eBay Selling Secrets by Andrew Lock, the ‘Renegade eBay Auction Seller’

When we have friends around for dinner, my wife loves to bring out a personality test book called ‘Please Understand Really great book by the way. It’s a series of questions that result in you being classified as a very specific personality type. Before the first time I took the test, I had no idea there were specific personality types, and it’s really freaky how accurate the test is in identifying who you really are. You keep thinking ‘how could they know so much about me?!”

In this particular test I came out as a ‘mastermind’ type, which apparently means that I like cooking up ideas in my marketing lab and then I get quickly frustrated when other people don’t follow my instructions. Sounds about right.

All of this leads me to bring up a topic that’s not just a BIG lesson, it’s a JUMBO lesson of gigantic proportions.

Do you know what the ultimate marketing sin is? There’s all kinds of possibilities, (and I see lots of contenders on a daily basis) but I’ll let you in on the ULTMATE marketing sin. The ultimate marketing sin is being boring! Yep, that’s right. There’s no excuse for not amusing your customers while you sell.

Let’s face it, we’re all overloaded with, stress, health problems, bad news etc, so it’s a breath of fresh air when we can smile or laugh. Whoever said that marketing had to be dull? Seems like that’s the standard most people go for, so it’s really not that difficult to do better.

Note that we’re not talking about telling jokes or making the humor the main focus. It’s simply about one word: personality. Everyone has personality *(as we’ve seen) -

some are more interesting characters than others, but we all have personality. So why is it that as soon as someone tries to write an eBay listing or a website sales letter, they suddenly go all formal?

People relate to other humans, not unnatural sounding corporate style messages that have had all personality sucked out of them.

Exhibit A shows a sample signup form for the Digg online community. Don’t worry if you don’t know what Digg is, it’s not important. Okay, I’ll give you a brief explanation. – It’s a website that allows people to let others know when they’ve come across an interesting article or video.

We’ve all seen signup forms like the one shown, we’re very familiar with them. But Digg made it fun to enter your details. They entertain and amuse while you go through what’s normally a very boring process.

The best way to see how the form works is to go and sign up yourself (click on ‘Join Digg’ at the top of the website (www.digg.com), but for now I’ll walk you through the bits that caught my eye.

Firstly, when you;’re asked to select your gender, rather than the traditional ‘male/female’ choices, Digg offers:

Guy

Girl

Dude

Lady
Fellow

Bird

Chap

Grrrl

Gentleman

Damsel

Transgender

None of the above

Being British, I chose ‘chap’ of course.

Further down the form, there’s one of those boxes where you have to copy the characters you see on screen, into a box. Instead of the usual warning along the lines of ‘for security reasons we need you to enter the code..’ on Digg we’re simply asked, ‘Are You Human?’ which gets right to the point in a friendly way.

Isn’t it amazing that with hundreds of thousands of web forms out there, I only just came across one that entertained me? I think there’s room for improvement, don’t you?

Now, I hate to be hard on you but I have to share some rules with you about personality:

Rule 1: Don’t try and be all things to all people. In other words, you can’t please everyone, it’s impossible. The very act of injecting personality means that you’ll alienate some customers who don’t like your style. That’s fine, it’s better that way. By contrast, the plain vanilla, corporate middle-ground alternative is not where you want to be if you want to get noticed.

Rule 2: Don’t try and be someone who you’re not. Your favorite comedian might be Steve Martin, but there’s only one Steve Martin. The same thing can be said of any well known entertainer. If buyers believe you’re just trying to copy a well known personality, you’ll lose them. The best way to start is by exagerating your natural qualities. Inject the kinds of things your friends like about you. Joe Polish, advisor to the carpet cleaning industry came up with a little acronym called ‘ELF’. He’s always asking people if they have an elf business. Then he explains: easy, fun and lucrative. That fits with Joe’s personality very well.

Rule 3: Ironically, this rule is to break the rules of grammar. Your English teacher isn’t here to rap your knuckles anymore, and your customers will respond better to a plain talkin’, straight shootin’ style than a dull corporate memo from head office. Memo schmemo. Marketing is supposed to invigorate customers into life, not send them to sleep.

Rule 4: Always remember your aim is to sell. Don’t let the personality take center stage over the message. And don’t go off on tangents that divert the attention of the reader from the main aim of – getting them to buy from you. Also, stay away from off color, crude language that will offend many. Bad language isn’t funny to most people. Sorry, that was more like a bunch of last minute, extra rules - not one rule - wasn’t it?!

Note that you can also make your product into a character and use that as the personality. Think of the Energizer bunny, the Budweiser frogs, Kellogg’sTony The Tiger and so on.

All of this advice applies to your eBay listings just as it does to any other selling environment. People are people. Businesses don’t buy anything, people do.

Get creative with how you present yourself and your products., don’t be afraid to take some risks. I think you can see by now that buyers respond to REAL people, and if you can throw in a hint of wackiness then so much the better.

Will it take work to inject personality in your marketing to create character,? Yes, of course. But like any skill, it’ll become a valuable asset in your business, and you’ll jump light years ahead of your competitors.

Q: Hi Andrew, I’ve read a lot of conflicting advice about the best duration for an auction listing. Some people say 7 days, I’ve also read that 3 days is best, and then a friend of mine recently swore that 10 days was the best because the auction stays live for longer. Can you clear up this ‘mess’ for me?

A: Hi Terry, I’m not surprised you’re confused with all that well meaning, but bad advice. Look, here’s the reality. There is no best listing duration for all types of auctions, there are simply principles to keep in mind that will guide you to the right decision.

One day auctions are best for items that NEED to be sold within one day, for example last minute event or travel tickets.

Three and five day auctions are usually best for commodity items that you list over and over again and that commonly sell for around the same price - the reason being that you can sell more of them within the same time frame.

Seven day listings are best for one off items (any item that you don’t have more than one to sell), so that applies to most auctions

Finally, ten day listings are best for rare and collectible, unique or unusual items that will attract more bids the longer the listing is active. In that case, the extra fee for a 10 day auction is insignificant compared with the value of extending the auction.

Q: Hi Andrew, can you explain keyword spamming to me. I’ve heard the term a few times but I have no idea what it means.

A: Hi Sherrie, let’s start with keywords. Keywords are the words that you should be using in your title to attract potential buyers to your listings. While most sellers use that space more as a description, the renegade approach is to simply list a series of keywords. For example, here’s a conventional listing title

“Brand New XBOX360 in Perfect Condition One Careful Owner”

And here’s the renegade version:

“NEW XBOX360 XBOX 360 Video Game Console Microsoft”

In the first title words like brand, in, one, careful, and owner are not keywords because buyers don’t search for those words when looking for this item.

The second title is pure keywords, there isn’t a single word wasted – every word is a potential search term, or keyword.

Now that you understand what a keyword is, keyword spamming is a practice where you deliberately get buyers to look at your listings by including words that don’t relate to the item you’re selling.

For example, this title would be guilty of keyword spamming:

“XBOX360 similar to Sony Playstation, Wii, Nintendo”

This practice is strictly against eBay’s policy and if you try it you’re likely to be suspended or banned from eBay. Having said this, there are some legitimate ways to use helpful keywords that can boost your sales - we’ll be discussing that next month.

Please submit your questions via email to:

myebayquestion@gmail.com