinkedIn, review your tweet stream to make sure that your tweets add to the professional presence you want to convey on Twitter. Users can view all of the Twitter information from their connections and read a snippet of a connection’s last tweet. Build a dynamic list of them to contacts all tweets from your network. Tweets also gives you instant access to the updates of people you are following on Twitter and the power to tweet, reply, and re-tweet — all from your LinkedIn home page.

The above mentioned applications make your life easier when you are trying to make use of LinkedIn for your store promotion. But, I want to remind you that LinkedIn is a highly professional community where too many status updates aren’t encouraged at all. Therefore, be careful not to spam the LinkedIn wall with too many status updates and share the best of your listings which can give some value to the LinkedIn community. Great blogger Guykawasaki has written on “Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn“. Social media examiner shared  ” 6 Powerful LinkedIn Marketing Tips for Small Businesses” Share relevant updates with relevant groups. If you are more into selling items with less price, then you can read our post on How eBay and Amazon sellers can “Use of Facebook“, and ” Use of Twitter” for promoting their store and listings. If you need any help, contact us. I will be happy to be your friend on Facebook and Twitter.I am excited to share more upcoming blog posts here at OBVA Blog. Grab the RSS feed here so that you don’t miss the updates.