Before you start trying to drive outside traffic to your store make sure you are doing everything possible to get existing eBay traffic.

Are you using Fixed Price or Auction listings to get exposure in search?

You should also have a link in every listing inviting people to your eBay store.

Also - consider not suing all caps. It makes it harder to read to descriptions.

You have some beautiful items. I will definitely be going through your store to look at everything.

I have several websites so any web traffic is directed there. My goal on eBay is to capture the eBay eyeball. Since you have a much higher level of product it makes sense to cast your net as wide as possible.

Google changed the rules this summer. You need to go into your preference and make sure feeds are enabled. eBay is doing feeds but that doesn't mean you'll get decent placement on Google.

I'm sure Steve will be along sometime this weekend with his usual recommendations. They are good ones and include getting a domain for yourself. An easy starting point is to then point your domain to your eBay store. Then you can put that domain on all your packing slip and business cards. You can also put in a store referral credit that reduces your eBay fees. (Sally is the one that usually explains that.)

All of us around here do different things in our businesses so you'll get a round robin of information as people check in. I always recommend that people look at lots of other listings and stores. You can learn a lot by how others do things.

Your store makes me think back nostaligically on a time when I used items like you sell. I don't want to go back to that life but sometimes I miss the pretties it included.

Hi Paul! What searches do you look at?

Hi Paul, I really enjoyed your post!
Today I took a BIG leap for me and purchased a domaine name and website from godaddy. I called and spoke to a rep for 35 minutes who did all the work for me and gave me his personal work contact to be my mentor. Not bad!
I played around with creating my website today and it was quite easy! I was able to add the link to my eBay store and it worked fine. I was so HAPPY!
I will publish my website to the web on Tuesday and let you know so you can check it out and give feedback. They told me that I need to submit my website to all the search engens but it seems easy so that is not a problem.
My question is how often shoud I re-submit my website to stay in the top 20 or 40?
If you could help me computer wise with this new venture I would really appreaciate it. I am not tech savvy AT ALL which is why the godaddy deal really worked for me.
I would love to see your other web sites!
Let me know.
Elizabeth

Faerie is right that over time your web site will move up the ranks. But it absolutely does not hurt to submit your site and to make sure that the search engines have your sitemap.

You can get some information about using Google to promote you web site at Google's Free Marketing Tools on hubpages.

Google Analytics can be especially helpful if you want to figure out how people find your web site, what keywords brought them there (and therefore what keywords you should perhaps focus on), what pages they landed on, etc. Google webmaster tools can help you see where your web site stands in the cosmic scheme of all things Google.

Your godaddy mentor should be able to help you with this stuff in case you have any problems, but it's really not very difficult.

Best of luck!
Sallie

Hi everyone;

I have just tuned in to the recent string here and you have my complete attention. I have a store 'Fashionista Purses and Handbags' that is a few weeks old.

I have read everything that I can get my hands on re how to market it, which unfortunately isn't much. I bought a domain name for it right off the bat, but know not what to do with it. I see you talking about selling my eBay stuff from a website using the domain name, how do I find out how to set that up? I don't mean how to do it, just what is involved; I will probably figure out how by myself... maybe lol.

Another question I have is how do I make keywords work for me, it seems quite different than how logic tells me to approach it. Everything I tried to pick up the pace works in retrograde. I switched to all fixed price and auction, I wrote an about me page; I changed the keywords, with every change things slowed down even more, I am writing a blog too btw.

The question I want to ask re keywords is - Lets say I sell purses, cos I do... I had changed the keywords at one point to something like this:

Fashionista purses and handbags
handbags
purses
large handbags
large purses
leather
black

I used these because they were common factors of phrases used in eBay search that brought people to my store or items. There was a really negative impact by that change. Also by one that was something like this:

Fashionista purses and handbags
handbags
purses
large
leather
black
red

Can someone give me a hint on how best to do this? I even tried using words that are common to my product titles, nothing there either. Frrrrrrrusttttrrrratingggggg! And expensive...

My average traffic after 3 weeks is 1-2 per day.

I always recommend that first you do everything possible to optimize your listings to get the existing eBay traffic. Once you are doing everything reasonable then look outside of eBay.

Keywords aren't about making a list somewhere. Keywords are the searchable terms you use in your listing titles and descriptions. Search engines search web pages. Each listing you have is a web page. Choose 2-3 keywords per page to concentrate on. Your description should utilize these keywords as much as naturally possible.