Self Promotion For the New Seller:

      Using Forums to Guide Traffic

     Recently, many large companies 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 companies 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 ebay.
     
     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 ebay 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 competitiors) 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 Comic 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 Comic Con,"  in three comic forums and I didn't even have to be the one who posted, "I saw this on Ebay."
    
     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.