Schewanick Computer Services

Online Marketing: Online Auctions
By Aaron Turpen of Aaronz WebWorkz
Many people have not considered the value of using online
auction houses, such as eBay and Yahoo! Auctions, to
promote their own businesses. No matter your business,
with a little creativity, you can use this tool to market
yourself.
There are three important pieces to the marketing puzzle
when using auction websites: your user name, your profile,
and your products.
When signing up, pick a user name that reflects your
business. Your business name is preferred, but anything
close (even your website name: yourbusiness.com) will do
well. For example, my username on eBay is
"AaronzWebWorkz."
The next focus is the "profile" page, which you will set up
as a part of the signup process with these auction
websites. In this profile, you are able to talk about
yourself (read: "market yourself") and link to your
website. This is fairly straightforward. Make sure that
your links are correct and that you haven't made any
spelling or grammatical errors. Short and sweet works
best. The majority of those who do come to this page will
read your information. If you make it too long, though,
they might skip it. After all, most people who load these
profiles are looking for other auctions, not your life
story.
The final issue to deal with is your products. Even if you
sell services (as I do), you can use these auction sites.
If you are new to the auction site, read several other
auctions and go through the posting process (without
hitting the final "post" button) to see how the auctions
are structured. Once you have an idea of how you should go
about posting your items and what kind of knowledge you'll
need, start writing your product information. Do this by
typing them into a text editor (Word, Notepad, etc.) and
running them through a spell checker. Then re-read them
once or twice to make sure you didn't miss anything or
fudge the description. Once you're ready, go back to the
auction site and post your ad. I'd suggest no more than
one or two to get started. Once you have a handle on
things (and have made a couple of sales), you'll be ready
to post more often.
The auctions themselves are unimportant. I usually take a
service that I perform for a minimal cost and post it at a
bare minimum cost. For example, I do domain name
appraisals normally at $5 each. I post them on eBay at $1
each as the starting bid. These don't take much time to do
and are something that many people look for. Even selling
at only a dollar, after eBay fees, I usually make about
sixty cents profit. That doesn't sound like much, and it
isn't, but I'm not in it for the money. A look at my
server logs says that the thirty minutes a week I'm
spending on my auction marketing is sending about 200
visitors to my site. This number has been steadily
building since I began using this form of marketing a few
months ago. The more you market, the more referrals you'll
receive!
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Aaron Turpen is the proprieter of Aaronz WebWorkz, a full-
service provider of Web needs to small businesses.
www.AaronzWebWorkz.com