Terry Gibbs: eBay Business Expert and Information Publisher

by Bonnie Boots

Any live theater performance involves a good deal of strutting and shouting upon the stage. But good actors understand the equal importance of the whisper. In the midst of a play filled with storm and thunder, an actor can insert a pause to focus the audience's attention. And in that quiet space, a whisper can speak volumes.

I was reminded of this when I came across a sales page created by eBay expert Terry Gibbs.

The internet has become so crowded with strutting, shouting sales pages that I've grown numb to their self-important shenanigans. Screaming headlines and grandiose promises like "I made $23 million dollars working just 4 minutes a day!" no longer effect me.

In the midst of all this internet cry and caterwaul, Terry Gibb's sales page galvanized my attention with a low-key claim. "In an auction we ran in early May," it whispered, "we sold one product…leaving us $3.67 in profit. Plus we got ten new subscribers."

Those petite figures made more of an impact on me that anything else I saw in that day's surfing. It stopped me in my tracks. I wondered what sort of a person would stand in the middle of a screaming crowd and whisper. The author, I decided, was either supremely confident or just plain crazy.

So I called him up to find out.

Terry Gibbs is crazy, it turns out. Crazy like a fox. In an interview that spanned two hours, Gibbs laid out the clear and careful reasoning behind every part of his marketing, even that claim of making a $3.67 profit.

"I think the whole field of doing business on the internet has been damaged by hucksters," he said. "It's made it harder and harder for credible people to stand up and be heard. I've struggled with finding a way to market without stooping to the huckster's standards."

Gibb's solution to this problem is the actor's old trick-speak in a whisper. "I purposely use very low figures in my example on that sales page because I don't want to mislead people. My defense against hucksterism is to build credibility."

Take a tour through Gibb's main web site and you'll see it's nothing fancy.
Gibb's took it well when I told him his web site was ugly. "I know, I know," he laughed. "That awful side bar navigation-all those links. Sometimes I feel embarrassed about it, but on the other hand, the site works for me."

The site layout and color scheme are drab, indeed, but the content is solid and Gibb's personality shines through. You get a good feel for the man and his values just by reading the articles. Gibbs writes in a friendly, almost folksy style that's immediately reassuring. You know you're hearing from the man himself, and not just some slick, well-paid copywriter.

"I write a new article every two weeks," Gibbs says. When I sit down to write, I imagine I'm speaking personally to my target customer, which in my case is a middle-age woman in Ohio. I write down exactly what I would say to that woman if we were sitting across from each other, having a cup of coffee."

That tactic keeps his writing real, and keeps Gibb's focus where it should be-on his reader. He's not trying to bowl them over with bluster and boasting. Instead, he's focused on delivering solid information that people can really use.

Gibb's readers and customers are, for the most part, sellers on eBay. Gibb's himself is an eBay seller, dealing in the model trains and tin toys he began collecting at age 12. But soon after starting on eBay as a collectibles dealer in 1997, Gibb's realized he could make much more money selling information.

Today, in his early-40's, Gibbs is an acknowledged expert on both model trains and the ins and outs of doing business on eBay. He writes a newsletter that goes out to 25,000 subscribers, does a radio show on eBay's own channel. And along the way, he produces an ever-increasing number of "information products," including ebooks, reports and a series of CD's sold by subscription..

Gibb's self-published his first book, a guide written for train collectors. Selling the book involved keeping stock on hand, as well as shipping supplies and postage. When he discovered he could deliver his information products digitally, Gibbs says, "The whole world changed for me. It opened up this whole new field of opportunities."

Gibbs says when he switched from print to digital delivery, many of his original customers dropped away. "They came from a generation that wanted to hold a book in their hands."

Gibbs says as time went on, he made up for those old customers and added many new ones. "With digital delivery, there's instant gratification," he says. "People can have the information they need delivered to them within seconds, instead of waiting for a book to arrive by mail."

Because Gibb's focus in his newsletters and information products is all about eBay, it might be easy to brush him off as a sort of internet yard sale expert. But Gibbs, like eBay itself, has layers and layers. His marketing knowledge is extensive and his grasp of internet marketing techniques is encyclopedic.

I asked Gibbs where he came by his expertise and learned that long before he got started on eBay, Gibbs spent time working for some very big names in marketing. Those same big names laughed when Gibbs told them about the potential he saw in eBay. "Back then, I was just talk," Gibbs says. "I hadn't done anything on my own yet and they didn't want to talk to me. Of course, after I had a couple of projects under my belt, they stopped laughing. Now they talk to me," he says with dry humor.

Beyond the skills he learned while working for these marketers, Gibbs became a self-professed "serial purchaser" of internet marketing information. "I spent thousands of dollars on reports, on videos, on CD's, anything I could get my hands. I got overwhelmed by information and ended up doing what so many people do-I didn't use any of it."

Gibbs realized he was spinning his wheels -studying, but not doing. So he put himself on a diet. "I told myself I wasn't going to buy one more thing until I'd made use of all the information I already had."

It took two years.

For two years, Gibb's went through his prior purchases, book by book, CD by CD, learning and then implementing tactics and techniques. "Information is worthless unless you take action," he says. "Once I started acting on the information I'd already bought, things really started to move."

Today, Gibbs is a veritable fountain of information on using the internet as a sales channel. And he's proud that his information is based on experience, not just something he read in a book. "I'm constantly trying and testing," he says.

Gibbs doesn't see the internet as a perfect sales channel, and warns against those that do. "The internet has problems," he says "and they're growing. It's becoming more and more difficult to get your message across in email or newsletters. A lot of people are finding they have to turn back to the old standbys of direct marketing, like mail-outs."

Gibbs says the internet also fails miserably when a business needs to target people in a geographical location. He sites his own experiences with AdSense as a case in point..

Gibbs set up an AdSense campaign that announced he was a buyer of model trains. The ad was set to be broadcast on the internet, but only in Gibbs physical location of Mesa, Arizona.

Gibbs' says the first few months, the ad worked well, costing him about $45 a month in PPC, or "Pay Per Click." Then, October came, a month during which Arizona sees the arrival of a large number of snowbirds, people that travel to escape cold winter weather elsewhere.

"I had no idea that was going to affect my AdSense ad," Gibbs says. "In just 2 days, my AdSense cost climbed to $1,200. For 2 days! And the people clicking on my ad weren't even people with trains to sell. They were just people passing time on the internet who saw my ad and thought they'd go look at pictures of model trains."

Gibbs says he stills remembers the feeling he had in the pit of his stomach when he entered his AdSense account and saw he owed $1,200. "That hurt me, " he says. "And that's one of the reasons I have such a dislike for the hucksters selling misleading information."

Gibbs sites a sales campaign he saw recently offering information on a Google-related scheme. "Some of the people that buy that information are going to act on it. And they're going to get hurt. I know how bad I felt losing that $1,200, but that's nothing when you're talking about people potentially losing $20,000. What those hucksters are doing may be legal. But it's certainly unethical."

I asked Gibb's how he's changed since he first started doing business on the internet. "I've learned to do things my own way," he says. "I got a lot of pressure when I was first starting out to do things the way all the big guys were doing them. But their way didn't work for me. I wasn't comfortable with it."

Gibbs says he sees so many people focusing all their energy on their sales figures, to the point where nothing else matters. "They get very competitive--they're all about "I've got higher numbers than you this week!"

But I don't get validation from focusing on "sell,sell,sell," he says. "I get my validation from helping people. My goal is to make people happy with what I send them. As I emphasized that more, I got more testimonials from people. The more testimonials I got, the more credibility I built and the better I felt about myself. And so focusing on those deeper values actually brought me to a place where I'm pretty comfortable with myself and my business."

"What I've learned," Gibbs says, "is that I have to do things within the scope of my own personality. What matters is that the way I do things is productive for me."


SIDEBAR:

Here's what Terry Gibbs thinks is essential for people doing business on the internet:

1. Don't feel you have to follow the herd. Test different strategies to see what works best for your business.

2. Be willing to invest time and money to expand and improve your skills.

3. Build your business around something you love. "Passion makes a big difference," he says.

4. Diversify. Gibbs started out with one book printed on paper. Now he produces books, audios, and software.

5. Make sure every page in your web site has a specific goal. Gibbs sees his pages goals this way: article pages get subscribers, sales pages make sales and some pages are there just to feed keywords to the search engines.

6. Last, but extremely important, says Gibbs. "Know the basics of how a web site works!"

You can visit with Terry Gibbs at his website "I Want Collectibles" by clicking this link.





About the Author

Bonnie Boots is the publisher/editor of The Internet Wizards Magazine for people who want to create their own products and market on the internet. Register for your free 1-year subscription at http://www.theinternetwizards.com