Published on: 25 January 2019
Last Updated on: 09 August 2019
Auctioning is a popular way of selling and purchasing various items. But, what are the differences between online and offline auctions?
In the past, all auctions were conducted offline. The development of the internet has led to the rise of online auctioning platforms.
Companies that provide auctioning services have embraced modern methods while still keeping the traditional live auctions. To get an overview of the services provided by such companies, visit equifyauctions.com
Curation:
In offline auctions, experts examine and curate the items to be auctioned carefully. Customers can also inspect the items and even test them (if applicable) before the bidding process begins. This assists them in making informed decisions about the items placed for auction.
On the other hand, it is rarely possible to test an item on online auctioning platforms. Online auctions are also accessible to global audiences, whereas offline auctions are only available to locals and people living nearby.
Bidding:
To bid in offline auctions, you must be physically present. Conversely, online auctions only require internet access. This means that you can bid from anywhere provided you have access to the internet.
In this regard, online auctions have the upper hand over offline auctions because of the wide variety of items available. For instance, you can bid for a car in Britain while living in the US.
Bidding online has an advantage in that prices may be cheap if you are first to the auction. On the contrary, it can also be expensive to acquire a product when the bidders are several, given that many people find bidding over the internet to be convenient.
Payment:
In live auctions, payments are mostly made in cash. Since the buyer is likely to meet the seller one-on-one and you pay for what you see, issues regarding payments are very rare.
In online auctions, there are no guarantees overpayments. Issues arising from faulty items, and in severe cases, non-delivery, are likely to occur. However, there are some platforms with a credibility that use secure payment platforms. Such platforms also compensate you if the bought items do not meet the desired standard.
Trustworthiness:
Offline auctions are renowned for their utmost trust. Online auctions, on the other hand, have some work to do on this front. As mentioned above, the trust issues originate from payment and delivery.
Conclusion:
Online platforms have been cited by many as the future of auction. This could be the case, mainly because they are convenient and give you a broader audience. However, there are several challenges that need addressing. These include:
People will always have reservations about risking their money. This means that online auctions have to implement methods of safeguarding client funds.
There is a need for creating a means of verifying the existence of an item, clients should also be able to inspect the condition of the item before committing their funds.
That being said, you should thoroughly research a reputable auction house before buying or selling an item.
Content Rally wrapped around an online publication where you can publish your own intellectuals. It is a publishing platform designed to make great stories by content creators. This is your era, your place to be online. So come forward share your views, thoughts and ideas via Content Rally.
What can you sell online?
It is obvious, that you can sell anything online. But here, selling online means to sell a product with a decent profit margin. To become a successful Amazon seller you need to find the right product that has high demand; low competition; and many other characteristics. Once you select a product that has all these characteristics, you can see a decent profit selling them. In this article, some of the ways of finding the best products to sell on Amazon are explained along with some examples.
Table of Contents
Finding the best product
Manual methods of product research
Automated methods of product research
Popular and profitable products on Amazon
1. Finding the best product
There are many ways by which you can find a profitable product to sell. This process of analyzing the current trends in the market and ending up with a good product is known as product research. Product research can be done in two ways namely manual product research and automated product research. These processes are explained below.
2. Manual Product Research
This is the process of analyzing the current trends in the market manually through various strategies as follows.
Checking Amazon’s bestsellers list – Amazon has its own listings of thousands of products as bestsellers categorized based on their niches. You can just go to this list and check what are all the niches and products that sell well. You can also go through those product listings to find out the special features and characteristics of a product that attracts more customers. The product reviews under each bestselling product will be the bible for you to shape your own product. If you just look at the bestseller list, you will get to see the products with high competition. So, you can go through the sub-categories to find more specific products with high demand and low competition. You can get excellent product ideas from this.
Pinterest – Pinterest acts as a great platform for finding different product ideas. It may seem like a social media platform like Pinterest cannot help in developing product ideas. But it is very helpful in finding new products since millions of people are searching and uploading millions of pictures almost in all niches. You can just search your keyword and get thousands of product images to develop an idea from.
Contacting your suppliers - If you have traded on Amazon already or you have a product supplier with you, you can get much information on the current trends in your niche. He will provide details about the movement of specific goods and products in that niche. This may help you in developing a product idea that actually sells.
Spying on Competitors – Although it sounds like illegal activity, it is legal in terms of an online marketplace. You can look at the strategies used by your competitors; the keywords used by them; their customer service; and many more. You should not try to copy the exact strategies of your competitors since you may not have the same reach and capabilities of your giant competitors.
Lookout for bestselling products on eBay – You can get product ideas by looking at the trending products on other e-commerce sites like eBay.
3. Automated methods of Product Research
This includes the same processes of keyword research, competitor analysis, monthly search volume calculation, etc. But all the processes are automated using various free and paid tools available online. An example of automated product research is the use of Google trends. It helps to notify you of all the recent trends in the market along with various numbers and statistics.
4. Popular and profitable products on Amazon
Some products are there known as evergreen products that will definitely make more money. These are the products with low cost of production; high demand; and high-profit margin. Some of these evergreen products are listed below.
Books – Books are always a great product to sell online. Since the online market place is like an open library and the product is delivered directly to the residence of the customer, books are always high on sales. You can easily get books in bulk from any publishers and sell them online at your own price with a profit margin.
Accessories and apparels – Although this category is oversaturated with millions of sellers providing the same cosmetics; jewelry; clothes; and accessories, this niche is always evergreen. It is because of the everlasting need for apparel and accessories in modern society.
Toys and Games – Surprisingly, this niche is also one of the bestselling categories in the whole market place. Baby products and toys for both children as well as adults are another evergreen choice to be successful.
Electronics – Although it is an evergreen niche, only authorized brands will dominate this niche.
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The email marketing industry is expanding and there is growing competition between brands: they all want to get people’s attention. Sometimes, acquiring more subscribers seems hard. If you are looking to grow your email list, we have three easy ways maybe you never thought of. Whether you offer a service, product or content is the product, use these tips to add more subscribers to your database and become more successful at email marketing.
Why you should grow your email list
There are good reasons to build your email database. It can be an instantaneous way to reach the people who want to hear from you. Also, it’s cheaper than advertising or mass mailings.
Every marketer wants a large email list which is understandable. In general, the more people you reach, the better results and this has never been more true than with emails. The typical ROI for email is $42 for every $1 spent.
However, before you try any email list growth strategy, remember it’s not always about the numbers. You want true engagement and a long-term relationship with your audience. To build that, focus on adding real subscribers to your list – people who genuinely want to connect with your brand.
How do you do that? Let’s get into three ways to grow your email list without much effort.
Is it easy for someone to sign up?
Many organizations and freelancers have only one sign-up form and you’d be surprised how much you have to search the website to find that form.
So, the first tip: make your email sign-up visible and easy to find. For instance, you could place it at the top of your website and not buried down by the copyright notice. Also, avoid making the text so small that someone can’t read it. Instead, let your signup form be the first thing people see when they land on your platform.
Are you promoting your email list on your social media channels?
Maybe you’ve been working hard to gain followers on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. There’s certainly inherent value in this, but a lot of marketers make the mistake of not cross-promoting channels.
Who’s to say that someone can’t follow you on Facebook and be a subscriber to your email list? Just remember that people will frequently leave social media channels for one reason or another. You don’t want them forgetting about your brand and what you offer, so do your best to get them on your list.
Post periodically on social media and invite people to subscribe to your emails. Your newsletters’ content should have real value and be unique from your website or social media content. This is a great incentive to gain an email audience.
Plus, you can think outside the box to gain new followers. Maybe you can run a contest or offer a freebie, such as an e-book to anyone who signs up – whatever you think would entice your audience.
Do you include an email subscribe button in every email you send?
Word of mouth is the best marketing. If someone on your list really likes your email and forwards it on to a friend, they need an easy way to subscribe. A “subscribe” button makes it simple by saving them the trouble of looking you up, going to your website, and finding your form.
So, at the end of every email you send, include a call-to-action. It could be as simple as: “Did you get this email from a friend? Get yours” + “Subscribe” button. The more convenient you make it for people to subscribe, the faster your email list will grow!
Also, it doesn’t hurt to encourage your subscribers to forward your email. Some of them will do that and that’s a great way to grow your audience.
It’s not all about numbers
Now that we’ve gone over a few easy ways to grow your email list, it’s important to keep in mind that it’s not all about numbers. There is another aspect to growing your campaign: email list quality.
Gathering lots of subscribers is great for email marketing, but you have to make sure those subscribers are real. You may be asking, “Well, why wouldn’t they be?”
In the world of email marketing, there are quite a few types of emails that degrade your sender reputation. A sender reputation is a score that every email sender has. It’s the rating Internet Service Providers use to determine your behavior as an email sender.
Some of the factors that influence your sender score are:
your bounce rate
your overall engagement: open and click-through rates are vital metrics
the number of spam complaints and unsubscribes you get
Bad email addresses you could have in your list
All these factors are in direct connection with the quality of your email list. Unfortunately, every organization or marketer will acquire some bad email addresses over time. Some of the most damaging yet prevalent ones include:
Fake email addresses: for a number of reasons, people sometimes provide fake email addresses. Sometimes they just want to take advantage of a freebie and have no intention of being a subscriber.
Abuse emails: some people are malicious and others just careless. Abuse email owners have a habit of marking emails as spam, even those they signed up for. You don’t want these people on your list because they will hurt your sender reputation.
Temporary email addresses: would you believe there are websites that exist for the sole purpose of generating temporary emails? These email addresses are sometimes called disposable because the person uses them for a day or two and never again. Then, they only cause your bounce rate to go up.
On top of these, we can’t forget there’s always natural decay of the list. People simply change email addresses. Some people use their school or work email and they graduate or quit. You must get those email addresses off of your list.
Use an email verifier to keep your database clean
Thankfully, there is a healthy way to grow and maintain your list. The first thing is to never buy or trade email addresses to add to your list. First of all, it’s illegal to email people without their consent. Furthermore, a purchased list isn’t likely to result in anything positive and most likely the people you add will mark you as spam.
The simplest way to keep your list healthy is to:
The first clean it in bulk using an email verifier
then, install an email verification API on your sign-up forms.
Clean your list in bulk
If you already have a substantial number of contacts in your list, but are not sure about their validity, run your list through a bulk email verifier. The process is simple and doesn’t take much time: you upload your list into the system and get it back clean within hours or even minutes.
Install an email verification API
This simple piece of software checks every new email address in real-time. It grants permission to good emailers and keeps out any of the problematic accounts mentioned above. Once your list is clean, consider adding the API to all your sign-up forms to ensure it stays in good shape.
The sky’s the limit
You would be surprised what a difference email marketing makes. It’s the most personal way to reach people and is an incredible tool to communicate the story of your brand and service. Using careful planning, creativity and email verification tools you are on the right path to growing your email list and getting good results.
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Content marketing has been around for quite a long time, and it is the go-to marketing strategy for many businesses nowadays. But everybody uses it, and the results they get are more or less along the same lines…in terms of the time they take to materialize.
What if you’re looking to get better results from your content marketing endeavors? What if you want to do some smart work rather than hard work?
In this post, let’s take a look at some answers to this question.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is basically defined as the type of marketing that involves creating and publishing/distributing content to a certain audience. The purpose of distributing this type of content is to increase awareness of the product/services so that they can be sold more. While “content,” in this context, refers to the content of all types, mostly written stuff is utilized for marketing purposes.
This type of marketing takes different shapes and forms.
Some people can engage in content marketing by writing and publishing blogs regularly. Others can utilize their product pages as a medium to engage in marketing, i.e., by making the descriptions and the visuals, etc., appealing and attractive.
Actually, instead of mentioning them here somewhat haphazardly, let’s look at some of the content marketing methods in detail before moving on to the tips.
What Are Some Common Methods Of Content Marketing?
Here are a few of the common ways in which content marketing is employed.
Blogs: Blogs, especially when created by a professional writing service, have a key role that goes beyond just advertising products or services. Their main goal is to educate and engage readers. This approach helps grow a brand's readership and audience. By providing valuable and informative content, the brand naturally attracts more people. This isn't just a marketing strategy; it's about genuinely helping readers. As more people find the blogs helpful, they start to trust and follow the brand, leading to increased business opportunities. With the help of a blog writing agency such as Compose.ly, brands can consistently deliver high-quality content that connects with their audience.
Emails: Email marketing is technically a marketing strategy on its own, but since it almost always utilizes content of some sort, it can also be mentioned in content marketing. In an email marketing campaign, individuals are reached out separately by the brand. These emails can either inform the recipient about some sort of new product release, a sale or a special discount, etc.
Newsletters: Newsletters are technically emails, but they are not like other messages that are typically used and sent in an email marketing campaign. While the latter, for the most part, directly promote the offerings of a brand, newsletters are geared toward educating the readers. You can think about them to be a type of hybrid between a blog and a typical email marketing message.
E-books: While this one is a more elaborate step than what brands usually do, it is a good way to engage in content marketing.
Now, with all that out of the way, let’s take a look at some tips that you can follow to get better results from your content marketing endeavors.
Tips For Getting Better Results From Content Marketing
As we mentioned earlier, while content of all types can be employed in content marketing, written content is the most common…and perhaps the toughest to create. That is why our tips will be geared towards it in particular.
Don’t Write Like A Robot, And Don’t Write For Robots
In that rather wordsmith-is line, we’ve summed up one of the most important principles of writing online content.
Firstly, when you write content for marketing purposes, be it of whatever type and kind, you should make sure that your tone is friendly, communicative, and human-like. Mind you, there are exceptional cases where a totally opposite tone would be more suitable, but we are talking about the common cases here.
This is what we mean by not writing like a robot.
Here is what you can do to make your writing tone fall into this criterion. Of course, depending on the situation at hand, some of these tips may not be very applicable.
Try and refer to the reader as “you” and yourself as “I” or “we.” This is one of the basic and simplest ways to make your tone look more natural and human-like.
Since you have to make your written content look more like a conversation than a piece of written text, you should reduce your overall use of passive voice. People hardly use passive voice when they speak. I mean, I could have just said, “The passive voice is hardly used by people when they speak,” but I did just make my point.
Keep sentences short. Keeping your sentences short can also give a natural touch to your writing and make it more reader-friendly.
The second part of our tip was Don’t write for robots.
We should actually clear this up a little before moving on.
Nowadays, a lot of content marketing is done via search engines. When people write blogs, they channel them to their readers via search engines. The same goes for a lot of other types of content, like product descriptions and e-books, etc.
Now, in a bid to make their content look nice to the search engines, a lot of people can end up making it look too mechanical, erratic, and awkward for human taste.
Consider the following example:
We offer the best ramen in Tokyo. Our quality ramen store in Tokyo is very good. Buy quality ramen near me in Tokyo. (Note the atrocious keyword usage)
Good content? For the search engine, maybe. For the reader? It’s just gibberish.
You have to avoid doing this sort of stuff when writing content for your audience. You should strike a balance between making the content appealing for SEs as well as your human readers.
Do Proper Research…And Use It
When it comes to content marketing materials such as blogs and newsletters, your aim should be to provide reliable and educative content to your audience. This can only be done if you do proper research and then utilize it when writing the content itself.
In this part, let’s look at how you can do research properly and what benefits you can get from it.
Here are some things that you can do for effective research:
Look for popular and reliable sources on the internet. Before you start gleaning information from anywhere, you should establish its reliability first.
Once done, be sure to find out relevant facts and figures to add to your content. This tip is, of course, subjective. In some types of content, adding facts and figures may not be very suitable. However, it can be a good idea in things like blog posts, emails, and the like.
If you find yourself in a situation where you have to use some material from a source verbatim in its actual form.
(More important than implementing theoretical and conceptual information is the utilization of the data you get from audience research. In other words, you should conduct audience research and then use the details that you find to adjust your content as per the needs of the audience. When we say “audience research,” we basically refer to using analytical tools to find out necessary information and details about your audience, such as the details about their age, gender, location, and so on.)
Now let’s look at what benefits you can get by doing and incorporating research into your work.
Authority: When your content is backed with research, it comes off as authoritative. For example, when you present a stat for a certain situation or occurrence, it looks more grounded as compared to an opinionated guess.
Up-to-date information: Conducting research can also get you in touch with up-to-date information. By not researching your material before writing it, you can get stuck with old, outdated information that can neither help you nor your readers.
Value: When your content is based on research, it provides value to your readers. For problems, it can provide solutions. For choices, it can provide expert opinions.
This sort of content is a lot more potent in building a better readership and for growing your brand.
Aim For Content Perfection
Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.
Vince Lombardi
It’s a bit of a dramatic way to start off this heading, but it does make the point that we want.
No content is perfect because perfection (least of all in written content) is not achievable. But if you aim for the bullseye, you can land somewhere close to it.
That is why you should make all the effort possible to remove all types of imperfections from your content.
Grammar errors: Grammar errors are by far the most common and most harmful errors that you can make in your content. You should be proactive about avoiding such errors during the writing phase. And once you do write the content, you should take steps like proofreading the content and using an online grammar checker to weed out the remaining ones.
Clunky readability issues: Readability issues, such as confusing words, long-winded sentences, and weird phrase choices, can also adversely affect the quality of content. you can remove these types of imperfections from your content by using an online AI-driven paraphrasing tool. A good AI paraphraser can improve the readability of the provided content during the rephrasing process.
Plagiarism: Plagiarism is like the diamondback of content imperfections. You can’t spot it quickly enough, and it can kill the quality of your write-up without you realizing it. Removing this imperfection is necessary and tricky at the same time. The best way to go about it is to use an online plagiarism checker and then analyze the results to take the steps you need.
Conclusion
A lot of brands do content marketing nowadays. But, to bring yourself a cut above the others, you have to follow some best practices. We’ve outlined a few of those in the post above.
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