It can be wisely said: “What Works on Youtube Works on Ebay”. It is a fundamental truth, a deep-welled fount of wisdom.
First of all, whether you’re acutely or dimly aware of it, you are under a great deal of world-stress, “Angst”, from the environment, which includes war, covid 19 and dirty politics, not to mention my Aunt Clara. Oops … I shouldn’t have mentioned her. Too late now.
The thing is, to get out from the hole into which world-stress automatically puts you, there are several remedies, one of which is to get really, really busy all of a sudden, and stay busy, relentlessly. It works wonders, to keep the “worry bone” buried deep.
Well, I figured, as long as I’m up and running around, why not make it pay off for the community?
So I logged back onto eBay for the first time in a larger number of years than I want to contemplate, and began once again listing goodies on their website, things for sale.
In no time at all, I had over 400 items up for sale, and things were starting to sell, really sell, as if there were no plague out there, no horrible wars and looting and hurricanes and tornadoes and voter fraud idiots and mask mandate idiots and all sorts of other idiots.
The money was okay, not what I used to make as a Platinum Seller, but then, I don’t have the merch anymore, and people are no longer buying that stuff, anyway, but the whole thing is, it’s not about the money — it can’t be about the money.
If it IS only about the money, your enthusiasm will wear mighty thin pretty darn soon, and you’ll be off of eBay and blaming me for the merciless way you were treated, but that IS the corporate way — eBay is no longer a friendly community. It’s a pack of wolves, and you’d better be well away from their growling and rabid teeth.
Yes, everyone’s on there now, and I do mean everyone, including those characters from the worst most gang-ridden neighborhoods of them all — the streets of Washington, D.C. and if you’re looking for real crooks of a magnitude of Order higher than that, the formerly hallowed halls of Congress.
Forget about those assholes — they don’t even know you’re alive, and if they did, they’d tax the very air you breathe and the water you drink. Come to think of it, they do.
So the thing about how things work on Youtube is that the videos that get the clicks have a singular IDEA under a powerful and narrow focus of momentary attention. You can’t get farther than that without an IDEA to propel you forward.
The IDEA leads to a PLAN, if you’re approaching this with any consciousness at all. The PLAN tells you what you’re going to do, when you’re going to do it, how much it will cost and how much risk versus reward there is in doing what you have in mind, which in the case of eBay, would be: “What’s for sale and how much is it and how much does it weigh, and can I find it when it sells and needs to be shipped?”.
That’s an awful lot to keep in mind, but it’s necessary for an eBay seller to be always cognizant of the awful dreaded truth: when you want a thing, it can’t be found.
That’s technically what they call “Murphy’s Law”, the law of irony that says “If something can go wrong, it will.”
Call it Terminal Cynicism, but it’s true — things can go wrong, they go wrong. Something mustn’t happen, it does. It must happen, so it doesn’t. Irony, see?
So when it comes to selling something on eBay, it isn’t enough to have a good product — it must have a powerfully potent THUMBNAIL graphic.
Without a decent THUMBNAIL, I can guarantee failure, no matter how incredible your product may be and how amazingly low your price.
If you find the right image to convey the IDEA, you need no more.
What constitutes a “good THUMBNAIL”? Actually, nobody knows. It’s whatever works, not what you think might work. Some say you need a FACE in the graphic, some say not. Some folks swear by the background, claiming that only THEIR background color is the right background color.
Other folks don’t use a background at all, or they use a greenscreen virtual background, which is my Primary Choice, although I often will turn off the fake background when showing something to the camera, unless I have the green-screen lowered behind me.
Most of the time, I don’t.
So you found a way to express the IDEA in the graphic and text of your THUMBNAIL, and now it’s time to LIST your item, so you do.
Now you have to describe the item, tell the STORY. Show PHOTOS of the object, of people having FUN with the object, if at all possible.
Remember that showing a FACE is a way of BRANDING, of helping your customer find you again.
Make the sale an EVENT, not just a click-bait trippy thing. Want the Real Great & Terrible Secret of Sales? Sure, no problem and, as usual, it’s free for the asking.
Convey some emotion.
Yes, that’s the whole thing, convey some emotion, any emotion at all, the stronger the better, and you’ll get a reaction, generally a click-through, which is what you want.
That’s really all you want from them is a click. Relief is just a click away.
We all know it isn’t, but it sure FEELS like that when you buy something new, that something in your life is going to definitely change for the better now that the thing you bought is in your more or less permanent possession.
Of course, there comes a time when whatever you collected will be broken up and tossed to the wind, but that’s part of living, and it can happen long before you’re in the ground.
What’s the ACTION? Of course, it’s to REACT to whatever you’re selling or showing or telling. In the case of Youtube, it’s watching the video. In the case of eBay, it’s adding the product to their shopping cart or hitting the BUY NOW button.
The TEXT on the graphic should not be the same as the title, except in my case I use it both places because the graphic doesn’t register on the search engine unless you put in the meta data, and even then, you can’t be sure.
Use a font that everyone can read, not some clever font that looks so cool. Keep the coolness to a minimum — you’re not trying to win awards, you’re trying to sell product.
If there’s something visually special about your merch, use a pointy finger to emphasize it, and always show your product in relation to a human body, or at least the hands, to give it scale without having to say how many inches it is tall.
Of course, you will have an opportunity to put those measurements into your listing — they give you a place to put all that stuff.
Once you have a listing up, keep a close watch on it for the first few days, and see if there’s anything you can think of to improve its chances of performing well?
For one thing, I like to add four, five or six photos that show WHY they should buy my product or my art, and why they should be interested in my stuff, which means, give it CONTEXT and give it REALITY with the photos of YOU in ACTION, showing people having FUN with your stuff.
Whatever you do, don’t just list and abandon it. Nurturing a listing is an art in itself, and requires a green thumb of the advertising kind.
Sales — nobody’s born to it — it’s an acquired taste.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby