Ebay has a very powerful marketing tool for any business, and that is lead generation.  Lead generation, or traffic when speaking in terms of the World Wide Web.  Accounts are easy and FREE to set up.  You can use some very simple techniques to develop a feedback score that is necessary for certain listing upgrades, and once that's done, there are numerous ways to drive traffic to your listing, and then from your listing to your own ebay store, or your own website. But ebay offers some other very low cost options that can drive even more traffic for you.

For instance, "Featured Homepage" listing upgrade, will get your product placed in a rotation on ebay's home page.  The cost for this service is a mere $39.95. With over a billion hits a day, that equates to less than $.01 per visitor.  It isn't even possible to buy that kind of exposure anywhere else but ebay. 

The Featured Plus also gurantees that your listing will appear at the top of the page that your product shows on, in the Featured Section.  The price for this is only $19.95.  The top of the listing page is what I would consider ocean front real estate, and could very well be your ticket to owning that coveted piece of property for a very small fee.

Start by getting a feedback score of at least 10.  Do this by finding products that are in high demand, and then listing them.  Ask your friends and family to buy something from your ebay listing, and then ask them to give you that positive feedback.  They must buy from you in order to give you that feedback, so make sure you are finding them exactly what they want and then give it to them at cost or less if you can afford to, just to get the item sold and the buyer can leave feedback.

Next, choose the product you want to sell and then create a listing agreement for it.  Ebay does have certain restrictions on their listing upgrades, such as no information products and no promotional items, so if your product is in violation of that, find a way to make it fit thier criteria.  For instance, if you have an Information Product, turn it into a book, or a business opportunity.  Then upgrade that listing to a "Featured Home Page" listing.

Once the viewer sees it on the ebay home page, they can go to your listing agreement.  Ebay does allow you to link to your own website in your item description as long as your site pertains to the item in the item description.  As an example, if you sell houses, you can link to your real estate website and that will drive traffic to your site.  Ebay is a commercial for a commercial.  It is an amazing web presence felt the world over and it is another tool for online marketers.

On a final note, make sure your website is designed to capture your visitors.  Offer them something for free in exchange for their name and email address.  Make sure that it's an opt-in form, and then use an autoresponder to send them updates about your site and your products and all the things you are selling on ebay that week, to keep them coming back.

Happy buying/bidding. :)