Here are the most important ways to make short eBay listings very effective.

1) Capture Attention. Effective advertising captures the attention of qualified buyers. Every ad in any medium has to first capture the attention of interested and qualified prospects. To get attention means interrupting your prospects searches in order to direct them to your specific item listing.

eBay is the worlds largest inventory of products and that inventory changes on a daily basis. Buyers just don't know what sellers will be serving up next and so they tend to check in on a regular basis so they don't miss out on that one special item they'd just love to have.

So off those eager buyers go to eBay to see what might be available. Most will use the Search function while others will wade through a bunch of listing titles in their favorite category. Regardless of the search method used, buyers are served up a long list of titles. Some are accompanied by Gallery Images, while others are not.

But that's all any seller has to capture the attention of interested prospects. It's just one line of text, just 55 characters and perhaps a single thumbnail image. That's it. And this either pulls prospects in or sends them along to continue their treasure hunt. In one brief line you need to attract qualified, interested and action-oriented people and as many of them as you can each time out.

2) Build Interest. Once you've stopped potential buyers in their tracks and temporarily interrupted the noise competing for their attention, you've got to make their attention stick. Interest them or you lose them. Nobody's got a spare moment anymore. Grab them instantly or they're gone for good.

You've aroused curiosity and piqued interest with a strong title. Now it's time to strengthen that interest and squash any doubts. The first thing potential buyers want when they click through is verification. Is the item really what they hoped? You can begin to address this by expanding on your title straight away.

3) Describe major benefits and key features. It's not just what your item is but what it does. Benefits address the true value of an item from the buyer's perspective. It's the emotional payoff that far exceeds the actual cost. Paint a picture of what could be theirs.

But don't just cover the benefits. Many items are sold on eBay because the specific features offered are exactly what the buyer was searching for.

Features are easy to include. All you have to do is examine the product and list such details as brand name, model number, size, where it was made, color, year of manufacture, materials used, condition, and anything else you can think of that might be relevant to a single prospect. Most sellers do an acceptable job of listing an item's features, but they fail to add any sales sizzle by graphically communicating the glorious benefits that make an item appear to be worth much more than the cost.