There are a number of ways you can promote your eBay store, but most of the best ways are also the simplest. For example, making sure you include a link to your store from every auction you run can greatly increase targeted traffic; if someone is already looking at one of your auctions then there is a good chance they’ll be interested in similar items in your store. A simple link such as ‘click here to view my other items for sale’ sounds so obvious, but there are many people who don’t even think to do this.

Similarly, adding a link to your eBay store to any communication which you have with bidders on your auction is a good way to drive extra traffic to your auction; for example, you could add a link to any receipts and invoices which you send to winning bidders, as well as including a link as part of an email signature when communicating with bidders. You could also include the link in emails which you send to family and friends; many will visit your store out of curiosity, and some because there is an increased level of trust as they already know you, they may be inclined to bid.

Promoting your eBay store is very similar to promoting a website, so many of the techniques are the same. For example, writing articles and posting them on article directories or as guest posts on blogs with a link to your store can be a great way to drive more potential bidders to your auction.

Similarly, actively participating in forum discussions related to the goods which your store sells, using a link in your forum signature to promote your store, can also significantly help to drive traffic to your store. It is important to read forums’ rules on links within signatures, as some forums frown upon this and see it as no more than spamming.

If your eBay store is selling high volumes then it may be worth upgrading your store to become featured. This does involve some extra costs, but for popular stores the extra sales which being featured can bring to the store will outweigh the costs.

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of users who leave the site after visiting it, without clicking on to any other pages, often because they’re not satisfied with the content which they’ve found on the site. A website’s bounce rate can be tracked through analytical tools such as the popular Google Analytics.

Other than giving a good indication of visitor satisfaction, a site’s bounce rate has also been confirmed by Google to be considered as a factor in a website’s search engine rankings. The bounce rate is something which is often ignored by webmasters, and many websites’ bounce rates sit constantly above 90%, meaning only 10% of visitors have any interest in the site’s content. However, there are steps which can be taken to improve this statistic.

The easiest – but most important – step to reduce the bounce rate is to give visitors somewhere else on your site to visit. It might sound obvious that if they don’t have the option to visit another page then they will have no option but to leave the site, however many websites’ interlinking is extremely poor. By making sure that every page of your content contains links to other relevant content should instantly improve the site’s bounce rate. This may be a mammoth task if your website is established and has many pages of content, but will be worth the effort. Sites using content management systems such as WordPress can usually do this automatically using ‘related posts’ plugins.

Another tip to improve the website’s bounce rate is to ensure that any external links open in new windows. This means that whenever someone clicks a link to go to an external web page from your site they will still have your page open in the background, and may still be interested in looking at other pages on your site.

Having high quality content is essential to ensure your bounce rate remains low; if someone reads a helpful and informative article then they will often want to look at what else is available from that website. It is also worth remembering that websites which are poorly designed, and in particular those with prominent adverts, will put off visitors and will often result in high bounce rates.

There is no right or wrong path to take; both options have benefits and drawbacks. However the main drawback of creating large numbers of smaller websites is that they take a lot of time to maintain. To combat this issue, many people started setting up sites with automated scripts which take data from other websites and post it, meaning that sites can be filled with content quickly and easily, with very little effort. Known as autoblogs, these websites became very popular a couple of years ago with many people creating hundreds of autoblogs.

For a while, these types of sites were generating good profits with little effort, until Google introduced changes to their search algorithm to penalise sites which are filled with duplicate content. Since these changes the value of autoblogs has crashed; they are now far more difficult to make money from than sites with unique content, partly because Google Adsense have been known to ban sites from displaying adverts if they have large amounts of duplicate content, but also because it has become more difficult to achieve high search engine rankings.

Despite this, the trend of creating autoblogs has continued, albeit not on quite the same scale as a year or two ago. The main reason for this is that inexperienced internet marketers are reading old articles and eBooks which suggest that autoblogs are a great way to make money online. However, the reality is that Google is cracking down more and more on these type of websites, and they are certainly not a long term strategy; most successful internet marketers moved away from autoblogging long ago. Most internet marketing experts agree that quality, unique content is the key to a successful website, and regardless of how advanced autoblogging scripts become they are unlikely to ever be able to compete with websites with quality content.

There will always be get rich quick schemes which internet marketers rush to exploit, and autoblogs were simply one of the latest of these. However, all of the schemes end sooner or later, and those who are creating autoblogs will be very unlikely to be able to replicate the kind of profits which some were making from autoblogging a year or two ago. Rather than looking for get rich quick schemes such as autoblogs, creating high quality websites with helpful and informative content is a far better long term strategy, and in the long run will be far more profitable.

Blog readers have become more difficult to please as the selection of blogs for them to visit has grown, and if they don’t like what they see when they visit a blog for the first time, they are unlikely to visit again.

One of the main ways to attract readers, and convert accidental visitors into regular readers, is to ensure that the blog’s content is of the highest quality. This means that each blog post should be helpful, informative and enjoyable to read. Creating quality content will ultimately lead to natural linking from other websites and natural sharing on social websites, which will help to improve the blog’s authority in the search engines, as well as attracting new readers directly. While this is far easier said than done, there are some online tools which can be used to check the quality of your blog’s content.

Duplicate Content Checkers

One of the major updates which Google have made over the last couple of years is to penalise sites which have duplicate content. Because of this, uniquely written content is essential to a blog’s search engine rankings. While any blogger should always be writing their content rather than copying and pasting text from anywhere, it is worth using an online tool to check the blog for any duplicate content, to avoid potential penalties. Copyscape is generally recognised as the best tool for checking duplicate content; they offer premium accounts, but for most bloggers using their free service will be fine, as this allows you to enter the URL of any of your posts and check for any copies. If Copyscape does return any copies of any of your blog posts then these can be reviewed; if you are writing your own content and Copyscape finds any copies then the chances are someone else has copied the content from your blog.

Spelling and Grammar Checkers

Poor spelling or grammar can quickly distract a reader and in the cases of very poor grammar can even lead to them leaving the blog without reading the rest of article, so ensuring that your blog’s content has excellent spelling and grammar is essential. As blogging has become more popular, the number of bloggers who are writing in English despite it not being their native English has increased dramatically; many of these blogs have poor grammar and spelling. There are a number of websites and programs which can check an article’s spelling and grammar, and usually make suggestions to help the user to correct the mistake. Most spelling mistakes are glossed over by the reader – studies have shown that the human brain automatically corrects most of the spelling errors without the person even realising that there was a mistake – however serious grammatical errors can force the reader to have to go back and read the sentence again, which disrupts the flow of the article. Even the best writers can make mistakes, and spelling and grammar checking tools can help writers to identify and resolve any issues with their article before publishing.

SEO Rating Scripts

Optimising an article for search engines is very important in order to attract natural traffic, so checking SEO factors such as keyword density is often considered to be an essential part of content creation. While this can be checked manually, there are online scripts and WordPress plugins which will analyse the content and return an SEO score, as well as offering suggestions to optimise the article further. Some bloggers will simply not publish an article until it reaches a certain score to improve the chances of their article ranking highly in the search engines.

While these scripts can be useful to get an idea of how the search engines might rank your content, it is important to remember that in the long run well written content will always be better for your site than search engine optimised content, so amending your article to try to get a better score is not recommended. Google’s search engine algorithm is constantly changing, so the factors which led to a page ranking well one month could be completely different the following month; however, readers will always favour well written, informative articles.

Analytical Tools

Often overlooked are the site’s visitors. If the visitors don’t like the content then it should be reviewed to check where the issues are – do any parts of it not make sense, or does the text not flow correctly? The content can then be amended, or in extreme cases removed from the website altogether.

To analyse whether your visitors like your content, you should check for any comments. If the number of comments being left is a lot lower than other articles on your site then this is often – but not always – a good indication that people are not interested in it. Another way to check whether the content is popular with your visitors is to check the time which visitors are staying on the page, which can be checked using analytical scripts and plugins. If people are leaving the page quickly then this usually means they’re not interested in what you’re writing about.

Writing for blogs can be hard work, and many bloggers take the easy route of writing quick articles just to fill up space and make their blog appear more popular, however readers generally appreciate fewer high quality articles to read rather than a high number of articles which don’t really tell them anything.

As with any other popular form of making money online, as the popularity grows people with dishonest intentions inevitably creep in, looking to make quick money from unsuspecting and trusting sellers.

Any method of selling electronic goods such as websites, eBooks or software is very difficult to control and prevent scammers from finding a way to sour the trade and end up with the money as well as the product. However, there are some standard scams which you can watch out for.

Falsified statistics

Statistics are the main selling point for any website flipper; traffic, income and authority define the selling price for most websites, so scammers tend to exploit this by falsifying the website’s statistics. Using Photoshop to make a false screenshot of the website’s earnings or traffic is probably the most common scam, however some website marketplaces, such as the popular auction site Flippa, have taken measures to prevent this, such as uploading PDF files from Google Analytics.

Nevertheless, it is very difficult to verify the authenticity of any statistics, in particular earnings; when the seller displays proof of the website’s earnings, you only have their word that all of the earnings have come from that one website, when in fact the earnings could be a cumulative total from several sites. Give that the sales value is calculated based on the earnings figure, this will result in the buyer paying far too much for the site.

Similarly traffic statistics can be falsified using scripts which load the website over and over, or by showing unreliable statistics such as web counters. Sometimes traffic screenshots will include visits by search engine spiders, whereas Google Analytics tends to ignore these visitors.

The other statistic which is regularly faked is the website’s Page Rank. Many buyers value Page Rank extremely highly, as it gives an indication of the website’s authority within the search engines.

PayPal claims

While it is the most popular payment method for website sales, it is very easy for scammers to cheat the system using PayPal. Deceitful buyers often pay for the website through PayPal and then raise a dispute as soon as they receive the files and domain. It is very difficult to prove during these disputes that the buyer received everything, so PayPal will often refund the buyer’s money. Domain registrars will not usually transfer the domain back to the seller, so sellers often end up losing the money as well as their website as a result of PayPal disputes.

Escrow is a system which a lot of regular website flippers use to protect themselves against these disputes. Escrow will hold the website and payment until both parties are satisfied, significantly reducing the risk of being scammed. However, Escrow is an expensive way of doing this, meaning that although it is a sensible business practice for people selling high value websites, for the majority of website flippers selling low value sites Escrow is simply too expensive to be worthwhile, and they must trust the buyer not to raise a PayPal dispute.

Minimizing the risk

There are some steps which you can take to minimise the risk of being scammed. Firstly, every website flipper knows not to send any files or the domain until payment has been received. Buyers on website marketplaces know that this is standard practice, so if a buyer is refusing to pay until they receive the website then you should be extremely cautious. It is understandable that new buyers will be wary of being scammed themselves, however the risk to the seller is far greater than the risk to the buyer, which is why website marketplaces tend to enforce the payment being sent first.

Screenshots of statistics can be easily faked using various methods, including Photoshop, so you need to check whether the figures add up. Some sellers may be willing to arrange “team viewer” sessions, where you can remotely connect to their computer and they can show you their accounts. However, the best way to verify the statistics is to check the number, and analyse whether they sound reasonable. For any earnings which are claimed, analyse the number of sales or ad clicks against the number of unique visitors, and decide whether the click through rate sounds accurate. To check traffic statistics, analyse the sources of the traffic – for example search engines or referring websites – and then check where the links are in the referring websites, and which keywords the website is ranking for in the search engines.

In many cases you might find that the traffic figures simply don’t match up to the keywords which the site is ranking for; this is because many sellers will list their site for sale once their traffic sources start to dry up, for example if they lose their search engine rankings. This means that although the seller is providing accurate statistics about historical traffic, the reality is that the website will not be generating that level of traffic in the future, which can be misleading for potential buyers. The seller has not done anything wrong – they have provided accurate historical information – so it is up to the buyer to analyse the data and decide whether the website is worth buying.

Buying websites can be something of a gamble, so it is important to protect yourself wherever possible. Many websites will lose traffic and earnings naturally after you buy them, through no fault of your own or the seller, so minimising the risk is good practice. It is worth asking why the seller has chosen to list the site for sale; in many cases they know it’s about to stop earning money for them, so they want to cash in while it’s still profitable. Learning how to spot these factors will help you to pick out the most profitable websites, and help you to develop your website flipping business.