While many of the auctions sites have enough of their own publicity to bring in customers, you are still at the mercy of the customers’ searching and stumbling. In many cases, you are dependant on the customer stumbling onto your item and buying it.
There are several ways for you to help the process along. It’s always better if you can lead the customer directly to your items rather than hoping they stumble upon them.
When trying to lead consumers directly to your items, you can choose to go free or paid. In many cases, the paid traffic will be a little more focused directly towards consumers who are looking for or are likely to be looking for an item like yours.
The most popular way of paid traffic is Google Adwords. You can purchase a adspace for a given keyword. The adspace will display on Google searches and on millions of websites. The ads are keyword based, so they only display on websites that have high instances of that keyword. For example, if you sell Ford headlights, you would want to buy adspace for the keywords Ford, Ford parts, Ford headlights, and possibly some that are more generic like Headlights and Auto parts. Your ad would most likely show on only websites that talk mostly about Ford, Headlights, and car parts. These sites are much more likely to have browsers who may need a Ford Headlight.
As opposed to paid traffic, free traffic is much less focused. Free ads/traffic generation consists mostly of participating in online forums and message boards.
If you are determined to get your traffic for free, find as many forums or message boards that are on subjects that are close to your items’ subject and become an active participant. In the example of the Ford Headlight item, you would want to find forums and message boards that are frequented by mechanics, DIY mechanics, and car owners. If you could find one that was specifically on Ford, that would be that much better. Many of the auto related forums and message boards have sub-boards that are broken down by make and sometimes by model as well.
Before you begin posting messages to boards and forums, make sure you read the usage rules of the board or forum. In nearly all cases, the moderators of the board or forum will remove your post and possibly your user if you are merely just posting a link to your item. Make sure that you are contributing to the conversation and not just “spamming” your item link to the board. Also, check on the availability of adding a signature to your posts. By adding a signature to your post, you can add a link to your store/items to each and every post you add to the forum/board.
No matter how you decide to drive traffic to your items, remember to follow the rules and you should see a very nice pickup in sales and profits.
[tags]promotion, traffic, auction, store, listings[/tags]
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May 5th, 2010 at 3:48 am
Great all round advice. I would also add the importance of driving traffic to your listings from sites you control (i.e. a blog or website). More traffic will mean more bids so if you have your own site (loads of free blog services around!) then this is an excellent place to promote your listings, especially if the site is relevant to the items you are selling. Having relevant listings next to the content of your site will likely drive traffic to eBay and boost sales.
This has worked very successfully for me and by using a tool that updates with your current listings automatically like auction nudge (www.auctionnudge.com) you don’t have to worry about keeping your site up-to-date then. I hope this helps someone get some extra sales! :0)