- Trick #61: Brand Your BusinessAnd Market It
- Trick #62: Link to Your Other Listings
- Trick #63: Set Up Product Cross-Promotions
- Trick #64: Encourage Add-On Sales
- Trick #65: Optimize Your Listings for Search
- Trick #66: Create an Email Mailing List
- Trick #67: Gain Exposure by Writing Reviews and Guides
- Trick #68: Use Google AdWords
- Trick #69: Feed Your Store Listings to Google Product Search
- Trick #70: Promote Your eBay Listings in the Real World
- eBay Business Profile: Balkowitsch Enterprises, Inc.
- A Rags to Riches Story
- How to Grow a Business
- Managing the Business
- Selling Strategies
- Keys to Success
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Trick #67: Gain Exposure by Writing Reviews and Guides
Here's an interesting way to promote your business and your listings. You can use eBay's Reviews and Guides to establish yourself as an expert in your field, and thus gain more exposure for your business.
You might not be familiar with the Guides and Reviews features; they're both relatively new. eBay Reviews are product reviews, written by eBay members; you can find product reviews for CDs, home audio receivers, golf clubs, and so on. Guides are more detailed how-tos that present useful information and buying advice; these are available for a number of different topics, and include both buying guides and more informational guides (Techniques for Drumset Recording, How to Plan the Perfect Vacation, and so on).
Anyone can write a Review or Guide—including you. And when users read your Reviews and Guides, they're likely to click through to your item listings or eBay Store.
Writing a Product Review
Writing a product review is quite easy. You don't have to bother supplying product details, such as model number, or dimensions, or whatever; all you have to supply is your opinion. Just follow these steps:
- Go to the main Reviews & Guides page (reviews.ebay.com), shown in Figure 7.9.
Figure 7.9 eBay's Reviews and Guides.
- Use the search box at the top of the page to search for the particular product you want to review.
- When the list of matching products appears, click the link for that product's review page.
- When the product review page appears, select the Reviews tab and then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the Write a Review or Be the First to Review It link.
- When the Write a Review page appears, as shown in Figure 7.10, enter a title for your review. The title can be up to 55 characters in length.
Figure 7.10 Writing your own product review.
- Give the product a rating, from 1 to 5 (5 being excellent; 1 being poor).
- Type your full review into the Review box. The review can be up to 3,500 characters long.
- When you're done with your review, click the Submit Review button.
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That's it; your review will now be listed among the other reviews for that particular product.
Creating a Guide
The process for writing a Guide is similar to writing a Review, although here it really helps if you're an expert or otherwise uniquely experienced with the topic at hand—that is, if you know enough to write a useful Guide. (Ideally, of course, you will be an expert in what you're selling.) Follow these steps:
- Go to the main Reviews & Guides page (reviews.ebay.com).
- Click the Write a Guide link.
- When the Write a Guide page appears, as shown in Figure 7.11, enter a title for your Guide. The title can be up to 55 characters in length.
Figure 7.11 Creating a new Guide.
- Type the text for your Guide into the Guide box. Remember that the first 200 characters of your Guide will be all that appears when people search for Guides by topic.
- Enter up to five "tags" that other members can use as keywords to search for your Guide.
- When you're done with your Guide, click the Save and Continue button.
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Fairly easy, although I recommend composing and editing your guide offline (in Microsoft Word, perhaps), and then cutting and pasting the completed text into the Guide box. This way you can take your time writing and researching, and just paste the final result into the eBay page.