Do you like competing with people selling similar products on eBay?
Do you enjoy participating in price wars?
Do you like having to reduce your prices daily just to remain competitive on eBay?
Answering “Yes” to any of these questions means this article is not for you. But if you fancy moving away from the cutthroat competition that typifies selling on eBay & Co., then what follows will help you to do just that.
Introducing ‘Mass Audience Domination’…
What you’ll hear about now is an easy, and low-cost (sometimes even no-cost) way to encourage hundreds or thousands, potentially even millions, of potential bidders and buyers to study your products to the exclusion of whatever anyone else is selling.
I call this my “Mass Audience Domination Theory” and it involves finding crowds of people desperate to buy whatever you are selling and who won’t want to shop around to find any other suppliers.
Before I explain, you’ll be aware that you can find millions of potential buyers directly through eBay, or Amazon, or Etsy et al. “Directly” being the operative word, because, for this method, we’re not going to target buyers directly on eBay or Amazon, Etsy or elsewhere, for one main reason:
Targeting potential buyers directly through the search function at your chosen marketplace means sharing your visitors with other sellers!
For example: key “computer” into the search box at eBay.co.uk and see how many listings are returned…
… the answer is 134,925 and almost certainly hundreds of different sellers!
Key in “dog kennel” and you’ll receive 4,808 potential sellers.
Try “teddy bear” and as a seller you’ll be up against 87,872 current listings from many hundreds of different traders.
What we want is for our product to be the only one that presents itself to hundreds of thousands, or many more potential buyers and for those people to want our product so badly they rush to buy it right away!
How do we do that? And where does the Mass Audience Domination Theory come into play?
Well, my first encounter with the Mass Audience Domination Theory (I should trademark that name) – let’s call it MAD for short – came when I answered a question in a money-making forum and within two days had more than 2,000 people sign up to my newsletter for more information about a product mentioned in the signature file after the posting.
I didn’t make money from that traffic, I didn’t expect my posting to be so popular and I hadn’t set up my newsletter to promote the product. But doing the same thing today I’d make sure my signature file included links to a product some of those people might buy and make myself some money in the process.
And that’s where the crux of this money-making idea lies, namely in targeting a massive market of people with a very strong and shared passion for whatever it is you are selling. Then, even if only a tiny percentage of those people purchase your product, you’re bound to make money… but, only if your target market is immense and potentially unlimited, and only if the lowest possible positive response rate (number of visitors to your product who ultimately make a purchase) still generates profits for you.
So if, for example, your market comprises 1,000 people of which just 1% buy your product, you’re unlikely to get rich on a product costing just a tenner and netting you a measly few pounds profit.
But if your marketplace comprises 2 million potential buyers, as for some national daily newspapers (hint, hint!), that 1% response rate for a £2 profit margin product would net you 20,000 buyers and a very nice payday indeed!
So we’re not just looking at response rates, or profit margins, we’re looking to find the largest markets possible for whatever products we’re already selling or could introduce to our business in future. Then we test our market and, if we manage to secure that teeny-weeny 1% response rate, or better still, a much higher figure, you could say the world is our oyster. That’s because once you have one huge product-hungry audience making money for you, you can look for another major market, and another, and another.
And, because we’ll be targeting potential buyers outside our main marketplace – eBay, Amazon, Etsy, etc. – our readers will be taken to our listings without spotting other people selling similar products, and there’s every chance they’ll place an order right away.
Among the many ways to make the MAD theory work, I discovered the easiest and most profitable method was to place small classified ads in niche market offline publications and use them to direct potential buyers to my eBay listings. My most profitable example is a very small advertisement I place in an animal charity magazine directing people to my eBay listings for a book about helping people live with epileptic dogs.
Here is another reason I know this idea works based on a conversation with a publishing friend more than seven years ago. He said something like this:
“I have a book about starting your own courier business. I’m selling it on eBay. But until a few weeks ago I only sold about 10 copies each week because so many other people are selling similar titles on eBay. So many of us in fact we were all constantly reducing our prices to sell as many copies as possible but still I never exceeded one or two sales each day.”
That was until he placed an advertisement for his book in a, then leading, business opportunities magazine and directed readers to his eBay shop to make their purchase. Which more than 100 people did every month, presumably without ever checking others selling similar books at the site.
Within weeks our man added more books and other products to his range and started selling his goods in other marketplaces, including ClickBank and Amazon, as well as from his own websites and blogs… with every single product promoted to a mass audience independent of the websites in question and with most of his promotions taking place through classified ads in offline publications!
So he sells dog kennels on eBay through small classified ads in pet publications; he sells collectibles from his own websites via press releases and readers’ letters to collectors’ magazines; he markets countless other products through classified ads in niche market magazines, and from postings in niche market forums, guest articles at other people’s blogs, by writing and submitting product reviews to major article directories, and much more besides.
His secret (or rather, secrets):
#1 – Make sure your target market is enormous.
You don’t want to place your advertisement, or send your press release to a newsletter having 200 readers when there’s another boasting millions. You should not guest blog for someone with 20 irregular readers, when another blog on a similar theme has thousands of people visiting daily. You probably won’t want to write product reviews or place helpful postings in forums with 10 or 20 members who visit two or three times a month, when there’s another forum with thousands of members, most of whom visit daily.
#2 – Make sure your product relates to regular features in magazines hosting your ads, or to questions asked and problems revealed in forums and blogs, to articles attracting the most readers at article directories, and so on. So, for example, you need to promote items you know your audience is interested in and you’ll know this because a particular subject is mentioned in every issue of your target magazine or there are plenty of people already placing ads for those products.
Once you mix a massive market with definite interest in your product, you’re on to a winner. And because people are eager to buy they’ll very often buy from you rather than look for other people selling similar products on eBay or Amazon, for example, or by Googling for sites similar to yours.
That’s because they’ve read your articles and trust your product reviews, or because your advertisement appears in every issue which suggests that it’s working and people are buying and liking your product.
Making the mass audience domination theory work for you
There are millions, literally millions of ways to make this idea work for you, so I’ll give you just a few of my own ideas from which you can change the product, or the marketplace for your product, as well as the method of attracting countless hungry buyers for your products. Starting with:
» Almost every popular interest has its own special publication usually offering advertising space. They’re called “niche market publications” which, even if readership is low compared to national daily newspapers, have readers that are 100% interested in goods and services relating to their shared interest. This means response rates to advertisements in niche market publications can be many times higher than promotions in publications targeting people with no obvious shared interest.
When you find newspapers and other publications read by a large number of potential buyers for your product, contact the advertising department and ask for a couple of past issues, say you’re considering placing an advertisement. When they arrive, study the kind of goods and services others are promoting and seek similarly themed products to advertise such as dog kennels and eyelash-thickening mascara, for example, where several ads already exist for those product’s in your target magazines. But make your products superior, because your kennels are made from quality wood where others are cobbled together from leftover timber, for instance, or your before and after pictures show your mascara really does make lashes look much longer and thicker than rival products.
Find niche markets, and general markets also, in the following guides available in most local libraries – look for readership figures after each listing and request sample issues from those with the highest reader numbers:
* Willings Press Guide
* Benn’s Media Directory
Article directories are perfect for placing book and product reviews with resource boxes leading direct to your eBay product listing or other marketplace. So you can use articles to promote products you’re selling on eBay and Amazon, Etsy and any other marketplace on and off the Internet. But be sure to upload your reviews just once, to avoid duplicate content which, as we know, is penalised by the search engines.
Currently, most people agree the leading article directory is Ezine Articles
Those are just a few ways to reach massive niche markets desperate for whatever products you are already selling, on eBay and elsewhere, or for whatever new products you source for the future.