HugePedlar’s Blog

One of the simplest ways to sell an ebook is doing it through eBay.

The problem is the eBay marketplace is pretty saturated with ebooks - especially the make-money-online ones. So how do you stand out from the crowd?

Here’s what I did. I used to sell an ebook on eBay for a while last year. I found the best way to get exposure was to get onto the Pulse.

What’s eBay Pulse? It’s a front page list of current hot products. The list is compiled from products with the most ‘watchers’ - that is, people who have added the item to their watchlist.

The Pulse is divided into categories just the rest of the marketplace. Within the Information Products / How-to Guides section it’s possible to get onto the Pulse with around 20 watchers.

I used two methods to get people to add my item to their watchlist.

First, I added a prominent link to my listing inviting people to watch my item. Simple enough. Here’s the format of the url I used (on the UK site):

http://cgi1.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?MakeTrack&item=XXXXXXXXXXX&ssPageName=VIP:watchlink:top:uk

The XXXs represent the item number. I also added that url as a link for all the pictures in my listing. People love to click pics, so when they did it automatically added the item to their watchlist.

The second method involved offsite promotion. I used to advertise online survey sites using free online classifieds. The classified ads would direct people to my own site where I listed banners for a number of survey sites.

Pretty standard, but I also took advantage of the traffic (around 100 visitors a day) by displaying a nice bold link saying “Click Here to find out how I quit my job!”.

The link of course sent them to my item listing on eBay and automatically added the item to their watchlist.

On a ten day listing that was enough to get the item on eBay Pulse within about three days. After that the views soared and I usually sold around 15 copies a week - enough to make about 50% profit on my listing fees.

Speaking of which, it goes without saying that you need to pay for Featured listing and have a gallery image, bold text and a subtitle - all that stuff, which racks the fees up but without it you’ll be invisible.

The tedious part of this setup is you’ll need to change all your links each time you relist (because the item number changes). I never found a satisfactory way to automate this, but I found the least painful way was to use a php redirect.

I used the url myrandomdomain.com/ebaywatch.php for all the links in my listings, which redirected back to the listing through the add-to-watchlist url. Then I only had to update that one url each time I relisted.

So there you go: Want to sell an ebook on eBay? Get on the Pulse using offsite promotion. It works.

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