Come On, Take Some Responsibility!

So, I got a comment on our blog at Renegade-eBay-Sellers that both amused and saddened me. A guy named 'Fred' commented on a podcast Andrew and I did recently about the strategy of starting items off at 99 cents. Fred said we were wrong! That was the part that completely amused me. Us wrong, come on, that's crazy talk!

In case you don't know, the 99 cent strategy is where you start an item out at 99 cents in order to draw attention to your auction, which means more people will be attracted to it, and subsequently all the strategies to take them off eBay to your site (hide them away) come into play - as well as starting a bidding frenzy that has the possibility of taking the auction price above your normal buy it now price! There are many other advantages to this strategy, but those are the main ones to help you understand the basics of it.

After I stopped laughing at the thought that we may be wrong ;) - I read the rest of his comment. He went on to say that he had listed a handful of items at 99 cents and in not one case did he recover his costs. Losing money is never funny, so I went into teaching mode. There are times when I do something where I knowingly lose money of the front end sale because I know what the Lifetime Customer Value is once I get the person into my sales funnel. The Lifetime Customer Value is what a person will spend over their lifetime. I offer them all kinds of helpful products I have, and a bunch of things I don't have! What I mean by the latter is things I partner up to sell (affiliate sales). He didn't understand that part yet and his main issue was that he 'built it' but 'they' didn't come.

Come on! Reallllly? We are wrong because he simply threw the auction up and hoped for the best? Had he followed all the other advice we had given? Had he taken the time to study how to draw people to his auctions ? I'll answer that for him - 'No' and 'No.'

The only time I found the 99 cent strategy didn't work for me was when I was lazy. If you are in a category that gets very little traffic then you need to take some responsibility and go get some extra buyers! Here are a couple things I am doing right now to draw in traffic to my 99 cent auctions:

Reviews & Guides

eBay allows you to write reviews and/or guides, so use it! Come up with creative ways to write guides that motivate the reader into realizing what they need to buy, and where they can buy it. Show that you know what you are talking about & be the expert in your market. Let's imagine you sell a boring product like neckties - you could write a guide on "how to pick the right necktie for you", or it might be "the care and maintenance of a fine silk tie", "how to tie the top 3 most popular tie knots" or "three best 'Power Tie' colors for the corporate world." Be creative! You CAN come up with something. What great advice can you give that will make the reader be appreciative and trust you enough to buy?

The key to this is to have the last sentence tell them where they need to go to find suitable ties. On eBay that's easy - they're already on the site, so it's easy to direct them, and if your listing titles use the right keywords, eBay will tie your listings with the review or guide.

Your Email list

Again, this is something I'm doing right now. You have all of your customers and leads in an autoresponder series, right? Good, then try the following strategy....

I start an item for 99 cents, then the next day I send email #1 to my list of previous buyers, with a title like, "This weeks 99 cent special". In email #1 I give them a link that takes them to the 99 cent auction. 24 hours before the auction is going to end I send email #2 that says something like, "Don't let [product name] get away!" or "24 hours until someone gets your [Product Name]". Be creative, and get them to open the email! Email #2 also needs to have the link to the eBay auction. Try this for a month and use different products each week. This tactic, obviously only works if you have more then one product, so we'll call it a 'backend' sales generation tactic.

These are just a few of the things I'm doing right now to draw even more attention to my 99 cent auctions. The more traffic they receive, the higher the final price. Even if you feel you can't use these strategies and tactics, use the ideas to inspire you to come up with your own ways to generate more traffic.

There are many more techniques, such as using eBay blogs in the same way I pointed out in the Reviews and Guides section, or having an eBay store that automatically gets picked up in Google's Product Search. There are far too many ways to generate traffic to have the excuse that the 99 cent strategy doesn't work for you or your market! Even if you're already getting a lot of viewers and buyers for your items, these methods will still serve you well. It's well been said that the best time to invest in more marketing is when the going is good...