10 Great & Inexpensive Ways to Promote Your eBay Store

There are myriad venues for you to promote your eBay store inexpensively, so many in fact that the world is literally your stage. To try to take advantage of them all would be overwhelming. Let’s keep it manageable then and talk about a few good ways to promote your eBay store, effectively and on the cheap!

1. If you haven’t already done so, register a domain name (URL or website address), then point it to your eBay store using the host’s web forwarding service. Network Solutions and GoDaddy are a couple of well known domain registrars that can help you set this up, and it doesn’t cost that much. Make your name as short and sweet as possible, something easy to spell and remember. Use your new URL in your advertising, newsletters, promotional flyers, and online advertising. For example, my ebay store at http://stores.ebay.com/Venus-Shoe has a domain name of simply venusshoe dot com. Easy!
2. Submit your store’s new URL to search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.
3. Submit ads about your products to free advertising sites (using your new URL, of course) like Craigslist, Free Advertising Forum, Kijiji, and slews of niche advertisers. Always submit photos or links back to your products on eBay when given the opportunity in these free sites.
4. Create a short 1-3 minute video of your products and upload them to as many pubic video sites (e.g. YouTube, Metacalf, Myspace profile, etc) as possible. As you’re loading them, include keywords about your product, and make sure you display your new URL as a graphic somewhere in your video. This can be a lot of work, but well worth it. Why? Because most search engines, including Google’s, are optimized to give preference to sites containing video files. If you aren’t comfortable with making a video, make a PowerPoint or Flash Slideshow file instead, then convert it to a video file using a third party utility or plug-in. 
5. Create a myspace and a facebook page about your eBay store. You can easily drop html links in your myspace page back to your eBay. You can find really cool widgets that will interface your auction listings to your myspace and facebook pages too. Cooqy works great for myspace. Facebook has its own applications for eBay – just seach on eBay on facebook! Learn how to use these sites to post bulletins, get friends, get fans, submit photos, submit videos and get noticed! Social networking is on the rise and these are well worth your time.
6. Keep in touch with your past customers by creating an email newsletter campaign to your email contact list. There are several services that are adept and inexpensive at helping you manage your email campaign (our favorite is Constant Contact at $15/month). If your email list is small and your newsletter not very complicated, you can easily manage the whole thing your self, if you have a good email client. For example, we’ve found that Gmail, used in tandem with Mozilla Thunderbird, make a great way to send out HTML newsletter email campaigns, and it’s not too difficult to figure out either.
7. Learn HTML. No tool will come in handier as you’re trying to accomplish all of this. It is proven that those with HTML skills garner better rates and conversions than those online merchants without it.
8. Submit your product feed file to Google Base.
9. Join and participate in niche forums related to your products.
10. Create a blog and use good key words in your blog titles.

Okay, we have to mention this one, so you get a bonus tip, bringing the total tips to 11: Write an eBay Guide and Review about your products, and put a link back to your store in the guide!