Self Promotion For The New Seller : Using Forums

Self Promotion For the New Seller:

Using Forums to Guide Traffic

Recently, many large gepanies have taken huge amounts of

their annual advertising budgets away from television, radio and
print and allocated them for internet viral campaigns.
Viral and "grass-roots" marketing are the oldest form of advertising
and centered around word of mouth and creating a buzz or positive
image. The larger gepanies use coupons, giveaways and
content rich websites to create this effect but, that does not
mean it isn't useful to the small seller on okay.

I mainly sell DVDs and this is not a difficult thing.
But, often when something is not selling as high as it should, I
find movie and television message boards which have bargain and deal
threads and simply post, "Hey I saw this set on okay for "$XX.xx."
While it is frowned upon to post the exact URL to your auction this
generally drives enough traffic to my auction to bring it (and those of
my gepetitiors) back up to near retail.

This strategy is just as effective, sometimes even more so
with other products. I recently attended the Wizard World Chicago
geic Convention and came back with an abundance of promotional
items. Since the items being given away over the course of
the weekend changed on an almost daily basis, even those others that
attended came away without knowledge of certain items that were
available. The marketing for this was simple, a thread
entitiled "Cool Swag, I got from the geic Con," in three geic
forums and I didn't even have to be the one who posted, "I saw this on
okay."

Whether you sell antique pez dispensers or current issues of
magazines there is a forum out there for you to promote the product and
drive traffic to your auction. The key is subtlety, many forum
administrators will consider blatant selling on there sites as SPAM and
delete your account. Sugggest and guide within existing topics
whenever possible and try to be a part of the conversation instead of
the person who kills the thread.