Now that your blog has been set up it is time to write some content for it.

Since the primary purpose of your blog will be at attract additional potential buyers to your eBay auctions or store, most of the content should be relative to what you specialize in or to specific items you are selling. There are two approaches you can take.

The first would be to write a post about one specific item you currently had on eBay. This kind of post might work best for eBay store items simply because store items tend to remain available for a longer period of time and the post would have a chance to attract more potential buyers. However, it can also be very effective for auction listings also. There have been numerous occasions when the winning bidder has sent me an email stating they found the item as a result of a search on one of the search engines that lead them to an article on one of my blogs.

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Search engine optimization is a subject many web site owners and blog publishers either completely ignore or become obsessed with. The smart ones find a middle ground and then concentrate on other aspects of their business, and that’s the approach I recommend you take.

In this article we will cover some simple things you should do now to let the search engines know you exist and then offer some additional ideas you can implement long term if you feel the need. Also, rather then make this extremely lengthy, I’m going to be offering a lot of links to information on Darren Rowse’s excellent ProBlogger blog. Darren is an extremely successful blogger and a lot more knowledgeable about this subject than I am. Most of the search engine optimization techniques offered here are free and all they take is a little time to implement.

Some basic search engine optimization steps you should take when you first set up your blog are:

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Today we are going to add some useful plugins to our eBay blog. A plugin is a script that has been written to perform one specific task to simplify managing and building a blog or, occasionally, a web site. There are hundreds of them available and most blogging platforms come with several of the most-used plugins already loaded.

We will begin by returning to our WordPress dashboard and clicking “plugins” from the menu. Thing brings up a page titled “PlugIn Management” which contains a scroll-down list of numerous plugins already loaded into the plugin folder of your blog. Each listing provides the name of the plugin, a short description of what it does, and an activation link. To activate a particular plugin all it is necessary to do is click on the activate link and it is live.

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It’s now time to log into your new blog, choose a design theme/template, and set your new blog up in preparation for adding it’s first content. While the screen shots here are from WordPress if you chose a different blogging platform you will still need to do most of these basic set-up procedures and it shouldn’t be difficult to determine where you need to go from your blog’s set-up panel.

For WordPress, once the instalation is complete, you will be provided with a link to your new blog’s administration panel, a WordPress User ID and a WordPress password. Click on the link to your user panel and you will see the screen below:

Enter the user ID and password provided and hit Log In. Once you’ve logged in you will not need to log in again unless you log out.

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For the purpose of this part of the series I’m going to make an assumption - that you’ve chosen to go with a stand alone blog platform and that the name of your blog will be the same as your domain name. If one or both of those is incorrect than not all of what follows will apply to you.

Choosing A Domain Name

There have been millions of words written about what makes up a good domain name - much of it conflicting. For our purposes we are going to simplify the process as much as possible and consider two options.

Keyword based domains names - a keyword based domain name, as you have probably already figured out, is one that includes the keyword or keywords related to what you sell and what, presumably, your blog will be about. If you primarily sell widgets on ebay then a blog name of Widgets Galore and a domain name of widgetsgalore.com would be an example of a keyword based domain name.

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The first step in building a blog to promote your eBay auctions or eBay store is deciding on what blog platform you will use. Blog platforms fall into two general categories - hosted blog platforms and stand alone blog platforms. We’ll look at the most popular in each category plus one hybrid.

Hosted Blog Platforms

When you use a hosted blog platform your blog is hosted on the domain of the platform provider you use. The hosted platform option is popular with beginners because they are easy to set up, easy to use, and most of them are free. Three of the most popular are:

eBay recently began offering on-site blogs that a lot of sellers have begun using. Because of the restrictions eBay has regarding linking and permissible content, this feature on eBay is totally useless for building your business long-term. I recommend you do not use eBay blogs.

Google’s Blogger.Com is a free hosted service that has become extremely popular with hundreds of thousands of users. Blogger is a simple, easy way to start a blog but it suffers from two serious drawbacks.

• It has become the home of tens of thousands of splogs (spam blogs). Because of this Blogger has developed a bad reputation among many people and there are people who won’t have anything to do with any Blogger blog.
• Because of the above problem, Google has become trigger-happy when it comes to deleting blogs from the system which means you could loose several months of work overnight

I don’t recommend using Blogger either.

WordPress.Com is the hosted version of the popular WordPress blog platform and, although it’s probably the best option of the three, it still has restrictions regarding what you can and cannot do that don’t lend themselves to what we want to accomplish with an blog. I don’t recommend it either.

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If you are serious about building your eBay business then you should give some serious consideration to creating your own blog as a marketing tool for your eBay business. While eBay does a fairly good job of marketing your auctions or an eBay store you have, in may situations you face a lot of competition from other sellers. This means you must find ways to put yourself ahead of the crowd and attract more potential customers. A blog of your own, when set up and used properly, is one of the easiest ways to accomlish this.

Here are just a few of the benefits of using a blog as a marketing tool to promote your eBay auctions or store:

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Earlier this year, in a phone conversation with Terry Gibbs, we talked about the benefits of using blogs to promote eBay auctions. Both of us felt it was an idea that offered a lot of potential if done properly. After our conversation Terry began looking for eBay sellers who were using blogs to promote their auctions. Some time later, he wrote about what he found in a newsletter article titled Blogging For eBay in which he wrote:

“Since then I have been looking for eBay sellers who use blogs to promote their auctions. I asked my readers to send me links to their blogs, Scott Prock asked all his members to send him links to their blogs, and I spent a few hours searching blog directories to find people promoting their auctions in blogs.

I found nothing.

This is hard for me to believe. As popular and easy as blogs are, I couldn’t find a single person productively using a blog to promote eBay auctions. Very disappointing.“

For my part, after thinking about it for a while, I began testing various ways of using a blog to promote auctions in one of the small niches I sell in. The results have been productive enough that I decided to set up a new blog to promote my listings under the paperpleasures46 user ID.

There are now quite a few sellers using blogs to promote their eBay business, but in most cases they are going about it all wrong and as a result, the benefits they get are minimal at best.

Beginning tomorrow I’ll be writing a series of posts documenting the process. I’ll be covering everything from choosing a blogging platform to what to write about to optimizing it for the best search engine results.

You are invited to follow along and build a blog of your own as we go along. I think you’ll find it beneficial to your eBay business.

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