Best Match: Adapt or Perish
Filed Under Best Match, Sellers' Insights
Who Moved My Cheese?
Update: Download the FREE eBook Best Match Made Simple
If you’ve read Dr Spencer Johnson’s book, Who Moved My Cheese, you are familiar with the concept “adapt or perish.” The analogy, by the author of The One Minute Manager, tells the story of mice in a maze. At the beginning of the tale, all of the mice know their way through the maze to the cheese and life is great. However, at some point, the cheese is moved to a different part of the maze.
Some mice keep returning to the old cheese location and loudly lament their poor fortune. Other mice go looking for more cheese. The mice that insist on doing what worked in the past, eventually perish – all the time complaining, “Who moved my cheese!?” The mice that set out to find a new source of cheese experience a number of wrong turns and set-backs as they stumble through the maze until they eventually find success.
The moral of this story is: Change happens and eBay moved the cheese when they implemented the Best Match search algorithm. Like the mice in the book, eBay sellers must change and adapt if they want to keep ahead of the pack.
According to Dr. Johnson, “If you do not change, you can become extinct. Get out of your comfort zone and adapt to change sooner. Take control, rather than let things happen to you.”
Here are some things you can to to adapt to Best Match – eBay’s “moving cheese”:
Study what title keywords help auction listings improve their rankings in eBay’s Best Match. Maximize the value of every character eBay permits in the listing title without being dishonest of misleading.
You must accept and take an active role in leading bidders to your auction listings. You can no longer passively assume that eBay is going to send traffic to your auctions. Sellers should be looking for ways to attract and send visitors directory to their listings.
There are several tools and techniques available to increase traffic to your listings.
Probably the easiest to implement is creating an email signature that sends click-throughs to your current listings. AuctionLink is our free service that creates a short, easy to remember web address that forwards potential bidders to your auctions.
- Here’s an example: http://AuctionLink.to/saddleonline.
If you want your own AuctionLink address, visit AuctionLink.to today or simply replace “saddleonline” with your own eBay.com user ID. Usage of this free eBay tool has really increased since Best Match rolled out.
Create your own web site to attract people who are interested in your niche. This provides free search engine traffic from Google and other sources and established your credibility in your niche. If you should decide to change venues for selling, you already own your traffic, so shifting to a platform other than eBay is as simple as changing the links on your site.
An excellent example of this technique is provided by AuctionBytes‘ Ina Steiner in the book, Blogging Heroes:
One eBay seller I know writes a blog devoted to mugs, and he includes pictures, descriptions, and advice on interesting mugs he finds. This is a great way to serve his customers by providing content that’s of interest to them. In addition, he builds up a following of people who are more likely to buy from him in the future, and shoppers doing searches for those types of products will find his blog — and his listings.
As this example demonstrates, this is an extremely effective way for sellers of long tail collectables to remain relevant under eBay’s Best Match.
Your own place on the internet is absolutely the only way to authentically own your own auction business. There is one service that I used when I first started that is truly interested in your success as an online presence. To learn more about this service visit http://auctions.sitesell.com/insights2.html.
Finally, once you’ve established your corner of the internet, be it a blog or a website, you’ll want to include your auction listings. Another free resource from AuctionInsights makes that simple. Just type in your user ID, click enter, and ListingTicker automatically generates the code to cut and paste on your web page. Works for eBay US, Canada, UK and Australia.
So Best Match is coming. The cheese is moving. I’ve provided some general directions to where you can find the cheese now. It’s up to you to go and find it.
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