Opening post / purpose of this blog

The advice I seem to get coming from everyone who talks about search optimization and what not is to create a business blog but I have hesitated to do so up until now because I didn't want to create another blog that is just outright shilling for my website, posting links to online articles that have little or no relevance to my business or posting affiliate marking links in every other post. I am not saying I won't do some of that, after all the whole point of doing this to help generate more sales for my website.

Why am I creating a blog now? In the month since fixed price 30 day listings has been rolled out my eBay sales are falling and sell through rates on my weekly fixed price 7 day listings have fallen below 15% the last three week (I will give some data in a future post). My sales are not all bad since the fixed price 30 listings are selling pretty well but this has been kind of a kick in the ass to get me motivated and try to make sure my business can survive without eBay. Right now it probably can't since 65-70% of my monthly sales are coming from eBay.

I don't really have any kind of plan just the general idea that I should stop spending so much time and energy chasing the eBay changes and concentrate all my energies into growing my business outside of eBay. To that end I have a few general ideas I am starting with and will go from there.

• Create a blog and write about eBay, google and other e-commerce related issues on a regular basis.
• Work on SEO and improving rankings in natural search results (blogging is supposed to help with this).
  
• Add more of my products to Amazon.com since it has been a great source of extra sales and should a fairly easy path to growing sales (at least in the short term)
  
• Finally get around to adding some new Google adwords ads and exploring some of more advanced options.