Using eBay for Handyman Businesses
Alright, let’s talk a little about eBay. You’re probably wondering why I included eBay in a handyman marketing course. Well, the interesting thing about eBay is you can also list services on there to sell. So you can go and directly list that you do, we have projects or basements or kitchens, or whatever it is you’re doing. But then you can also create products that sell on eBay as well. One of the products that we talked about a lot are these marketing widgets, or special reports, or audio CDs, or videos, or things of that nature, that people are requesting information on how to do something. Not realize you’re probably going to have a lot people outside of your local area ordering those unless you somehow make them very geographically specific products or information products. But I have used eBay as a lead generation tool quite a bit, where I’ve taken things that would otherwise be services, and created information products that we sold information on. And when people bought the product usually at a break-even or slightly positive lead generation cost for us. So it’s a profit center in many cases. But then I also get their name, their mailing address, their email address, their telephone number, and I can add them to a marketing newsletter or database that I can market over and over and over to them with their business. So think about using eBay as a possible way to do lead generation, as another one of your many marketing streams for having prospects coming in.
Is eBay one-step or two-step marketing? It’s almost always one-step because you can almost always get your entire sales marketing message out on eBay. I can’t think of an example where I’d have a two-step, especially since eBay has some policies about having people leave their website in order to get back to your sites, or putting telephone numbers in there to kind of get them off of eBay to complete the transaction outside. So it’s almost always going to be one-step.
How to get done is pretty straightforward. You make an eBay account and you post it up there. EBay is dirt-cheap. I think the low end is like $.40 or something like that, to post a product up on there. As long as you’re under I think $9.99. You’ll want to check their pricing structure to see, but it’s pretty cheap to do that. And you can then use higher-priced items if you wanted to — the fees are going to be more for that. But my model for eBay has been break-even or even slightly negative. I was willing to do it to get the name and address, because it was a nice model for me, doing that. And I can’t remember exactly how many people we are generating, but it had to be over a hundred new inquiries per month from eBay alone. So, just to give you an idea of scale. And this is nationwide. So, you’re doing it for one local market, it’s probably going to be significantly less than that. But one or two new inquiries per month, for a local type of business, might not be that bad.
Scalability: not highly scalable, it is definitely limited. It’s got a cap on it. I think I even tested really scaling eBay up. I have tons and tons of auctions up, and I got to the point where every time I put an auction on it, it had no improvement at all in the effectiveness of the ads. I would get no additional leads. I was reaching market saturation very quickly with eBay. So that’s just something for you to consider.
As far as effectiveness goes, it’s probably not the most effective thing you could be doing with your time, especially if you’re local. If you’ve got a couple of difference areas you’re working to be focusing on, you might be able to do that a little better. But it’s relatively cheap, it can be set up to be relatively automated, so I would consider it. It might generate one or two prospects per month on a high end, I think. It’s not going to generate too many more than that, unless you’ve got a larger area. So it’s just something to think about, it’s an additional marketing tool. So that’s about all I can say about eBay for now.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn more about using eBay to generate leads in your handyman business? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
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