"How not to get married" may seem a strange piece of advice to be giving at an eBay session, but top blogger, author, and Squidoo.com founder Seth Godin found a way to tie it in to promoting your eBay business. You can either go to bars and hope those random series of hookups work out, or you can do it by dating. (He recommended "waiting until the third date 'til you tell them you're out on parole," which got one of many laughs from the audience).

Dating was the way he did it, he said. Why, he asked the audience rhetorically, are you not dating your prospects?

The reason you need to do that is to build communication with them; a way to differentiate yourself from all the other products on the proverbial shelf. The Internet is "the biggest wicked haystack of all time, and you're a little tiny needle."

The other big question he had for the audience was "Is eBay a platform or a job?" As a platform, you can use it to "build something far bigger than you can imagine."

The key, he said, is to "do something remarkable," which means "worth making a remark about." The cycle, as it looks like in a diagram, is to "be remarkable, tell a story to your sneezers, they spread the word, and you get permission from them" to keep in touch with them via an e-mail newsletter, blog, etc.

One example he used of good email marketing was Scott Adams, the "Dilbert" cartoonist, who puts his email address in his cartoons so people can subscribe to his newsletter. "When he writes a book, he presses a button and 250,000 people sell his book and make it a bestseller," said Godin.

The message, however, needs to be anticipated, personal, and relevant.

So it's important to get your customers' permission to email them, but remember "permission is selfish - I don't want email, I want me-mail." Make it about the person to whom you're emailing.

It's important to find the people who want to hear the information you're pushing out. "I write books for people who read my books," explained Godin.

Godin showed slides of a couple of Squidoo pages that were good examples of marketing and had in fact won his contest for good Squidoo lenses. One was "The Monkees Merchandise on eBay." "She gets paid a commission every time someone buys" one of those Monkees items on eBay, he said.

The other was the "Scott Barnes Cosmetics Showcase."

Other examples Godin gave of great customer communication and businesses in the real world: "Daily Candy," which sends an email every day about sample sales, bars opening, etc. "The right people get the email," he said.

"Threadless," which is from Chicago, brings in $20-$30 million in revenue, and the whole concept is they ask people to submit a design for a t-shirt, people vote on it on the site, and the one with the most votes wins. Friends tell their friends "vote for me," and every other t-shirt is for sale.

Godin took eBayers' questions at the end of the session. One woman said her friend sold fabulous jewelry on eBay but couldn't get people to her store.

Either make the jewelry so fabulous that people say, "Oh my God," or "tell a story about it," advised Godin. He gave some examples of jewelry-industry stories, such as ethical diamond, and jewelry for gay couples.

Another seller said he sold things to people who were not Internet savvy. Godin suggested he offer an 800 number and do customer service by phone, but said "if you can't figure out how to have a conversation with people, you need to sell something else."

He also advised people to pick something they have passion about, and advocated giving away ebooks for free to spread the word about your business. "Digital things want to be free," he said, which brought another laugh, but Godin said tongue-in-cheek he didn't think it was funny. "The enemy is not piracy, but obscurity."

One seller owned an eBay drop-off store, and the seller wanted to know how to get the word out on the local level. Godin suggested changing the model from "drop off to pick up" – "The reason drop-off stores didn't take off was it was so hard; there were too many steps."

"Your job is not finding stuff to sell, but stories to tell," he summed up.

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Julia Wilkinson is the author of "The eBay Price Guide" (No Starch Press, 2006) and "eBay Top 100 Simplified Tips & Tricks" (Wiley, 2004-6); Her latest ebook, "Over 500 Books that Sell for $50-$5000 on eBay," is available on her website. http://www.yardsalers.net/500Books.asp