Five Tips for Selling at Live Auctions

Ah, the old-fashioned country auction! The idea of a country auction conjures up certain images for people. The image of a fast-talking auctioneer offering up an antique table or chair is a popular example.

People who are buying household goods or collectibles are looking to get their items at the lowest price possible. However, the people who are selling their items at auction are hoping for the highest price!

Unless a person is in the business of buying and selling antiques or other items, not a lot of thought goes into how goods are prepared for sale via the auction process. However, if you are one of the growing number of people using auction venues to sell your collectibles or other inventory, there are a few things to learn first about how to sell at auction before you bring a truckload of stuff over to the next event.

Tip 1: Make sure the things you want to sell are a good “fit” for the auction house you’ll be using.

Never bring a load to an auction house without actually having been to one of the previous auctions. It’s important to get a feel for the type of goods that the house sells. For example, at one very rural country auction it was common for the owners to sell live chickens, pots and pans, car parts, and farm equipment.

After close investigation, this would not be the right venue for selling your daughter’s “Hello Kitty” collection. On the other hand, the spare John Deere parts that you bought at last week’s yard sale might be just the right thing for the buying crowd at this auction.

Tip 2: Be sure you clearly understand the terms and policies of the auction house.

Visit with the auctioneer ahead of time. Call to find out what the best days and times are to visit. One of the worst possible times to drop in for an informational visit with an auctioneer is the day of the auction. Call ahead and ask. While you’re at it, find out what are the best days and times to drop your stuff off.

Once you have a little time with the auctioneer, you’ll be able to find out what type of commission he or she takes from consigners (which is you), and what type of paperwork might be needed. Some auction houses send out Form 1099 tax forms at the end of the year. An auctioneer may need to see your identification and have you fill out a W-9. Be prepared.

Find out what happens to your items if they don’t sell. For example, some auctioneers may have a minimum starting bid. If, for some reason, one of your items does not sell, it may be grouped with another one of your pieces. Know the auctioneer’s strategy beforehand so that you aren’t surprised on pay day.

Tip 3: Make sure the auctioneer knows what you’re selling.

It might be perfectly obvious to you that the signed print you are consigning is a rare and valuable piece of art. However, the auctioneer may not know this particular artist. Make a note of anything particularly special about your items, and leave the note with the piece. Be sure to tell the auctioneer about it as well. He or she might determine that this is something to highlight on the company website or in the newspaper listing.

Tip 4: Present your items neatly.

No one likes to have to dig through a box full of grimy and greasy car parts to see what treasures might be in there. Separate the parts and lay them out on a flat, or use more than one box to de-clutter the lot.

There is no need to buy fancy display boxes. It’s easy enough to go to the local convenience store or supermarket and ask if you can have the emptied boxes or flats that they are discarding.

While it’s good to present clean items, take care not to ruin the value of anything by over cleaning. For example, if you find some old cast iron cookware, clean the obvious dirt and grime, but don’t scrub it to its original finish. For many people, this ruins the value of the item. So, clean and tidy and organized is the key here.

Tip 5: Don’t complain to the auctioneer if your stuff doesn’t sell for as much as you’d like.

The phrase to remember here is, “You win some; you lose some.” That’s just the way it is. There are some days where an auction house is loaded with people who all seem to want what you’re selling. There will be other days where the crowd is sparse, and the bidding is simply not competitive.

Remember that it’s in the auctioneer’s best interest to sell your things for the highest possible hammer price. But sometimes, it’s just not going to be a stellar sale. The auctioneer is only human, and is also disappointed if a sale doesn’t go as well as planned.

If you notice that every time you bring a bunch of goods to sell that you’re not realizing as much as you think you honestly should, try another auction venue and compare apples to apples. That is, bring the same types of items to the new auctioneer and compare the results.

Unless the auctioneer is particularly disagreeable or inconsiderate to you or buyers, there is no reason to confront him or her about a sale. If you find you just don’t care for an auctioneer’s style or methods, find another one. Believe me, there are plenty of them out there!

The primary thing to remember as you learn how to sell at auction is that the business is unpredictable at best. You will have good days, some not-so-good days, some great days. The more you sell, the more experience you will gain, and the more enjoyable the business will be.

How to Start Your Own eBay Home Based Business

Have you finally decided to start your own home based eBay business? If yes then you have actually made a great decision which you will soon start reaping the benefits. As you make your plan to start your own eBay home based business, there are some important tips that will serve as a guide that I will reveal to you as far as eBay is concerned.1. Make your Plan to Sell: making the right plan for selling on eBay should be the first thing you should do before attempting to make any money on eBay. You do not have to be a professional to start an eBay home based business or a specialist in something else before you will be qualified to sell on eBay. Also you do not have to have a product of your own before making it on eBay.2. Concentrate on a Particular Niche: note that if you really want to be successful, then you need to concentrate on a particular product especially as you are a new comer starting an eBay home based business. If possible look for a niche that it less competitive and which is not popular. If you do this then it will enable more customers to rely on you for the long term. If you are the type that constantly changes from one product to the other then you will not get loyal customers with your eBay home based business.3. Sell Things you can buy: when you are contemplating on what to sell on eBay home based business, it will be very wise to think about those things which you can buy as well. It has been a fact that it becomes easier to sell what you can buy and what you use yourself, because at last it will give you the interest to do proper research on the product online.4. Ask People: when you have employed the above method and they don’t work out, then you can go further by getting advice from people such as friends and family members. You may be lucky that they may have an idea about something you could market with your eBay home based business.5. Sell Rejected Items: you can start making money if you start by selling those things which you no longer need, that is items you have upgraded or you just want to clear clutter. Selling such items online may enable you to realize a reasonable profit within a short period of time.6. No Personal Inventory is required: making money on eBay does not actually require that you must have a product that was produced by you. Most of those who deal on eBay home based business and who are making huge profits do not sell items they produce, but rather they market other people’s products. They make this possible by selling through eBay online stores.I believe anyone that has the desire to take action can make a full time income with their own eBay home based business.

Attract Sponsors and Advertisers

This article examines sponsorships and advertising as methods for making cost breakthroughs and generating extra revenues. Let’s start with sponsorships.

What do I mean by a sponsorship? It is any way to combine recognition with providing access to desirable prospects and customers for someone who, or an organization that, makes a payment or otherwise subsidizes an activity. Sponsorships are more important than ever because they help marketers avoid being lost in advertising clutter by providing higher visibility and prestige to the sponsor. When a sponsor pays you, that’s income to offset costs you cannot otherwise reduce. The effect is similar to simply reducing costs.

As the primary benefit, sponsors are usually looking for access to attractive prospects for their offerings. In many cases, your prospects and customers are also highly appealing for other companies and nonprofit organizations, making them interested in sponsoring your activities.

You may have observed some of the ways such access is provided while attending a sponsored conference or seminar. Typically, the sponsors have a chance to speak briefly to the assembled group and to have lots of marketing people present for mingling during meals and breaks. There may also be banners on the walls and notices in the printed program carrying sponsors’ names and logos. On the event invitations, there are probably mentions of the sponsors. Publicity for the activity probably includes listing sponsors by name, as well.

Under such circumstances, it’s not unusual for the sponsors’ fees to cover more than the total costs of the conference or seminar so that all attendance fees contribute profits for the conference or seminar organizer.

You may not be holding conferences or seminars. How, then, can sponsorships cover some or all of your costs? Well, you can provide online services or material that can be downloaded for little or no cost from the Internet. Such an online site can also have sponsors whose identities are prominently displayed.

You can also develop offerings that sponsors purchase. As an example, a sponsor might provide your offering as a gift to those who buy their products or services. During times of high gasoline prices, for instance, some dealers in the United States have offered hundreds of gallons of free gas for people who bought new vehicles that didn’t get very good mileage.

A sponsor might also provide marketing access for other organizations. In our community, some charities play this role by selling inexpensive books of discount coupons. The charities keep the proceeds from the book sales, after obtaining the books for free from the publishers. The companies providing the coupons pay the publisher to appear in the book. Those who buy the books save lots of money by using the discount coupons. Through the coupons, coupon providers introduce new prospects to their offerings and bring some customers back more often.

In other cases, almost all offerings will be sold to sponsors who, in turn, directly provide the offerings to their prospects and customers. For instance, golf tournaments are often staged to provide funds for charity. Sponsors are given access to special venues at the tournaments and provided with most of the tickets for the events to distribute to customers and prospects. Sponsors also receive lots of visibility in the event’s promotions. The prestige of sponsorship is increased over the company conducting such an event just for itself by improving the quality of the competing golfers, the amount of media coverage, and the number of attendees.

In another variation, a sponsor may be a supplier seeking recognition that provides a lower price for its offerings in exchange for the sponsorship. An example can be found on the computer I am using to prepare this lesson. The machine has a seal on it that says “Intel Core™ Duo inside™,” indicating what brand and kind of microprocessor I have. In exchange for this recognition, Intel slices its microprocessor prices by about 5 percent to its computer-manufacturer customers.

Another way sponsorships are structured is through paying for “objective” measurements and rankings. Those who want to be evaluated pay a fee, which pays for the ranking process. The organization making the rankings distributes awards among those who sponsored the contest. The winners use the results to tout their superiority over competitors in press releases, interviews, and advertising.

You may not have thought much about how your marketing activities and offerings could benefit from encouraging sponsorships. Now is a good time to remove such blinders. Companies are more interested than ever before in sponsorships to replace more expensive and less productive marketing programs. You can cash in to make cost breakthroughs when you help such organizations to meet their needs through helpful sponsorships of your high-quality activities and offerings.

Now, how is advertising different from a sponsorship? Where a sponsor obtains recognition for making an activity or offering possible along with privileged access to prospects and customers in exchange for a payment, advertisers are solely purchasing the right to put their commercial messages in front of prospects through some form of media that you provide.

We’ve all seen television advertising. At regular intervals in the regular programming, short commercial messages are inserted. Companies pay large fees for such time slots in addition to covering their own costs for producing the messages. The fee paid relates to the number of people who will see the message and their potential value as customers for the advertiser.

The same concept generally applies to magazines and newspapers. All or part of a printed page offers the opportunity to attract the eyes of readers. Because the whole publication may not be read, the assumed benefit is considered to be less than the overall readership. In addition, television advertising provides the opportunity to create more emotion… which, in turn, can be translated into making a bigger and more lasting impression with more people.

Advertising is also sold for placement on commercial vehicles such as taxis and trucks. More recently, some companies have been paying to display advertising on personal vehicles. Such exposure is often cheaper than renting billboard space and may offend fewer people who are concerned about cluttering the sides of roads.

With the advent of the Internet, advertising possibilities expanded. Initially, advertisers were encouraged to buy so-called banner ads that took up a big space near the top of the screen and said little. Most advertisers found that such ads weren’t worth much in terms of adding profitable sales.

Yahoo, Google, and others found that carrying commercial messages with some relevance to those reading the online page worked better for encouraging purchases from advertisers. Rather than advertisers paying to reach people who merely see the ad, payments for such ads are tied to how many people click on the ad to reach a site where there is a more extensive commercial message or an offering can be purchased. This media approach was intended to be similar to paying for attracting someone to a store where he or she could buy an offering. Accomplishing the latter was worth quite a lot more than simply exposing the name and offering of the advertiser to more eyeballs.

Through Web 2.0, Web sites can become communities where people spend many hours a day. On such sites, the advertising revenues can be a vast multiple of the cost of providing the site… assuming that enough visitors are attracted who post and view videos and photos, exchange opinions, share ideas, and interact in other ways. As an example, a student of mine developed a very sophisticated social networking site of this sort for families at a software cost of less than $3,000, yet the advertising potential of her site was several million dollars a year.

If you don’t have such a site now, you can inexpensively develop one that can become a major source of cost-reducing advertising revenue by using software designers and programmers who are based where pay rates are inexpensive. While working on the site, you can speak with your developers at no cost over Skype or another Voice-over-Internet-Protocol service. Naturally, you can have as many sites as you want… as long as each one serves a different purpose and attracts enough visitors to more than cover its costs through advertising revenues.

If you hold gatherings of customers and prospects and don’t have sponsors for such gatherings, you can also sell advertising to place on the materials that you share with attendees. In many cases, your advertisers will also market your gathering to their prospects and customers, and you may attract a lot more potential customers to attend. When that happens, you gain direct cost savings for your marketing in addition to the advertising subsidy.

You can provide videos on your Web site as well and sell time slots on such videos to advertisers. Such online advertising opportunities have become popular with truck and automobile manufacturers.

You can also put advertising on your buildings, your packages, and anyplace else where customers and prospects may see the messages. Your suppliers, for instance, may want to be recognized on your final offering in some way (even placing their logos on a Web page may be of interest) as Intel does with its “Intel inside™” stickers on personal computers and laptops.

The sky’s the limit for attracting advertisers. You should realize that when print media were more popular, publishers regularly earned a profit on their entire operations just from the advertising revenues. The subscription revenues, by comparison, were usually quite small… just a tiny fraction of total profits.

Can you provide both sponsorships and advertising? Yes, as long as you keep them separate. A sponsored event usually shouldn’t include advertising from those who aren’t sponsors, but Web sites can offer a combination of sponsor recognition and pay-per-click ads from organizations that don’t compete with sponsors. Some magazines have been following this dual course for a long time. Fortune, BusinessWeek, and Forbes, for instance, carry lots of ads for offerings and sell sponsorships to gatherings that senior executives pay to attend. Such gatherings are potentially quite profitable.

What’s the key cost-reducing point about sponsorships and advertising? You can use zero-based analysis to create 2,000 percent cost-reduction solutions that allow you to gain new sources of revenue from sponsorships and advertising to support the minimum core offering by offsetting costs for you and your stakeholders in ways that will almost instantly expand profits after implementation to help reduce costs by more than 96 percent or increase social benefits by more than twenty times what you will be spending.