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We’ve all heard of the bait and switch strategy. Marketers “bait” a consumer by offering some unbelievably good deal. When the consumer enters the store to take advantage of this great deal, the salesman will redirect the buyer to a different product (the switch) to try and get the consumer to spend more money.

Since the advertised deal (the bait) would often result in a store losing money, some retailers have been known to go so far as to not carry any of the advertised item in stock to prevent losing money from the sales of it. The store made money by enticing the consumer into the store with a non-existent product and selling them some other, generally highly profitable, item instead.

This is NOT what I mean by “bait and hook.” I consider bait and switch to be unethical, and I don’t subscribe to such practices. However, the “bait” in bait and hook retains the same idea in essence, and can be used as an advanced marketing tactic to help you make money on eBay.

Your bait is still going to be a great deal on some (preferably very popular) product. Create a lot of focus on this product to build attention to it. This entails using several listing upgrades, in particular the Featured Plus! and possibly even Home Page Featured listing options.

Draw as much attention to this one listing as you can. Then use every cross-promotion technique you can to entice buyers to take a look at all your other listings.

This is a bit of an old school technique that early eBay sellers used with great effectiveness. Despite its age, it still has great potential to draw buyers in to listings of yours that they might not otherwise ever see.

Normally I recommend using your hottest item as your bait. Price it reasonably low, or if you’re running a regular auction perhaps start the bidding out at $0.01 if you feel it’s popular enough to generate a lot of bids, to attract even more buyers.

Keep in mind that this is an advanced marketing technique that can result in the loss of your investment. It’s best saved for when you have a lot of experience selling on eBay as well as some experience testing past campaigns and interpreting test results.

However, when you feel ready to try something like this, don’t let fear hold you back. Running a successful business requires that you lose money every once in awhile. A good businessperson understands that business is a risk, but that properly managed, is well worth the risk. Do it right, and you’ll find “bait and hook” an effective tool for making money on eBay.

PowerSellerPros is a free instructional website that teaches you how to sell on eBay and offers advanced advice on how to make money on eBay, authored by a former eBay employee and PowerSeller. Ed Staff is a freelance writer.

Back in the 1990’s, a man by the name of Pierre Omidyar, who had a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, received a complaint from his then girlfriend (now wife) — a collector of Pez dispensers — that there wasn’t any easy way for her to connect with other collectors for trading.

Pierre, in his efforts to sooth his girlfriend’s suffering, built the precursor to what would become the world’s largest online auction.

Or, at least, that’s the corporate line the marketing boys came up with. It does make for a great story, and chances are there is a lot of truth to it, although certainly with a marketing twist. However, why Pierre started the online auction revolution isn’t important. What’s important is that it changed the World Wide Web, and the world, forever.

In 1995 Pierre wrote auction software, which he called AuctionWeb, and put it up on the web. He listed a broken laser pointer as a test of his newly formed program. Astonishingly, the laser pointer sold for nearly $15.

Initially, sellers were allowed to list items for free. But when supporting AuctionWeb’s users became too overwhelming, Pierre decided to start charging 10 cents to list an item in the hopes it would thin out the herd. In fact, it did nothing to reduce the number of sellers. Instead, listings continued to grow. Rumor has it that some sellers would snail mail Pierre a dime taped to a postcard in order to pay for their listing.

Eventually the time to get some serious brains behind the brawn came. Jeff Skoll, a Stanford MBA, was brought on board in 1996.

Jim “Griff” Griffith, a struggling artist and regular helper at the user-supported AuctionWeb, received a call from Pierre and Jeff with an offer to become eBay’s first customer support employee. That call, Jim would later recall, probably saved his life as he was in the midst of contemplating suicide when his phone rang.

AuctionWeb would later become eBay (which some say is a reference to Echo Bay, the name of Pierre’s consulting firm at the time) and Harvard MBA and former Hasbro executive Meg Whitman would soon join the rapidly growing ship. Under Meg Whitman’s leadership, eBay’s growth was exponential. Early employees, thanks to stock options, became millionaires while executives became billionaires.

Stuart Lisonbee, who worked at eBay during 2001 and later became a PowerSeller and author of an eBay eBook, has often expressed amazement at learning that millionaires worked alongside him in entry-level positions.

Employees weren’t the only ones to strike it rich. The online auction giant became the platform that would support thousands of entrepreneurs who would make a full-time income, some of them hauling in six figures per month.

Although imitators have come and gone, eBay has remained through it all. Still the largest online auction website today, it continues to support thousands of sellers who make money on eBay as their sole occupation.

PowerSellerPros is a free instructional website that teaches you how to sell on eBay and offers advanced advice on how to make money on eBay, authored by a former eBay employee and PowerSeller. Ed Staff is a freelance writer.

To attain PowerSeller status and become one of the elite big money makers on eBay, you must first have the appropriate attributes to attain that level.

Becoming a successful online auctioneer requires much, much more than a simple source for cheap products that have a high profit margin. Anybody can find stuff to sell and list it on eBay. But running a business requires a level of dedication that few people have… which is exactly why there are far more workers in this world than entrepreneurs, and far more buyers on eBay than sellers.

Review the PowerSeller attributes below, and be sure that you have them all. If there’s something you’re missing, then a simple change of attitude is often all that is required in order to obtain it.

Understand That You’re Running a Business
Running an online auction business differs little from running any other kind of business. As the owner and president of your very own company, you need to think like a CEO. The decisions you make as the president of your company will directly affect your success.

Dedication
Unlike gambling in Las Vegas, there is very little luck involved in the success or failure of a business. A successful company succeeds because of the dedication of its founder and employees. You must be passionate about your business and have the discipline to do what it takes.

Desire
When I was in Marine Corps basic training, I watched as several recruits simply gave up and quit. Somewhere along the line they decided that the effort wasn’t worth the reward. What separated the quitters from those that made it through to the end? Very simply, desire!

Those that made it to the end preferred to be Marines, and have the prestige and respect that comes with being a Marine. I actually met a man who broke both his legs during boot camp and spent several months in medical rehabilitation. The Marines offered to send him home several times, but he always refused. He eventually healed and returned to training.

What is your desire level? Are you ready and willing to deal with the tough times that come with running your own company so you can eventually quit your job, or do you just want to keep grinding it out making money for your boss?

Are you going to quit when things are tougher than expected, or will you do whatever it takes to earn the prestige of being an eBay PowerSeller?

Becoming Successful is a Learned Process
Chances are you’re going to fall down a lot. Reaching success means that every time you do fall down, you get back up. But before you start charging ahead, you take the time to dust yourself off and analyze why you fell down to begin with.

Falling down is not failure. Failure is not getting back up. Falling down is simply an opportunity for you to learn how to not fall down again. Do that, and you soon be well on your way to making the big money on eBay and join an elite group of eBay success stories.

PowerSellerPros is a free instructional website that teaches you how to sell on eBay and offers advanced advice on how to make money on eBay, authored by a former eBay employee and PowerSeller. Ed Staff is a freelance writer.

When you’re first starting out and not doing very many sales, having a mess of things probably won’t affect your eBay business too badly. However, when you start ramping up sales to the levels of a PowerSeller, organization becomes a must.

If you are unorganized, running your business will require more of your time. Time that you could be spending doing what it is you would rather be doing, or time that could be spent making even more money!

One of the most time consuming parts of your eBay business will eventually become preparing and packaging items for shipment. The more items you end up shipping, the more important having an efficient system becomes.

During one of my busiest times as a PowerSeller, I received payments for around 70 items in a single day. But by utilizing an “assembly line” type system, I was able to package and print labels for all 70 items in about 4 hours.

Had I not utilized the assembly-line system, the time it took to package and ship could have easily taken me 6 or 7 hours. As you can see, your level of efficiency has a direct effect on your pay versus time.

Your assembly line does not need to be complex. It can be quite simple or very complex — whatever you need to suit your specific needs.

I had a long counter where I did all my packaging. On one end was a stack of shipping boxes and padded envelopes. By taking a step or two to the right, you’d run into a bag of styrofoam peanuts. Another step or two to the right and there sat my packaging tape on a tape gun.

After checking orders in the morning, I would print shipping labels for all the auctions I had received payment for, which most types of auction management software can easily handle. I would then take the stack of shipping labels over to the boxes.

With experience, I quickly learned what size box I needed depending on the order. The first thing I’d do is attach the shipping labels to an appropriate sized box.

Next, I would place the first item into the first box. Taking two steps to the right, I’d secure the item by filling all the empty space with styrofoam peanuts. Two more steps to the right and the box was taped up.

Back to the start and to the next product. This would continue until all items were packaged.

If you don’t have a counter like I did, a long table often suffices. Packaging materials can easily be stored underneath the table for easy access.

PowerSellerPros is a free instructional website that teaches you how to sell on eBay and offers advanced advice on how to make money on eBay, authored by a former eBay employee and PowerSeller. Ed Staff is a freelance writer.

Cross promotion entails promoting other items you have for sale to help you make even more money on your eBay auctions. This works best if the items are related. For example, if you’re selling shoes, it would be a good idea to cross promote shoelaces, shoehorns, socks, and so forth.

But in addition to the more obvious reasons for cross promoting, there are other, less obvious reasons as well.

If a visitor to your webpage actually clicked into your listing by accident, or finds that the item you’re selling isn’t quite what they are looking for, you want to take the opportunity to offer what it is that they actually want.

Placing In-Description Links

Never forget to cross promote other items that you are selling. I recommend placing a link at the top of your listings. Perhaps something like “check out my other items to complete your collection” which links to your auctions page.

To create clickable links, you’ll need to learn some basic HTML (the programming language used to create web pages). Use the following URL to link to your “Items for Sale by…” page:

shop.ebay.com/merchant/[your_user_id]

Replace [your_user_id] with, of course, your eBay user ID.

If you have an eBay Store, then it is better to link to it instead with this URL:

stores.ebay.com/Your-Store-Name

Replace “Your-Store-Name” with the name of your eBay Store. Just as in the example, replace spaces in your store name with hyphens, keeping in mind that it is case sensitive. “your-store-name” will not link to the same place as “Your-Store-Name”.

Having a link at the top to your other auctions or eBay Store lets buyers know right away that you have more to offer. This is important both for buyers that accidentally clicked into your auction (chances are that if they’re not looking for what’s in your specific auction, they’re probably looking for something similar) as well as buyers that are looking specifically for what you have.

You can also take advantage of a little “viral” marketing technique by adding a “send this to a friend” link. To add a link that will allow visitors to email a link of your auction listing to friends, use this URL:

contact.ebay.com/ws1/eBayISAPI.dll?ShowEmailAuctionToFriend&item=[itemnumber]

As you may have guessed you’ll want to replace “[itemnumber]” with the actual item number of your listing.

Cross promotion is used by all successful sellers. Next time you walk into a shoe store and buy a new pair of shoes, chances are the salesman will remind you that you need several other accessories to go with your new pair of shoes.

You should be doing the same thing, which is why you cross-promote.

PowerSellerPros is a free instructional website that teaches you how to sell on eBay and offers advanced advice on how to make money on eBay, authored by a former eBay employee and PowerSeller. Ed Staff is a freelance writer.

I was once neighbors with an employee of the world’s #9 top eBay seller. The seller pushed six figures worth of merchandise through the online auction system each and every month! So what was his secret?

Sure, it helped that he had a connection to a Chinese manufacturer who was able to make him wireless accessories for 25 cents per piece which he turned around and sold for six bucks each — a whopping 240,000 percent profit! But even though he was making a tremendous profit per sale, that 240,000 percent increase, while sounding impressive, equated to just $5.75 per sale.

At $6 per sale, this seller had to sell nearly 17,000 pieces per month, or an average of 555 per day to break the six-figure sales number each month. Keep doing the math and you get an idea of the kind of lifestyle he was able to live selling over 500 items per day. Think a little more and you realize that in order to make that kind of money on eBay required packaging and shipping a lot. That’s a lot of boxes, packaging tape, and stamps!

Despite having a system in place and selling enough items that he was really rolling in the dough, making money wasn’t exactly easy for him. It was reported to me that he worked sun up to sun down pretty much every single day. To sell 500 items, you must first list 500 items. Then you must ship 500 items, then do it all again. Just imagine the commitment it took.

And that is where we get to the true secret of making money on eBay: hard work and dedication. It doesn’t matter what business you get into, there is one inescapable fact to becoming wealthy, and that is you must put in the work required to obtain that wealth. Online auctions are simply one path of many.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffet both chose very different paths, both from each other as well as the world’s #9 top eBay seller. But there is a big difference here. Bill Gates is a computer genius, Warren Buffet a financial markets genius. The world’s #9 top eBay seller? Neither of those. He is just a normal guy selling stuff out of his home to the world thanks to the power of the internet and online auctions.

In fact, virtually everything about him is probably pretty average. But he does have one shining skill that is far above average: a willingness to do what it takes to make money on eBay… to make huge money.

First comes knowledge. Once you have that, the only thing holding you back is you. Just how willing are you? That’s question #1 you should ask before taking on the task of online auctioneer extraordinaire.

PowerSellerPros is a free eBay eBook that offers advice on how to make money on eBay, authored by a former eBay employee and PowerSeller. Ed Staff is a freelance writer.

Have you ever wondered why two different auction sellers who have listed the exact same item will end up selling their wares for very different prices? In the world of auctions, online or off, getting the best price is all about creating buzz and getting more eyeballs to look at what you have to sell.

So it goes with eBay. In order to make money on eBay, and make the most that you possibly can for each item, you must get as many people to look at your item listing as you can. After all, how many items can a person make if nobody ever sees what they are selling? It could be the better mouse trap that changes the world. But unless people know it exists, it will be impossible to give it away, much less make money off of it.

Here are a few tips to help you drive more traffic to your listing.

1. Optimize Your Title — This is the most crucial part. By default, eBay’s search engine, unlike World Wide Web search engines, works strictly off of the keywords from your auction’s title. If you want your auction to appear when somebody uses a specific search term, then that term must appear in your title.

2. Use High Traffic Keywords in Your Title — Try to use as many of the keywords and phrases that you believe a potential buyer would use to search for your item. However, you want to be careful to create a title that isn’t just a mish-mash of keywords. It might show up in the search listings more often, but it will get clicked on far less. Additionally, the keywords you use must apply to the item you are selling. If they don’t, then the auction police will remove your listing.

3. Cross Promote — Place links in each of your listings to your other auctions. Also, place links to your “items I’m selling” page as well as your eBay Store if you have one. If you have a website, blog, Twitter account, FaceBook page, or any place else you can promote your listings, go ahead and do so!

In the end, promoting your listings to help you maximize your opportunities to make money on eBay is mostly about common sense. Just think like a buyer, asking yourself, “If I were looking to purchase this item, how would I go about doing that?”

Simply do that and you’ll be well on your way to selling more.

PowerSellerPros is a free eBay eBook that offers advice on how to make money on eBay, authored by a former eBay employee and PowerSeller. Ed Staff is a freelance writer.