Hello! This is Rebecca Shapiro and Diane Falvey. We’re both entrepreneurs and eBay store owners. We’re also business partners at OASIS Connect (www.oasisconnect.com), a company we started to help eBay sellers and businesses get set up the right way on eBay because these days eBay should be a part of every online business.

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There are so many great ways to get your Internet business noticed online, from email marketing to social networking. But where do you start? One place is eBay. eBay not only gives you 233 million customers to start with, they also give you great marketing tools that will not only help you get more visibility on Google and other search engines, they will also help you establish yourself as an expert in your marketplace and drive customers to your website and keep them coming back time and again. And, on eBay, these tools are simple to use, and they are free with your store subscription and sometimes even without a store.
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There are several ways to get your customers to be email newsletter subscribers.

1. Ask your customers to mark you as “A favorite seller.” Place links in your basic store design, by going to Manage My Store > Listing Frames > and check the Add to Favorite Stores box and “Link to sign up for store newsletter” box.
2. Add links in your listings that point customers to add you as a favorite seller. When they add you as a favorite seller, they can also sign up for your newsletter at the same time.
3. Create a Newsletter promotion box to give your visitors an easy way to sign up for your newsletter. Make sure this promotion box makes it exciting to join your newsletter.

For example, let your customers know that your newsletter subscribers get special discounts or are the first to know about new, hard to find merchandise in your store! If they love your products, they will want the scoop and sign up!

4. Be sure to rename your newsletter from General Interest to something more exciting like “Dog Nose News”. Customers won’t be compelled to sign up for a newsletter with a boring title.

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Remember, someone who signs up for your newsletter is already interested in what you are selling and wants to spend their money with you. You just need to remind them and what better way to do this than with newsletters! Give your customers great reasons to shop with you and you’ll have customers for life.

For more information on how to set up your eBay newsletters, go to Link.
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Quick Steps to Creating an effective Guide:

• Include your company name or user id in your guide so it’s easy for potential customers to find you.
• Use your keywords three times in your guide.
• Give juicy information in your guide. This is not a place to promote your store or what you are selling, but rather to give information about the types of products you sell. What’s the best way to use your product? How do you take care of it? Why it’s considered the best in its class?
• Link to your eBay listings or eBay store from your guide. The eBay guide wysiwyg tool makes it easy to create an attractive guide, adding pictures and links back to your eBay listings!
• Make sure you have listing related to your keywords so eBay places your listings alongside your guides.
• Be sure to sign your guides by inviting customers to visit your store and link back to your home page. We also recommend adding your logo at the bottom of each guide.
• Add *tags*. eBay gives you spaces for up to 10 “meta” tags, keywords and keyword phrases that make it easy to search for your guide and can get picked up by the search engines.
• Ask your fellow eBayers to vote on your guides. Once you’ve gotten a few “helpful” votes, you will gain a Top 10,000 Reviewer icon next to your name. Customers will read your guides and feel comfortable doing business with you because you know your products so well. Potential customers will find you through your guides and become new customers! And, the most popular guides may appear on the Reviews & Guides Home page, in the “Most Helpful Member Guides” section.

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A tip to making guide writing easy is to first write your guide ahead of time in Notepad (most PCs have this under Accessories) or in a similarly unformatted type program. Writing your guide in a Word document and then cutting and pasting into a web-based program like eBay’s Guides or even blogs can result in what looks like gibberish to your readers.

To learn more about writing eBay guides go to Link.
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Write blog entries that prompt your readers to leave comments.

Again, you can enter up to 10 tags for your blog that will help readers find you. And last but not least, decide how your blog will look by choosing a theme.

To find out more about creating eBay blogs, go to Link