As a home based business owner online you’re always looking for and thinking about innovative ways to drive traffic to your website so you can build your email list, increase your sales and profits and firmly establish yourself as a business entity to be dealt with on the web. One solution to your traffic problem is to hold an online auction from your website.
As the auctioneer you’ll be matching buyers with sellers with the merchandise going to the highest bidder. Or you could place all the items up for auction from your own inventory thereby excluding participation by other business owners on the web. Holding an auction from your home page offers many advantages to you, as the owner, and to your home business including these five benefits.
1. As we mentioned earlier an online auction will increase the number of new visitors to your website. You can create an e-book related to your home business theme and place it up for auction with the book going to the highest bidder. Your e-book would contain links to your website which would create back links to your business and the more books you auction off the more back links you create to your home page.
You can advertise your auction date on forums, in classified ads and on your own website. You can also write an article about online auctions and distribute it to the top article directories on the web with an ad mentioning the time and date of your bid fest.
2. Increase your traffic yet again by approaching other home business owners on the web and inviting them to participate by making some of their own products available for bidding. They could promote your auction to their email lists while your current customers and potential clients would be exposed to their merchandise containing links to their websites so people can check out their offers. This would be a win win situation for everyone involved including your website visitors.
3. By inviting high profile Internet marketers to participate in your auction by puting some of their merchandise up for bid you would be adding immensely to the credibility your home business.
Just by being associated with these professionals your visitors begin to view you as an expert in your field. This association creates or builds a feeling of trust and respect for you as an entrepreneur on the web and this new found trust and respect can only translate into more sales and higher profits for your home based business.
4. Because of the highly competitive atmosphere created by auctions, these events can create a feeling of community on your website which can increase the return rate of your previous visitors. You could add a forum to your home page for these people to communicate and develop relationships with one another which would give them an added reason for coming back. As we all know the more often someone visits your site the more likely they are to become a paying customer. This feeling of community can also create a very loyal customer base for your enterprise.
5. By asking people to provide their contact information, including their email address, in order to participate, you will be building your potential customer list which you can promote to at a later date.
So as you can see, holding an online auction can increase your targeted traffic as well as enhance your return rate, build your email list, increase your sales and profits and amplify your profile on the web as well as boost your home business’s credibility and standing within the Internet community.