Sara-Baugh-Online Marrying the old and the new as eBay goes local – plus, affiliate marketing gets a makeover on Facebook
Marrying the old and the new as eBay goes local – plus, affiliate marketing gets a makeover on Facebook
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This week I’ve been busy trying to figure out the logistics of getting back to work whilst juggling a 6 month old baby and a 4 year old school girl.
As you’ll all know, when things change in your life it can be a little bit tricky to reconcile the old with the new. But sometimes, when you can manage it, if you succeed and take some of the best elements of both, things can be even better.
I mention this as I have also been hard at work trying to marry the old with the new when it comes to some rather popular online money making techniques.
You see, selling online on sites like eBay and Amazon has been around for ages. But it’s rare that you hear Internet Marketers talking about them in terms of how new IM trends and ideas have impacted on them and shifted their focus.
It’s no secret (although it may be news to you) that eBay has been investing very heavily in trying to work out how they can fit in to the growing trend of ‘local’ online – local search, local commerce etc. etc. And I have been investigating this, and the opportunities it presents, for the next issue of Internet Income Detective which is published in two weeks’ time.
The first hints of something happening with ‘local’ and eBay came some 18 months ago when they acquired the barcode scanning mobile app RedLaser.
Like other similar apps you may be familiar with, RedLaser’s barcode scanning technology allows its users to compare prices of items as they shop in real life shops (so scan a barcode in Waterstones of a popular book and see how much it costs elsewhere… in this case on eBay).
You can simply scan a barcode on any item at a shop and then automatically access any eBay listings of the product on the marketplace.
Savvy eBay Sellers can also use the scanning technology to scan an item and list the product in very little time.
But integrating barcode scanning and some of the other interesting ‘local’ developments for eBay (such as them also buying Milo) is only the very start of where local and mobile commerce meet eBay and its potential for us.
Perhaps the most interesting company eBay have bought in recent months is ‘Where’ – a free geo-location service and mobile advertising company that already has millions of active users on smartphones and tablets.
‘Where’ shows local listings for restaurants, bars, shops, and events, and also suggests places and deals for you based on your location and companies and places you have interacted with before.
Where also offers a location-based ad network, which allows advertisers to show their mobile ads only to people who are close to their shop (or perhaps even close to a competitor’s).
eBay have partnered ‘Where’ with Paypal which makes ‘local’ Paypal payments a possibility and also gives eBay a platform to enter into the local ‘deals’ market that we’ve talked about in IID before.
All of these, and many other interesting developments, are feeding in to a rather kick-ass new blueprint I’m working on that ties eBay and local together in a complete business idea.
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Another really interesting thing I’ve been researching this week came about after an email pinged in to my inbox from our editor-in-chief Nick Laight about how Hotels.com are now running affiliate programmes through Facebook Pages. This is a sort of in-Facebook affiliate scheme (cutting out the need to leave the social networking site for an affiliate to make money) and is the type of affiliate marketing that I think we will see a huge increase in now and going forward.
In my mind, this could well be the opportunity we’ve all been waiting for. As an affiliate ourselves or by setting up these in-Facebook deals for other companies.
To an increasing degree over time, Facebook has always provided excellent opportunities for affiliate marketing. But some new developments that have come about as a result of ‘Pages’ is something else I am investigating in detail for the upcoming issue of IID and will offer us all a big chance at some much easier Facebook cash than we’ve seen before.
You see, usually with affiliate marketing, you have to get people to go from one site to another. The beauty of the blueprint I am working on right now is that it offers the opportunity to make affiliate cash without having to encourage anyone away from a site they love using anyway. Getting someone to carry out an action on Facebook is much easier than getting them to carry out an action via AdWords, or on a site they don’t know and trust. And that’s why Facebook Marketing using this technique is exciting for you.
Phew.
As you can see, with my return to work plans, eBay craziness and testing out these Facebook affiliate tricks, I’m pretty bogged down right now. It’s all fantastic fun though. I’m also trying to put some finishing touches to some free tutorial videos and would love to hear from you guys to tell me some subjects you want me to talk to you about.
by Sara Baugh
Online Opportunities Expert
Sara has several years experience at the cutting edge of Internet Marketing and is a regular contributor to Internet Income Detective. You can sign up for her free weekly eletter here:
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