Marketing Your Ebay Store with Squidoo

Your own personal page on Squidoo is called a lens. A lens is written on one topic, and will offer your expertise on a certain subject. Any person that creates a lens is called a lensmaster. By creating your own Squidoo lens, you can offer additional information on your products or services, add links to your favorite sites, feature selected eBay items, and spread the word about your eBay store or business. Show what makes your store unique and you'll drive traffic.

Squidoo is easily customized via the "modules." Modules are the blocks of material that you can add to your lens, usually separated by a page break and large headline. Images can be added easily via HTML tags, direct links, or simply using the "upload image" icon. Besides text and images, you can add YouTube Videos, favorite links lists, links to your eBay items, Amazon items, Google Blog searches, Flickr photos, store items, interactive polls and much more. It's a great commodity for sellers.

Use these modules to make your lens more interesting and attractive to visitors, and direct them to your store by enticing them with your items, along with snippets of testimonials (positive feedback) from buyers, your feedback score, and instilling trust.

Outside of Squidoo, you can generate traffic to your lens through email, external website links, posting in forums off Squidoo, posting on your MySpace page, or including a URL on your business card. Tell all of your friends via email and you're sure to get a good initial boost of hits just from that! You can also boost traffic within Squidoo by adding the proper tags and using the Discovery Module feature in the introduction. Add your own relevant lenses if you have them, or leave it blank until you have more lenses to add. Be sure to add tags to your lens as well. Pick tags that users might use to search for a lens like yours. Keep them broad for best results.

Now that you've set up your first lens...start writing some more! And share what you've written in the eBay forums, your MySpace, or through email, including a link. Leave links in every lens to some of your other lenses. The featured lenses module is a good way to do this. Updating your lens frequently to provide fresh new content can also generate interest from search engines.

One more tip on increasing traffic to your Squidoo lenses is to add the "Guestbook" feature.This modules offer feedback from guests. The guestbook feature will allow other lensmasters or visitors to leave a brief comment, and your bio picture will appear next to your comment and ID. It's a good way to network within the Squidoo community, and is reassuring to search engine visitors that you aren't some fly by night, untrustworthy seller.

Don't forget to link to your Ebay Store URL in each of your lenses!

After setting up a few lenses, check your eBay Omniture free traffic reports in the manage my store section. Click on the "referring sites" link to generate a report of the sites that have lead users to your eBay store. Squidoo should show up somewhere on your report, and the number of click throughs to your store will be listed next to it. This will show you the results of your work, which lenses are generating the most traffic, and how you can tweek your lenses and tags to attact more attention.

You should also check the stats of your individual lenses through the "my dashboard" section of your Squidoo account. This will tell you how many people have visited your lenses, and where the traffic is coming from. It will also tell you how many people have clicked out of your lenses to other sites. This will provide you with the information you need to track the progress of your lenses, marketing efforts, what you'll need to improve, what's worth the time, what people like, and what they dislike.

Add the eBay module(s) and you'll be able to add products right from your store or auction listings! This is your opportunity to talk up your items. If you have a permanent inventory (you sell the same group of items over and over), you can create a great marketing pitch to sell your items. If you constantly have new inventory, you can have Squidoo automatically update your products with the search results you give them. It's that easy! Try adding several modules to your lenses for the best results. Be sure to add a description to each module to make a little more interesting. Talk it up, give it a good sell like an articulate used car salesman!

Squidoo can create a lot of search engine traffic and increase your Ebay store sales, but there is a small amount of work involved. Here are some basic guidelines to follow when creating your lens:

-Choose keywords for your Squidoo Lens URL with dashes in between the words (keep it short)
- Write an introduction that's both captivating to buyers and has plenty of keywords, at least a few sentences.
- Upload a picture to every module possible. Use pictures of your own Ebay items.
- Personalize your bio and add a picture.
- Link to your other lenses.
- Fill out all of the module titles and subtitles
- Research keywords with tools like the Adwords Keyword Tool, and include those keywords in your Squidoo lens once or twice.
- Make your lens at least 4-6 modules in length.
- Make your lens specific to one theme. If you sell a variety of items, make a lens for each of the groups of products that you sell.
- Include Ebay modules showcasing your store items throughout the lens.
- Link to your Ebay store in the lens.
- Join groups on Squidoo to gain backlinks to your lens.
- Fill out the Squidoo tags to get search traffic within Squidoo.