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100 Auction Secrets Revealed! By Aubrey Johnson & Barkingbird Productions AuctionTip #41: Don't Overlook This Free Service... Services like
Honesty.com offer free counters. Keep up with your page hits
so you can make adjustments to improve auction performance with It's a critical tool for
keeping up with auction performance. AuctionTip #42: Know What You're Selling
Before you put something
up for auction, look to see if something similar is already selling. In other words, know the
general market value of your item. If there is a few items
similar to yours already up, wait for those auctions to end before you post
yours. Compete with other items as little as possible. AuctionTip #43: Good Packing Material Newspaper makes good
packing material, especially if it’s shredded. It’s cheap, it’s handy
and it gets the job done. Save packing material
from any other shipments you receive. Bubble wrap is lighter and more
professional, but it will cost you more. AuctionTip #44: Revive Your Ad by Revising It Auctions
that haven't gotten any bids can be revised- did you goof up and mis-spell a
keyword in your auction title? Don't worry- simply go to the auction page,
click "revise", correct the mistake and make way for the bidders. Another
thing, if your auction has no bids and you still have more than a day before
the end, change categories. This is
helpful when you're testing new categories for a particular item- if an auction
in a new category starts to fail just switch to your bread and butter. By doing
this you'll uncover some better places to list. AuctionTip #45: Increase Your
Exposure at No Cost! This is
a pointer that is easily overlooked by most sellers. Go local
for extra traffic. Whenever you're creating your ad on eBay you'll be given the
option of placing your auction in a regional category- do it! Most
people simply opt to not list regionally thinking it can’t be seen, or they
shouldn’t since it’s not a regional auction. Be certain to pick a region. AuctionTip #46: Your Customer's Lifetime Value Do you know your customer's marginal net worth? What is that? This term simply refers to the long-term value of your customer. Develop a long-term relationship with your bidders and offer them
similar products they will want. Look past the initial sale. If you know that your average customer is worth $1000 to you over
the span of 5 years, then it only makes sense that you would be willing to
spend a good amount of money to get them. AuctionTip #47: Learn How-To Master HTML in 2 Hours If you’re
going to be a great seller, you need to learn html. Every webpage you see is
written with it. It just wouldn't be very effective to have someone else do
this for you. You don't
even have to know a lot about it; just the bare bones basics. Don’t let
it intimidate you. I speak from experience - it’s SO easy. Once you learn it,
you’ll have a blast using it. Need a
tutor? There's a real good interactive HTML tutorial at: Sooner or
later you’re going to want to get good at it. It'll take you about an hour or
so to get familiar. Also, the
html editor I've used since day one is Notepad.
This is bundled with all computers and is a good program to use; you'll learn html fast. Learning
html needs to be one of your important early goals. Being able to do it
give you great control over how your ad looks. AuctionTip #48: Relisting Strategies: Doing Better Next Time. Did your
auction do a flop on you? No bids, nothing? You can still relist for free but you
need to answer the question... What went
wrong? Was the auction over-priced? Was it in the wrong category? Do I need a
better headline? Description? Or was it that no one wanted to buy my old
sneakers in the first place. When you
relist, change things up a little. Consider
changing one or more of the following listing variables: ·
What
category you choose ·
How
you word your title ·
Your
reputation/feedback ·
How
you describe your item ·
Starting
bid price ·
Timing ·
Photos/pictures ·
Listing
Features like featured ads, etc Try to pinpoint what
went wrong- then relist and see what your results are. Thank goodness for
testing. If you test well, you
will eventually get that positive result you want. AuctionTip #49: "How To" and "Why " To Create Your Own eBooks. If
you plan on offering upsell and backend products to your customer, you will
start to really start to see the overwhelming relevance of eBooks to your success. In
this chapter we've dealt with a problem that most new auction sellers face- and
that is with their product. My
best advice is to start off selling hard goods and work your way to lighter ones
and eventually information; this will free you from tasks that will put a
damper on you in your auction business. AuctionTip #50: Dutch Auctions, One of Your Keys to Success Every seller
knows: in order to make a lot of money on eBay, you have to run Dutch
auctions. Any auction selling multiple similar items is Dutch. When you
start running multiple Dutch auctions then you will start to realize the power
of online auctions. You want
to position yourself with products ahead of time that lend themselves over to
the Dutch auction format and repeat sales. A little later I'll show you what some
of those items are. Dutch
auctions allow you to leverage your time to the highest degree. You can acquire customers and profits at a blinding rate. And if
your customer has a lifetime worth to you... prepare to break the bank. Consider
this example; you’re eBay’s cutlery guru (knives) – you’re selling Ginsu Knives
on eBay for $5 each and you have 500 of them. If you
sell each one auction at a time, then you would die before you ever sold them
all… Instead,
you take out two big ads costing you about $200 and you blow them all out in
one week. If your
profit margin is $3 then you just made $1300 (minus advertising costs). Not
bad, that’s $50,000 a year when you only consider the front-end sales. The
beauty of it is this: you have just bought 500 new customers and made $1300 at
the same time. Did I fail to mention that you had a rocking stock of high
quality Bonzai knives? Oh yes,
you do. And you intend on selling them to those same 500 customers outside of
eBay for a profit of about $10 a piece (no advertising costs). They can
cut through steel, so of course they will buy them. So as you
can see, Dutch auctions will allow you to crunch time and explode profits;
there is nothing keeping you from running as many auctions as you can as long
as its profitable. The
obvious question now is where is your product source? Though it’s not any easy one
to answer, it is about to become much clearer. Some
other questions need to be answered first. |