Just how important is it? Ever since the written word there has been some type of advertising to encourage prospective buyers to choose ones wares over anothers. However crude the methods were by comparison, todays venues, it was deemed important enough to use then and now.
As we review modern technology, newspapers or magazines were what we became most familiar with while growing up. Radio and television were invented and the race was on to see who could control the major portion of the market. Catchy jingles, defining moments from our lives, and sex were the highest producing hooks to reel in the buyers. Today we have the internet. Millions of dollars are spent each year on advertising campaigns from all angles, which might appeal to the consumer. A major auction site has a multimillion dollar budget, advertising what you can find on their site. The NFL and NBA and their sponsors spend untold millions on advertising during special events. So then why would we as sellers opt to not invest a little time to self promote?
Puzzling as it seems the answer is quite simple. These mega institutions have teams of people devoted to writing and promoting the advertising. Whole corporations are founded on the premise they can help you to succeed better than you can for yourself. Certainly if you want to reach a mass market and your product will appeal to the general audience, then it may be worthwhile to invest the money for professional help. But let us say we have a limited audience such as lapidary, spending big bucks may increase your sales by 10%, if we are being generous, is not practical. Will that return equal what is spent, probably not?
There are many free advertising markets available if you will spend only a couple of hours a month and use them! Try blog sites for a starter, Rockhound Station One and Bobs Rock Shop are two of the best. Most often you can go to the site register and place a free classified ad or join a string about specific material. You can then place a link directly to your store or site. One thing that is frowned upon is contacting individuals from the blog and hard selling them on you site. By acting as your own promotional director you have the control over what is said and how often the ads are repeated. Another source of free advertising is rock and mineral shows. Most show coordinators will allow you to place fliers of your site at the registration table. For a minimal expense of a few dollars Vista Print offers some excellent ways to reward or entice new customers from calendars to magnets, to simple business cards. Many are free after an initial purchase, a worthwhile venture. I haven not bought business cards in two years!
How the internet works is complicated for the ones savvy enough to get into all of the languages and whatnot. I believe in K.I.S.S, so I will attempt to explain as best I can how this works. There are things called spiders which crawl the web searching for specific key words. When you type in whatever you are searching for into a search engine; like Google, these spiders react to the search string and retrieve all the sites that have those words associated with them. When you write an ad or a description about a piece of material these words are what the spiders will see and act upon. Of course grammar and spelling do play a part in what they see, but as people will often misspell words, this too can be utilized as well. One example comes to mind is the word, mookaite. I have seen this word spelled; mookite, mooakite, mooka, mookookaite and a few more varieties. Each of these when added to a word string will bring the additional pages to the front of the results page based on the number of tags associated with that word. It goes further than this, but for the moment this is enough to explain the process.
When writing you ads or descriptions, the more information you include pertinent to the item, the better your chances of having that item seen by more people. The other way blogs and free ads help is by the interaction of the individual websites and yours. These spiders travel back and forth creating a mini hiway between the two sites. Therefore, the more hiways, the more traffic and the more chances your items will be seen. As I stated in a previous article; fancy pages and graphics will only slow your pages down. Unless you are selling those types of products, I would recommend avoiding them. They do look cool but cool doesn not sell the product!
Remember, if you do use these free sites, your ad is only good for about 60 days, after that they are usually replaced with more current ads. Revisit the blog sites and repost every 30 to 45 days. I have noticed a spike in sales whenever I follow this formula. Change the content of the ad to include new material or a new service. There is nothing worse than seeing the same ad for a site. It gives the appearance of not applying enough time to keep the content current. Likewise rotate your stock. If the item has not sold in two months it probably will not sell in another two months. Give it a rest and relist it at a latter date. Colors and materials fall from favor as fast as the wind changes direction. In reality, it is comparable to fishing. If one lure doesn not work, switch up to a different lure! Try these tips and see if they work for you, they certainly have improved my sales. Good Luck!
Dragon
