August 6th, 2010 → 7:50 pm @ admin // No Comments
Have you ever wondered how Ebay makes money? Well essentially, they are just matchmaking. Ebay connects the boys and the girls, or more specifically, the buyers and the sellers.
But why would the founder of Capchure be writing about Ebay? Well, I thought that I would point out how Capchure helps publishers become matchmakers with a business model. Historically, bloggers have been writing incredible content regarding the products and services that they like. Unfortunately, the only business model that existed were display advertisements in the sidebar representing one or two key phrases used in the content of the blog. Although this was somewhat relevant, it is tough for readers to connect the advertisement with words placed somewhere in the middle of the article. I would not call advertising up to this point an Ebay-like model.
So how do we take a blog and turn it into a matchmaking model? The answer is in two words: Relevance and Qualification. For Ebay, the relevance and qualification lies in the navigation of the site. People use either a search functionality or go through several links of categories and sub-categories to find the product that they want. Because Ebay has such a huge list of product categories and an easy to use navigation, people find what they are looking for. At the same time, people go to Ebay to buy things and they look for items on the portal because they have a certain degree of willingness to buy the product. With this kind of model, you would think that Ebay is like a store, right? Wrong, Ebay does not carry a single item in inventory. Ebay sells leads to sellers. Sellers give Ebay a percentage cost of the item in exchange for the closed sale to the lead generated.
So again, how does this scenario relate to Capchure? Well, Ebay is a search engine, but not the same size as the search engine that holds blog posts. The search engine that indexes posts is called Google. When people are looking up a product that you wrote about in Google, it is no different from people looking up products in Ebay. Actually, it is easier to look up a product in Google than in Ebay both in terms of labor and time. So let’s just say that somebody looks up tiki torches in Google, and your article shows up first in the search engine listing. There is a high chance at this point that the Googler is going to click on your blog post, because it is high up in the search engines. Right now, there is a good chance that they will read your post and say to themselves “that was cool,” and then go to Ebay to look for Tiki Torches and pay them their “matchmaking” fee. So let’s rewind for just a moment…. You conveyed the value proposition of the product to the customer, but they bought the product from Ebay. So you sold the customer, but Ebay was paid for the sale of the product. And actually, you may have been doing this for several years. And the only thing that Ebay really did was connect the buyer with a seller. Capchure technically allows bloggers to do this through our service. We offer publishers the ability to show relevant hover over adforms over keyphrases representing advertiser products and services. Now you know how to be like Ebay… So go ahead and sign up already here.