Just being part of our site is a great start towards a successful selling. But there are many things that you can do to promote your auctions on both a long and short term basis. The same things that you do to promote a website apply even more towards an auction, since time is a crucial element of any auction. A good promotional strategy will provide momentum for your auction when done on a regular basis. By establishing a routine you will be constantly reminding your customers where you are, and what you have to sell. Without this routine, you will be no longer at the forefront of your customers attention, allowing them the chance to be elsewhere buying other things. 

Your home page on an auction site is a permanent page. This was done so that no matter how many auctions you hold, people can always return to the same address, either through memory or a bookmark. This allows you to use the address in all of your promotions on the Internet, or any other advertisements. 

We recommend that you spend a half hour a day, or at least an hour or two a week promoting. The more you do, the better the results will be. You will notice one main theme throughout our little list of ideas here: 

Most of them don't cost a dime...
 

Absolutely the best place to promote anything collectible, the Newsgroups provide the quickest exposure for your auctions. Our site has features that are designed to take advantage of this. By utilizing the "Text Lists for Promotion" section in the Seller Tools menu, you may create lists of current auction info, printed out to a web page for you. From there a simple Select, Copy, and Paste will advertise your auction to a high concentration of your potential audience.

Here is a small list of Newsgroup Addresses. Most of you have been provided some type of Newsreader by your Internet access provider.

rec.collecting.sport.baseball
rec.collecting.sport.basketball
rec.collecting.sport.football
rec.collecting.sport.hockey
rec.collecting.sport.misc 
 
There are many thousands more newsgroups available.
 

Many excellent Email programs allow you to maintain a mailing list. By all means take the time to collect the email addresses of anyone you do business with. Be respectful of course if they do not wish to receive mailings.

Every time you start an auction, mail to your list. Similarly. Send another email with the current bids just before the end. Make sure to provide the location of the auctions each time.

Another huge feature of almost every email program is the signature. Many Newsreaders have this feature as well. A signature is something that gets added to the bottom of every piece of correspondence. A little ad if you will, whoever receives this will know the location of your auction, and a little bit about what you do.

You can submit your main page to any search engine you can think of. By going to the main pages of any search engine, you will generally find a spot to submit your page. The search engines will then index your page. If someone searches for the right subject, your page will appear in the results.

The most important thing to do here is to properly describe yourself and your auction in the Preferences. These are the words that the search engines will base the matches upon. Complete information will result in more hits for your auction.

There are so many other places to advertise your auction, and most people overlook them. The simple basis of fact is this: The more places you can mention your auction or website, the more traffic you will get. More traffic means more sales. They cannot buy from you if they never heard of you.

• Business Cards
• Letterheads
• Envelopes
• Answering Machines
• Press Releases
• Classifieds
• Websites