Removing the mystery from auction advertising

If you disregard the bidding process for a minute, auction ads are no more complicated than a normal web page or a classified ad. In fact, the process of someone finding your auction and placing a bid is exactly the same as someone finding your web page in a search engine and buying your product. Once you see the similarities, it gets a whole lot easier to drive traffic to your listing and make a sale.

Do you REALLY know what you are selling?

The process of driving traffic to your auction begins with understanding what you are selling, or what's called finding your USP (unique selling proposition). You might be saying "No duh", but sometimes we don't really understand what we are selling. Here's an example:

I have an October 6, 1958 issue of Life Magazine in fair condition. If I do a search on eBay using Life Magazine as my keywords, I find that there are 2762 open auctions (on the day that I checked). Yikes, how in the world am I ever going to compete against 2762 auctions?

What's worse, opening bids range from $1.99 to $5.00 and on the first 5 pages that I checked, not one auction had a bid! Guess I have a loser on my hands, right? Wrong. The title article in that issue is: "The TV Production Empire of Lucy and Desi." Could that be what I am really selling? Not the October 6, 1958 issue of Life Magazine, but a snapshot in time of the business empire of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez. Let's find out. Lucy is a bit more popular than Desi, so let's search on her first...

Well, there are 1108 open auctions. The opening bids are ranging in the $9 - $15 range, and several auctions have bids! This is looking better. But, just for curiosity sake, let's see what the demand is for Desi...

Hmmm, this is interesting. When I search for Desi Arnez, I get 53 open auctions. Auctions are active and I see bids ranging from $14 up to an amazing $495!

I think I've struck gold! I paid six cents for that magazine. It's 1958 cover price was 25 cents. Does that mean this magazine has depreciated in value since 1958? No, it simply means that I found fifty Life Magazines, tied in a bundle at a garage sale, and offered $2 for the whole bundle. They upped me to $3 and we had a deal. Obviously the sellers didn't know that they had a potential gold mine there. They may have even checked the price of old Life Magazines on eBay, like I did, and determined that there was no market for them. Good thing that they weren't smart enough to REALLY know what they were selling.

OK, so maybe I struck gold. Any chance I might strike Platinum as well? Flipping (gently) through the magazine, it quickly becomes apparent that it is chock-full of old time advertising. Really funny stuff sometimes. "You wouldn't dare be late serving dinner when your husband comes home from a hard day of work, would you?" kinds of ads, plus a whole lot of nostalgic ads that would appeal to the boomers that visit eBay.

Let's do some searching: "Vintage advertising" returns 5247 auctions. The price range is good, but that's a lot of competition to go up against. Let's try "Nostalgia", and its often-misspelled cousin, nostaglia.

Whoa! 8916 auctions with the keyword "Nostalgia", and a scant 31 for the most popular misspelling of "nostaglia". Let's put this information away in the back of our heads.

What else can I find of interest to bidders in this magazine? Well, there is a vintage Coca-Cola ad. Wow! Here's a full length story on the release of rnest Hemingway's "The old man and the sea" movie, due in theaters soon! Let's see what Ernest is worth. Hemingway is hot, 2356 auctions and prices all the way up to $4,318.

OK, I made my point. Make sure that you really know what it is you are selling. A simple item can have many faces and command different prices in different categories.

What to do with what you know

A lot of valuable information was discovered while I was on my quest for my USP. I got an idea of the categories that I might want to list my auction in, the competition that I'm going to come up against, the various price ranges that my product might sell for, and a lot of potential keywords.

Now it is time to plan my strategy.

Keywords First

Some people advocate writing your title first. That doesn't make sense to me. The default search condition on eBay is title only. The majority of searchers are going to use that option first. If they find what they are looking for, they may never do the more-complete "in titles & descriptions" search. If you fail to get your keywords into your title, then most people are not going to find your auction. So, let's decide upon the keywords.

I've decided that I want to use the following keywords:

• Lucille Ball
• Desi Arnez
• Ernest Hemingway
• Life Magazine

There are other keywords that I could use, but these will catch the eye of bidders who are interested in what I have to sell. Now that you know the keywords, it is...

Time to write the title

Of course you want to be descriptive, accurate, and concise when coming up with your titles which, seeing as how eBay limits you to 45 characters, is easier said than done. You need to spend some time thinking about your titles. You need to strike a balance between being specific enough so that buyers searching for your product can find it, and general enough so that people that are browsing will be interested as well.

Your title is your first and last chance to grab a bidder's attention. This is where the rubber meets the road. First off, you need to tell the bidder exactly what it is they are purchasing. In this example, Life Magazine.

Next, you need to get them excited about what comes with that magazine. Again, in this case, stories about Lucy & Desi and Ernest Hemingway

Don't waster characters with words like "cool," "awesome," "L@@K"), or excessive punctuation!!!!!!! No one searches on any of that, so it is a complete waste of space.

Start with too much

What works best for me is to write my title as if there are no character limits. This lets me express my product exactly as I want. Then with the sharp knife of a Classified Ad editor, I whittle the title down until it meets the requirements of the auction service that I am using. This takes time, but it is time well spent.

Let's have a go at it:

Lucille Ball & Desi Arnez, the early days PLUS Ernest Hemingway's new movie. 1958 Life Magazine tells all.

That's 106 characters including spaces and punctuation. We have to chop off 61 characters! Let's get started.

Cutting out the phrase "the early days" drops us down to 91 characters. It's a start, but we need to keep chopping.

We can lose the word "PLUS" and we're down to 86. Let's see what our title looks like now:

Lucille Ball & Desi Arnez, Ernest Hemingway's new movie. 1958 Life Magazine tells all.

OK, not bad. We're getting there and we're still telling the story that we want to tell. Let's try losing "Ernest". Anyone searching for Ernest Hemingway is surely going to include his last name, so we don't need the first one. The only false hit that this is likely to generate is when people are searching for Mariel or Margaux Hemingway, his granddaughters. Now we are down to 79 characters, and our title look like this:

Lucille Ball & Desi Arnez, Hemingway's new movie. 1958 Life Magazine tells all.

I think we can safely chop off the "tells all" phrase although I LOVE it. It wreaks of Tabloid sensationalism. This gets us down to 70 characters with 25 left to chop. Hmmm, now it's getting harder. Let's think...

I got it. Anyone searching for Desi Arnez will enter the word Desi, right? Since I don't know of any other famous Desi, we can lose "Arnez" and get down to 63 characters with 18 left to go. Sharpen that knife and let's continue.

Lucille Ball & Desi, Hemingway's new movie. 1958 Life Magazine.

If we chop off "new movie", then we are left with a title that is actually a bit intriguing, PLUS we're down to 51 characters! Take a look:

Lucille Ball & Desi, Hemingway. 1958 Life Magazine.

Let's clean it up a little. We can drop the "," between "Desi" and "Hemmingway". While it isn't correct grammar, it won't hurt searching and people will still know what you mean when they read it. Likewise, the "." after "Hemmingway" and "Magazine" can go for the same reason. Now we are down to 48 characters with 3 more to go.

Lucille Ball Desi & Hemingway 1958 Life Magazine

Now we have to have a really sharp knife. Where can we whittle away 2 characters and still keep our title intact with the keywords that we want?

I got it! Let's try this:

Lucille Ball Desi & Hemingway 1958 Life Mag

Bingo! 43 characters! But let's make sure that we didn't hurt ourselves. I'll pop up to eBay and see what happens when I type "Life mag". Well, that brings me up 340 auctions, but it loses all of the categories, and additional auctions that come up when I type "Life Magazine". Hmmm, what to do. Let's see. The chances are rare that someone will search specifically for 1958 Life Magazine unless, of course, they are looking for a birthday present for someone born in that year. Let's try this:

Lucille Ball Desi & Hemingway Life Magazine

Still 43 characters. Look like we've got a winner. My point in the above exercise was to show you how important it is to test your title changes against reality. What might look good to you could possibly cost you a lot in lost search opportunities.

You might remember that I said I wanted to use these keywords:

• Lucille Ball
• Desi Arnez
• Ernest Hemingway
• Life Magazine

Well, with a little bit of editing magic, I've accomplished that goal. If you go through the exact same process when planning your auctions, you will always create the best title possible.