Using auctions

Ebay.co.uk is probably the UK's best-known on-line auction site, and can be used very effectively to market your products to a whole new range of customers who may not otherwise have seen them.

Essentially "Ebayers" are on-line looking for bargains of any sort - either something they have wanted for a long time and have seen someone else selling it, or perhaps a holiday, theatre tickets, clothes, toys, collectibles - all sorts. Many items are new or nearly-new and some are second hand.

There is no way of knowing for sure exactly what items will be for sale on any one day, and the auctions themselves can last just a few days, so many of the purchases made on Ebay are "impulse buys".

If you are willing to try selling something in an on-line auction, in the short term you may end up selling that item for less than its usual price, but each auction brings your business or service to the attention of many who may not otherwise have visited your shop or web site, so it generates greater customer awareness which is always to be encouraged. And you can set a reserve price for any auction to reduce the risk of the item being sold too cheaply.

You may only get bids from half a dozen people for the items you are selling, and there can be only one winner, but the counter on your auction page will tell you how many times your page has been viewed so you will get an idea of what level of interest there was. If you set up an Ebay Shop, this acts as a subset of your main web site (with a link to the main web site) where you can profile your business in more depth. The shop page also lists all the items you are currently selling across all the various item categories.

There is a feedback system whereby Ebayers comment on the service they have received from each other, and also a mechanism to protect the seller in the event of non-payment by the buyer. There is also a mechanism for dealing with the provision of faulty goods or non delivery by the seller, however it is not as comprehensive as the protection provided to the sellers themselves, so it is definitely a case of "buyer beware".

If you would like some more information on selling items via auction, I have sold many items via this route and would be delighted to help you make effective use of this marketing tool.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising

Google runs a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising programme called Adwords which can prove a very effective way of generating extra traffic to your web site.

When I create a web site I always endeavour to get my clients a good listing in search engines such as Google, for the business's central keywords. Eventually (it can take many weeks) the search engines will re-index and eventually a site will get a listing, although there are never any guarantees as to what position any site will land up in.

If you have been lucky enough to get a top 10 position for your chosen keywords, then all is well - well nearly. The problem is, whether you are in the top 10 for some keywords, there will be other keywords that people will be using to find the products or services you are selling, for which your site is not so visible.

PPC advertising enables you to queue-jump for any set of keywords and appear on the first page of search results, on a "sponsored link" box on the right hand side of the page (as in the example above). These ads also appear on other web sites that take Google's advertisements.

As long as the keywords your advertisement are targeting are wholly relevant to your site, and the advertisement itself is well written (bearing in mind you only have about 100 characters to play with!), surfers will click on it, especially if they are not satisfied with the main page of search results they were presented with.

Each click will cost you a number of pence and you can set a monthly budget so that you don't run up huge bills. A budget of just £40 a month will generate a steady stream of good quality clickthroughs to your site.

A key benefit of this approach is that it enables you to sponsor "seasonal" keywords, or keywords with more lateral connections to the content of your site. So a company making scented candles could run an Adword targeting the keywords "Christmas gifts" between October and December, without having to rework their own site to include these keywords and hope that the search engines re-indexed before it was time to open the January sales.

You can see some examples of Adwords advertisements currently in circulation by using the box below. Simply type in some keywords related to your line of business and press "Go". You will see a selection of adverts currently being shown in response to those keywords being used in someone's Google search or appearing on a Google content partner's web page (results will open in a separate window at Digital Point Solutions).

If you are interested in getting these keywords working for you, and would like some help in setting up and running a PPC marketing campaign, please get in touch for more details.