Having your own website (and that's what you have at BISI) is very different from selling on eBay. For the most part, prospective buyers don't come to the BISI home page and do a search like they do on eBay. They will find your products through the search engines: Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc. So you have to do what it takes to get your products found in those searches. Google Base will get you into a Product search but you can get yourself into regular search results, too. Good keywords and CONTENT will help. Put as much product information as possible on each product page. Use the SEO option with each category of having a description at the top.

There are all kinds of things we can do to get our websites and our products found. It just takes educating ourselves about search engine optimization and marketing. Fortunately, there is plenty of good information and help available on the web and here on the BISI forum.

I know a lot of people get discouraged and give up but it just takes some time and effort on your part and it isn't any harder than "doing" eBay. The eBay of today is probably more time-consuming than ever for sellers. Daily changes to keep up with; search disadvantaging; falling on one's sword to get good feedback. You can spend hours each day just trying to keep up and hope that eBay doesn't decide to hide your items after all your efforts.

In the end, having control of our own businesses makes it worthwhile to educate ourselves and do the work to be successful, IMO.

*stepping down from my soapbox now*

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