If you’ve read much of my material at all you know how often I tout the benefits of “Growing Your Online Audience“, “Adding targeted prospects to your email lists” and “EXPANDING your online influence“. Efforts along these lines are crucial to building and maintaining long term success – and that’s not just my opinion. Virtually all established experts in the Internet Marketing arena would echo my sentiments.
Perhaps you’ve heard marketing expert Dan Kennedy call your “list” your most valuable asset as a biz owner. I agree, but I word my message slightly differently. I tell my students and clients that, “There’s no more valuable asset you can have than a large and ever growing list of people who both want to hear from you and who are also eager to do business with you.”
Obviously, the easier it is to connect with such a list of partners/prospects the stronger the asset. This is why I love email as a tool of mass-communication and customer relationship building.
…but this isn’t an article about email marketing.
This is an article about using eBay and Amazon to expand your online audience.
Also note, there are countless strategies for expanding your influence & growing your “list” using creative online marketing tactics, and there are numerous articles on my blog on that very topic. In this article I’m going to focus on two of the most commonly used platforms for gaining the attention of potential prospects. Those platforms are:
eBay and Amazon.com
Here are my ground rules for any discussion regarding using eBay and Amazon as a marketing tool for list growth and prospect generation:
1. The rules are ALWAYS changing and out of our control – we all have to stay up to date (let me know if/when you find new relevant info and I’ll update this blog post!)
2. I’ll never intentionally encourage you to do anything outside of the established eBay/Amazon policies (nor have I ever done so)
3. In many cases the rules will be slightly confusing so proceed with caution no matter what the policies are
4. You owe it to yourself to squeeze every penny of marketing exposure out of your activities on Amazon and eBay WITHOUT breaking the rules
One of the best ways to do just that is to sell just about anything that is widely appealing to your target audience, and then while you have the attention of your prospects and customers you have an opportunity to invite those people to a mailing list. When they join your list it’s a chance to begin building a relationship with them over the long term.
This is exactly how I’ve built much of my online success in fact. Many of my most loyal partners and successful students were those who first found me on eBay so many years ago and elected to join my email mailing list. It’s put literally millions of dollars in sales through my biz as a result.
For nearly 10 years now I’ve done my best to stay on the cutting edge of what IS and ISN’T allowed in the arena of “pulling leads” from eBay and more recently on Amazon as well.
Here’s a summary of where we are now with both with additional details on each point in the video below:
On eBay
- The eBay ‘about me’ page is going away (but it’s not a big loss in my opinion)
- Profile pages are replacing ‘about me’ pages
- Profile pages can include a link to your social media sites (Facebook for example)
- This leaves you an opportunity to launch a FB group around your products. From there you can grow an email list etc. while you build a community!
- You can automate the process of adding BUYERS to your email list on eBay
On Amazon
- Amazon is FAR more restrictive than eBay when it comes to connecting with your customers, but they are also letting thousands of “big companies” clearly violate the rules.
- The only 100% legit opportunity on Amazon is to sell information (i.e. inexpensive kindle books) to help grow your niche audience. Include an invitation to your mailing list inside the book.
- For the more adventurous: If you sell a Private Label product, you can include print on the packaging with a link to a website, or an invitation card inside the sealed product that encourages buyers to join your list for future discounts, more information etc. Countless major manufacturers do this already on Amazon as they allow numerous third part sellers (us) to sell their goods on Amazon with invitation cards, registration cards etc. included in the package. Because Amazon sees you as the “seller” and not as the “manufacturer” they have no way of enforcing or even knowing if the product is yours or not, or if there is a registration card inside or not. I DO NOT encourage you to include a slip or flyer in each package you sell on Amazon for products that aren’t private labeled however because Amazon can and likely will punish that activity if they can easily identify the seller as the one growing a mailing list.
A video walk through of all of this:
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MORE IDEAS:
EBAY: Here’s a video I made that shows you how to give every eBay buyer the chance to join a niche specific mailing list post-purchase. You can grow multiple niche lists this way on auto-pilot. The full instructional video with full detail on integrating eBay with your email list building efforts (using a service called Zapier) can be seen using this link.
EBAY: You ARE allowed to link from one eBay listing to another! This means you can sell a “high attention grabbing” product and link to a second listing such as an information product or big ticket item from within your popular listing. For example, if you are trying to sell a weight loss book, you might advertise a popular piece of exercise equipment on eBay and put a link to your book inside the eBay listing for the equipment. There are countless possible uses for this strategy.
Thanks for this update. Short and succinct Jim Always good to get a “nudge” from you!
Hi Jim!
I love the timely and ACTIONABLE information you give, and
as a result I have started selling on both Ebay and Amazon. Question –
do you still advocate using Zapier.com to build a list? Can you give
feedback on your experience with Zapier? I value your opinion. Thanks
bonus points for making a great point! I’m adding info about Zapier to the above blog post now b/c you just reminded me that this info certainly should be included. Yes, we use Zapier to grow customer lists of buyers on eBay. Zapier lets us automate the process, and the video I’m putting in the blog post above explains how.
Hi Jim,
I purchased “Silent Sales Machine” some time ago and it really opened my eyes to the opportunity on Ebay beyond just selling products (which I was already doing at the time.) I wanted to say thanks for that! One legitimate strategy we can use to build a list from Amazon is private labeling which is something I’ve been doing for a while. Since it’s a “branded” product, you can include a website right in the instructions for the product while still staying within Amazon’s policies. I’ve used this strategy with great success to build a list for my products. It is the same concept as your own kindle book, but in the physical product realm! Thanks for the great post!
Great point Daniel! A branded product is “yours” so you have more opportunity to pull some traffic to your site with the packaging. When you say “instructions for the product” do you you mean in the description on Amazon? It’s my understanding that you can’t put a website there…please explain further! I’m intrigued!
Jim, I think Daniel means the literal instructions, i.e. the piece of paper in the box that tells you how to put together/use the product you bought.
This is an idea I will be trying out soon for one of my private labeled products!
Hi Jim, Just joined the PAC. I noticed there’s a lot of resources. I tried at the beginning but I’m not feeling like I’m getting a good grounding or “real” understanding. Not sure if its me. Just can’t see the step by step progression. Feel like its in bits and pieces and kinda all over the place. Any suggestions would be welcome. Thanks. I also noticed some of the videos were free on YouTube and I paid for them. I’m a bit confused.
When you first get into the PAC course, go to the “Start Here” section and work your way through those steps. You start out by setting up your account on Amazon an then listing your first item. From there, we give you a bunch of good ideas for finding profitable inventory. Everyone’s business will look a little different, but the steps for starting are all the same. If you have questions, you can use our discussion forums on MySilentTeam.com or the Facebook group! The PAC course has generated hundreds of success stories – I hope you are next!
Great clarification Daniel – thanks! Brilliant ideas.
Great… a profile page will be a million times better than the difficult-to-use eBay ‘about me’ page…
I am more interested in Amazon than Ebay but I am not living in the US or any of the countries listed on Amazon’s website. It will be a problem for me to get paid by Amazon if any of my stuff is sold.
You will need to set up a U.S. based bank account if selling into the U.S. – we have helped many people do just that as part of our course.
Update: look at the list again. Amazon recently expanded the list of countries greatly, so that I no longer need to use Payoneer services in Australia.
Things change fast – thanks for the reminder on that one!
I am so glad I watched the video! I set up the “Me” page back when I read your Silent Sales Machine book. I had no idea it was going away, although it was sitting dormant. Now I can create a new, fresh, relevant page that ushers people to our social media sites! Love the advice. Keep it coming, Jim! 😉
Thanks Penelope – always good to hear from you. Keep up the great work!
Jim, I am interested in the PAC program and selling on Amazon, but being in the insurance business right now I have a question. If you are importing products from suppliers in China or elsewhere, or selling any product you may buy and then resell on Amazon, there would seem to be potential product liability concerns if someone gets injured, etc by using the product if it fails or has a defect, etc. Obviously it depends on the product, but do you see concerns there, have you run across anyone involved in this business that has been sued? It would seem you might want to get insurance to cover you for these issues. What are you thoughts? Thanks.
It only makes sense to cover ANY business with proper liability insurance – and in this case Amazon actually requires it once you hit a certain sales volume (although they don’t always enforce that requirement to my knowledge – I think the “policy” of requiring coverage is simply in place to cover them in the event that a seller is sued).
As you well know – anyone can sue anyone else at any time for any reason…it’s smart to have a good *commercial general, umbrella and/or excess liability insurance *policy in place to help you meet the AZ requirements and to cover yourself.
Many of our sellers have grabbed a biz liability policy from Wells Fargo. They work with Amazon sellers all the time. Specifically one agent is quite familiar with the needs of Az sellers and we connect our students with him regularly.
Just as I thought. Excellent! Thanks for the info.
Do you recommend the use of the eBay sniping sites? If so, which one would you recommend Jim?
I’m not much of a shopper…I wouldn’t know where to start! I SELL stuff – my wife does most of the BUYING! 😉
Is this video available anywhere else? It looks like its been removed – or its been restriced:-(
Strange – it’s working just fine for us here. Regardless – here’s the direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kth8MvJVIVQ
Thanks for this – its appreciated , , , and VERY useful!
Hi Jim, unfortunately I have just been banned from selling on ebay this past October 1st. (Long story) Are there any other websites you would recommend like bonanza, OnlineAuction, eBid or uBid? I’m just reading your book for the 1st time. LOVE IT!
Thanks for the feedback on my book –
RE: other platforms to sell on – are you on Amazon yet? If not, that’s where most shoppers are now! Check out the provenamazoncourse.com course – we have stacks (hundreds) of success stories!
Hey Jim
i remember reading / hearing or watching you saying that there is a way to capture emails of users who participated in your Ebay auction and not only the one that actually bought . could you please post it again here ?
thanks again for great content !!
you can’t force anyone on to your mailing list, but you can invite your buying customers to join. eBay adjusted the rules a few years ago making it harder to grow a list of prospects with your eBay listings. All strategies available are revealed in the above article including creative ways to grow multiple email lists with only one eBay account.