If you're looking for a way to market your website, and you haven't considered using eBay, then you could very well be missing out on one of the lowest cost website marketing options around. Let me explain...

Everyone is looking for a way to generate targeted website traffic at the lowest possible cost, but it seems that a whole lot of people are overlooking an awesome website marketing tool that is probably already book-marked inside their browser - eBay.

EBay has over 65 million registered users buying, selling and browsing all kinds of products around the clock. Just think, what if we (website owners) had a way to funnel some of that traffic off onto our website? Well, we do, and we can do it relatively cheaply!

The key to accomplishing this is the eBay 'Me' page. The eBay Me page is sort of a profile-like page that you setup for your eBay ID. When potential customers look at your auctions, and your ID, they will see a little 'Me' icon graphic that links to your Me page. And it's very important to note: your Me page can link to your website.

Let's see how this could work with an example. Let's say you have a website that sells a course on how to make money using Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search engines and you want to get traffic from eBay to this website.

A good way to go about doing this is to create a small report on PPC Advertising that you can market on eBay. This report should contain useful information, but it should also pre-sell your main product - your PPC course on your website. Your PPC report should be something that you're willing to give away or sell for very little, in the following example, you'll be selling it for 99 cents.

You then need two more things: an enticing auction advertisement, and an enticing Me page that drives visitors back to your website.

You're now ready to open your auction. The particular auction you're going to create should be a Featured Plus auction, which means it is displayed at the top of the auction listings before the non-Featured auctions (regular auctions). You will also want the auction to be a Dutch auction, which means you can sell multiple items from the same auction. A Featured Plus auction will cost around $20.00 to post, along with about $5 - $6 of miscellaneous posting fees including the Dutch auction fee. So your cost for selling a low-cost report in this manner will typically be about $26.00.

Now, I hate to go over figures because there's just so much that contributes to the outcome of those figures, but let me throw out some typical scenarios as I experienced them.

If your auction has an enticing title, you could very possibly get 100-300 visitors to your auction. I've personally seen auctions that sell home business informational products get up to 1500 visitors! Let's say you get 150. Of that 150, about 20% will visit your website through your Me page, which works out to about 30 visits, again my experience.

Of the 150 visits to your auction, you will generate some sales for your report. If the auction copy is good, it isn't uncommon to get 10% - 20% sales, especially at the 99 cents range, which works out to 15-30 purchases. Let's say you generate 15% sales, which works out to 22 sales (rounding down).

Now let's tally everything up. At the end of the auction, you've spent $26.00 on the auction itself. You made $22.00 on the report sales. And you generated 30 website visits. If we do the math, you came out paying about 13 cents for each website visitor ($26.00-$22.00/30 visits). Plus, you have a copy of your report in the hands of 22 hot prospects (remember your report pre-sells your website PPC course). Can it get better than that? The answer is yes! I've been conservative with these figures. The fact is, you can actually make money and drive traffic to your website with some practice/tweaking.

Interesting to note, at the time of this writing, Overture was charging anywhere from $0.51 for the tenth place position and $2.55 for the number 1 place position for the "PPC" keyword. In our example, we generated 30 visits for 13 cents per visit from 1 auction. What if you had 10 or 30 of these types of auctions running?

Granted, I realize that this example may not fit everyone's situation, but you should be able to apply it to some extent.

The formula is really quite simple:

1. Sell something that pertains to your website that you can give away or sell for very little. Information is the perfect product.

2. Then make sure your auction (and auction title) is extremely enticing - try to drive as much traffic to your auction as possible.

3. Then make sure your Me page drives the visitor to your website (maybe offer something free, like another report).

Give it a try… you may have to tweak it here or there... but the formula does work.

Sincerely,

Michael Ellis