Is Your Booth on Steroids?

As many of you know, one of my assignments is to help sellers optimize their Booths so that they can see an increase in sales. Like many tasks, a multiple approach strategy will be implemented. Some strategies involve SEO and others are as simple as helping a seller get a Booth in working order.

There are many good ideas posted in the forum threads and I may steal some of them (LOL) as we add to the Booth Optimization Project. No, seriously, we want YOU to help us write educational articles that will be valuable to all Bonanzle sellers. As Bill said, we will give you credit and you can become famous (at least on Bonanzle... deals with Oprah are on your own!). Don't worry if you're not the greatest writer, I'll help you with that if necessary. On the other hand, if you want, you can just suggest ideas and maybe I or someone else will turn it into an article. By the way, I may solicit some Bonanzlers who have specialized in certain topics and have helped in the forums already (yes, you, Judy/Blue).

Many of the things mentioned below are what every Bonanzle seller should strive for.  I believe that doing as many of these things as possible increases your chance of having a successful Booth. I'm sure that this is not the be-all and end-all list, but is certainly a great start to get a seller on the road to success. In fact, I know it is because the sellers that have the most sales on Bonanzle have already done most (or all) of the following:

10 things You Can Do to Optimize Your Booth

•    A clean-looking booth with clear, focused, close-up pictures, showing multiple angles if the item warrants it. Clean up the HTML if necessary (or do without it). Make sure that you fix the item condition (USED/NEW) by using the Batch Edit feature if necessary. 

•    Place items into at least one custom category so that Booth browsers don't have to wade through hundreds of items to search for a specific item. Let the categories narrow it down for them.

•    A Booth banner that reflects what you sell. Is your Booth name appropriate? Should you consider dropping the word "booth" from the name of your Booth? For example, if your seller ID was "peanut" (and you happen to sell peanut products), by default your Booth would be named "peanut's booth". Maybe a name change to something like "PeanutsRUs" might make sense. After all, Wal-Mart is not called "Sam Walton's Store". It is something to consider. IMAGE is everything. Create an identity and stick with it. Put your LOGO everywhere. Put Bonanzle's LOGO everywhere too (except, don't litter or put Bonanzle stickers on police cars).

•    A personalized Booth that says you are "Bonanzling" and not "eBaying". You might still be listing on eBay or other venues; that's OK, but eliminating the eBay references in your Booth can't hurt. It may take time if you have a large Booth, but Batch Edit can be used to get rid of those references. You may not lose sales if a buyer sees another site mentioned in your listings, but it certainly can't hurt if you remove the references. 

•    Booth policies that are well-stated without ambiguity. In addition, a filled-in profile is very helpful with regards to the "trust factor" that a buyer feels toward you.

•    Well-written titles and descriptions taking into account SEO (search engine optimization - see THIS for more information) so that your items show up in search engines. And, yes, fix the typos (boy, I hope you don't find any in this post. Let me know, I'll fix them).

•    Proper keywords in your descriptions AND attributes/traits filled in to help the search engines zero in on YOUR items. Associating these with your descriptions will help potential buyers find your items. See ATTRIBUTES, ITEM TRAITS and TRAITS HELP for more information.

•    Submitting your items to Google Base for indexing. It is THE NUMBER ONE thing you can do to be visible on the Internet. See HERE for more information.

•    A pricing strategy. What will you sell your items for?  Is your product reasonably priced? How are your prices compared to your competition? Are you overcharging on shipping? Today's savvy online shopper KNOWS what shipping should cost. Shipping doesn't have to be free and a buyer will accept a reasonable charge for shipping, but don't overdo it. 

•    Promote Bonanzle and your Booth with an eye toward the outside world. There are 13,000+ sellers on Bonanzle. There are MILLIONS of people outside Bonanzle. Who's more likely to buy your items in the end? 

We are committed to helping as many people as possible maximize the potential that is in every Bonanzle Booth. If YOU have any ideas that you would like to share with me, please DO. If you're feeling overwhelmed with some of the tasks ahead of you, hopefully some of the things that I will be posting will help you. There is a tremendous group of Bonanzlers that help each other every day. A lot of them have knowledge to spare and share on a wealth of topics. 

Don't hesitate to contact me at tom@bonanzle.com  - I will do my best to help. Of course, there is always BonanzleMark to make your day (or afternoon, or evening... he doesn't sleep either). Mark will probably forward some of your requests to me and I'll forward some of yours to him.