October 17th, 2006 by Skip McGrath

New blogging technology allows eBay sellers to drive traffic to their eBay listings and feature their eBay auctions and store listings right in their blog.

Blogging is a powerful and simple technology that anyone can use to communicate almost anything over the web.  At first blogs were just used to communicate ideas and information, but online business owners discovered that blogs could be used to drive traffic to their web sites.  This was usually done by placing links from the blog to their web site.  Hopefully someone reading the blog would click on the link, visit the web site and buy something.

eBay sellers have been doing this for years with mixed results.  The problem with links is that they are just links.  And if you put a link on your blog to your web site –or any one else’s web site, once a reader clicks on that link, they are gone.

This blog uses an entirely new technology that displays your eBay listings right here on the blog.  Notice the eBay listing to the right of this post for my EZ Cube auctions on eBay.  That is a listing that is automatically fed from eBay.  But when you click on the listing it brings up a page that is still on my blog.  You don’t go to the eBay listing until you click on the listing title from that page.  You are probably thinking: “So what?”  The “what” is that the page on my blog you are looking at is being indexed by search engines.

The next part will be easier to follow if you open this blog in another window.  This is really cool and it’s important to understand it.

In the upper left hand corner of this page is a link that says: “My eBay Auctions.”  If you click on that link it will take you to a list of everything listed on eBay over the past ten days. There are several things to notice.  First of all each of these listings get indexed in search engines as a separate listing. Next if you click on the auction title it takes you right to the listing on eBay.  But, at the end of the link is an rfId tag.  If someone purchases from your store through this link, eBay gives you a 75% credit on the final value fee.  Lastly, click on the top tags below the listing and you are taken to a new page.  Again, this page is indexed by search engines.

So where do you get this technology?  It comes from a company called MyST Technologies. MyST developed a program called MyST Technology for eBay specifically for eBay sellers.  So if you sell on eBay and would like to use a blog to drive traffic to your eBay listings, just click on the link and get some information.

The other advantage of this technology is that it can drive traffic to your web site in addition to your eBay auctions.  Since setting up this blog, I have seen my page rankings climb.

See Also

• The Complete eBay Marketing System
  Complete training course for professional eBay sellers