Building your own Web pages to help you sell at auctions

Part 4: Talk it up

by Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com, www.samizdat.com

Our online store at Yahoo
Our eBay store
My seller's profile at eBay (with all customer feedback)

The following article was written for GoTo Auctions (formerly known as AuctionRover). The rights have reverted to the author.


Personal Web pages are a good starting point for promoting your auctions. After all, you might have items for sale at two, three or even half a dozen different auction sites; and the items themselves change each week if not sooner. So it helps to have one central place where you preserve and enhance your auction-seller identity and direct people to your current activities.

Once you have such a Web site -- with pointers to current auctions and to feedback from your auctions, plus other content related to the kinds of things that you normally sell -- you can begin to systematically promote your auction selling, with that site as the focus.

As a first step, create a "signature" file. In many email programs, a signature file is one of the options -- a few sentences that get automatically attached at the end of every message you send. If your program doesn't have that or you can't figure out how to do it automatically, simply create a document with those sentences and cut-and-paste that element into every email you send.

Tracy Marks, the ice-skating photographer we mentioned in an earlier column, has a signature that points to two Web sites, one for her consulting/teaching/Web design business, and one showcasing her photography. Since she only sells at eBay, she uses her eBay About Me page to summarize all her current auctions and feedback:

Tr@cy M@rks tmar@tiac.net

Windweaver Web and W95 Resources

http://www.windweaver.com/index.htm

Webwinds Skating Photo Gallery

http://www.webwinds.com/skating/skating.htm

Ebay Skating Photos Auction

http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/torreyphilemon/

For most people, a couple lines would suffice -- one saying what your specialty is and one with the URL of your personal site. For example:

John Q. Auctionseller

buy/sell baseball cards and memorabilia at online auctions

members.xoom.com/auctionseller

Next, you should become familiar with the online discussions related to your field of interest, and begin to actively participate. For newsgroups, go to Deja.com (www.deja.com). In the Quick Search box in the upper right corner, enter words that describe your category, for instance, "baseball cards". You will get a results list that includes "discussion forums" (in this case, including the newsgroup alt.sports.baseball.card-traders) and also a list of individual items that have recently been posted. Click and read. And check the help files to learn how you can participate. Anyone can get involved. There is no charge. But each group has its own written and unwritten rules for what constitutes appropriate behavior. Most newsgroups are intended for individuals to share information and help one another in a pre-set area of common interest. In most cases, people don't want to see blatant ads, and will respond very negatively to them. But you can learn a lot by reading select items here, and if you use a signature file, every time you post your opinion or helpful advice or relevant question, people see that you are an auction seller and see the link to get further information about what you have to sell. That's a way to spread the word without violating the culture.

Similarly, you should go to Liszt.com (www.liszt.com) to learn about email discussions in your specialty. Either enter a query or click on a category, then a subcategory. Here you'll see brief descriptions of the topics and information on how to subscribe. Nowadays it is standard procedure that you first need to subscribe to a particular list before you can post a message to it. That's one way these groups try to avoid "spam" (unsolicited commercial messages). You have to be willing to receive all the message from a group (which could be dozens of emails a day) in order to send your messages to the members. Many lists also have moderators who filter the messages to make sure they are on topic. Those lists that don't have moderators and automatically forward all messages received to the whole list, typically have a core of dedicated participants who quickly become outraged at inappropriate behavior, especially spam. But once again, if you are really interested in the kinds of things that you in fact sell at auction, you may very well want to get involved in discussions along that line; and thanks to your signature file, every time you post a message, the members are reminded of who you are and what you do and how to learn more.

The third major kind of online discussion is called "forum." In this case, the dialog takes place at a particular Web site and is saved there. The rules of engagement vary widely, depending on what the site owner is trying to do. To search or browse through the thousands of forum-style discussions now available, check ForumOne (www.forumone.com). Once again, it's usually best to restrict your commercial message to your signature file and keep the body of you messages strictly non-commercial and on topic.

If you become very good at this kind of discussion, you could set up your own forums for free at sites like Delphi (www.delphi.com) or start your own automated email discussions for free at Topica (www.topica.com). But the ones already in place should work quite well for most auction sellers.


This article and hundreds of related items by Richard is available, in plain text, on CD ROM My Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities (B&R Samizdat Express, 2002) for $29. That same CD also includes the full text of his books The Social Web, Take Charge of Your Web Site, Shop Online the Lazy Way, and The Way of the Web. It is available from Amazon and from our online store http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat, where you can buy an entire library for the price of a book.

Other auction articles by Richard Seltzer

Can we help you build an Internet business? Richard Seltzer is an independent Internet writer/speaker/consultant. Click here for details. or send email to seltzer@samizdat.com

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