Should I start a free online store at BLUJAY

Through some research and experiences, of my own and fellow blujayers, I have compiled ways to get your blujay store more sales.

Remember when you sign up for your store that your username will be your store name so choose something that could reflect what you sell. You can have as many stores as you like so you can sell certain items in various stores if you desire. When you fill in the about ME PAGE, use the first few lines to use keywords/what you sell. This is picked up by search engine spiders and save the personal information for later on in the paragraph. Make sure your item titles are spelled correctly and are descriptive without a lot of punctuation so that those searching the web can find your item. Make sure you fill out your Sales Policy and I find that accepting Google Checkout, Paypal, and USPS money orders offer easy and secure payment choices.

Since all free sites don't have the advertising to bring sellers in like Amazon and Ebay you should promote your store to pick up extra traffic/sales. I suggest at the bare minimum starting a Squidoo lens about your store, and either joining a few google and/or yahoo selling groups, etc to help bring in consistent sales. You get out of a site what you put into it. There are numerous other promoting techniques such as Kaboodle, My Space, etc but I am trying to keep it simple.

You should always submit your store and all promoting urls to the search engines. Then resubmit at least 2-3 times a year. This is self explanatory since you don't want your pages to be considered outdated. Don't submit to often or it can cause you to be ignored by search engines for spamming, etc. You can submit directly to Google, Yahoo, and MSN but there are other sites that submit your urls to various engines and I use a free one called submitexpress dot com.

Check into the blujay forums and don't be afraid to ask questions and read about how those that are successful are making regular sales. This helped me out immensely and now I am trying to give back to others. You can also email former buyers and let them know about your new home. Blujay allows link and HTML. Blujay has a very simple listing format and is done using only 1 page.

If anyone has any questions about blujay and/or thinking about starting a store there, I encourage you to visit Blujay and explore the site.

August 2009: I had no sales from April 2009-Sept 2009 due to no Google Base being submitted by the owners. I sold over 100 games and items from May 2008-April 2009. I have left Blujay for this reason. Your mileage may vary but considering how much I actively promoted the site and saw no owner involvement or site updates as promised in 2008 I can't recommend Blujay anymore.