Untraditional Method for Business Marketing - By Claude Bourgoin

There is a new, untraditional way for reaching your target market. Online auctions have become so extremely popular that it's now become a great extention to your marketing initiatives. There's is a lot of talk about online auctions because people enjoy them, the variety of products and the buying and selling experience they offer, have made them some of the most visited sites on the web. For businesses, they offer all kinds of new possibilities, from the sales and inventory management perspective to marketing research and web site promotion.

Auctions get an estimated 70 million visitors a month. With all this traffic some promote their products in order to take advantage of this visibility to promote products a large group of targeted potential customers. Leveraging the auctions combined traffic to promote your product can give you more exposure than any single web site's traffic could, or even offline advertising at a price point that isn't available anywhere.

Among the first to realize the potential of auction were the computer and hardware vendors who quickly realized how to move obsolete inventory thought them.Today many offline stores realize that their unsold inventory is doing them no good collecting dust on their shelves, so it's an effective way to offer them to interested buyers, letting the buyer fix the selling price and generate the extra income from stale inventory that could, otherwise become a total loss.

From a marketing perspective some use auctions for new product price testing and testing sales copywriting efforts. It's an effective and inexpensive way to test new product prices is to see what people are willing to pay for a product offering what your new product promises. Some sell their product at three or four different online auctions, then calculate the average selling in order to determine the suggested selling price before launch of a new product. Similarly some test the copywriting to determine the best description and conversion potential.

In order to get started all is needed is an online auction store, allowing you to advertise your store with links back to your site and your product information page. You'll need well designed ads offering product details with all the proper images, effective copy writing and of course the proper use of keywords. This will allow you to position this auction post in front of the proper audience, leveraging the power of the auctions search own engine and driving more traffic to your site and generating interest for your product.

Online auctions were never intended to complement marketing and promotion efforts, they were created to move products and create value from the Internet.But over the years these sites have attracted so many buyers that they've become a great traffic generation tool for your web site, giving your products and your company more exposure and international visibility. In many cases, they won't replace your offline initiatives, but for a lot of products they are an excellent alternative to the traditional ways of moving inventory, gathering marketing information and generating visibility.

Author, Claude R. Bourgoin (MBA), is an auction seller and buyer as well as an online marketing consultant and internet consultant and contributing author for a site dedicated to providing quality online auctions.