"It Ain't Broke... So Why Fix It?"
By Derek Gehl

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been talking a LOT about the positive impact change can have on your business, and encouraging you all to look at areas where a quick (or not-so-quick) "tweak" can help your bottom line.

Well, apparently some of you remain unconvinced that change is good, because I've been getting lots of feedback from people who are quaking in their boots at the thought of touching a THING.

So today, I'd like to make my point (and reassure you ALL) with a pretty darn good example...

I'm talking about eBay: a company who already had a clear track record of success, but recently made some BIG changes anyway!

With over 84 MILLION active users spending almost $2,000 a second (that's $60 BILLION a year, folks!), eBay is one of the true success stories in the short history of the Internet.

Clearly, eBay wasn't broken. So why fix it??

Well, they're smart enough to know that resting on their laurels isn't the way to keep growing, or reacting to the needs of their customers.

So over the past few months, they've been making some pretty radical changes.

The biggest change? They've revamped the way their customer feedback system works... and if you know anything about eBay, you know that having an impeccable customer rating is like GOLD, so it was a pretty risky change for eBay, right?

But that's just the beginning!

They've also changed the way some listings get ranked during a search, played around with minimum bid amounts, changed the way you qualify for coveted "Power Seller" status, and a bunch of other things.

And to be perfectly honest, there was a bit of an outcry at first from regular eBay sellers, who accused eBay of no longer caring about the "little guy" who made them successful in the first place.

But here's the thing about all of this change...

We have a team of in-house experts who provide personal, one-on-one eBay mentoring for people who want to start full-time eBay businesses, and what our mentors have been noticing lately is that these major changes that seem to have upset so many people are turning out to be HUGE WINS for everyone!

We've seen that, by fine-tuning their system, eBay is slowly discouraging the mountains of "hobby" sellers who list one lousy, two-buck item once in a blue moon just for kicks...

... and making it MUCH easier for serious professionals who want to use eBay to build a solid, full-time business.

It's a SMART move on eBay's part, because they know it's these pros who make them the most money!

(Oh, and just as a side note, this is ALSO an excellent lesson about the value of focusing your efforts on your best customers! ;-)

So if you've been thinking about making changes to your business, but you've been afraid of any negative fallout, remember that change (even change that ruffles a few feathers at first), can usually bring opportunity for you AND your customers!

To your success,

Derek Gehl

P.S. If you're interested in learning more about these changes at eBay, I've just finished putting together a FREE video that walks you through the biggest ones, and explains how to use them to your advantage.

It's part of a brand-new series of three free training videos I've created to help everyone cash in on the $60 BILLION that changes hands on eBay every year!

You can access all three videos here:

http://www.auctiontips.com/ebay_videos/freesignup.html

Quick Profit Boosters from My Testing Team
By Derek Gehl

My Advanced Mentoring Team is out there on the front lines every day testing new strategies and re-testing old ones.

This week they sent me some spectacular results for ideas that are so quick to implement I had to tell you about them right away.

Double your sales in a day

Mentor Cijaye Depardine says:

"I viewed my stats for the month -- and recognized where my highest exiting pages were -- and decided to analyze those pages.

"When I did, I found out that I was missing a call to action on them. So I put a product offer up (I know -- it should be common sense...but hey -- this is little stuff we tend to forget!).

"As a result I increased my sales by 100% per day. That was easy

"But how much money did I lose before I did that?"


Shoot your click-through rate up 30%

Search marketing expert Nicole Ephgrave did an experiment with a group of website owners who are already highly successful.

She says:

"Take a look at your title tag and meta description tag. How inviting are they?

They're what people see when a search engine brings up your listing, like this:



"If they're boring, or they don't tell the searcher they've found what they're looking for, why would someone click through to your site?

"In the test, everyone made their title and meta description tag more enticing


... and BAM! Everyone in the test received 30% higher click-through rate."

"Now before you go and uproot your tags, remember your title tag is one of your most important tags, so you still need to start it off with the main keyword phrase you are optimizing that page for. Same goes for your meta description tag."

Your title and meta description tags go in the section of your HTML code.


Get 5-star feedback on eBay

Finally, Advanced eBay Mentor James Lewchuk was getting okay Detailed Seller Ratings for his eBay store, but okay doesn't get you higher placement in eBay's search results.

Detailed Seller Ratings are where buyers rate you out of 5 on your item description, communication, shipping time, and shipping & handling charges. eBay buyers often think that a 4 rating means "sure, no problem, the transaction went fine" and only superhuman efforts should get a 5.

Well, they're wrong.

"No problems" should get a 5. And sellers can actually be penalized for getting ratings as high as 4.5.

So James started ASKING for top marks. He says:

"Since I started sending email encouraging my buyers to leave 5 stars, I've got DSRs of 5 / 5 / 5 / 4.9 for the last 30 days."

With those Detailed Seller Ratings, he'll get way better placement in the eBay search results. He'll get some fee reductions as well.

And all he had to do was ask nicely.

See? Even little changes can net BIG results.

Make these little tweaks to your site or eBay business and tell us about YOUR results on my blog.