Do's 'n Don'ts for an Effective Bonanza

"Bonanza? I thought this site was named Bonanzle."

Yea, it is. A Bonanza is what you can do on Bonanzle. Here's a brief description from the Bonanza topic page:  "What's a Bonanza? Only the greatest invention since the electric toothbrush. A Bonanzas is a brief (1-3 hour) sale on some or all of your items, where you wheel and deal (in real time, if the seller is logged in) to sell as many items as possible in the least time possible.

Setup a Bonanza and we'll drive as much customer traffic as we can (through the home page and buy page) to your booth for the period of time your Bonanza is running. It's the quickest way on the Internet to rid yourself of old iPods, handblown glass candleholders, and Gibson guitars. It's like holding a garage sale in Central Park on a July weekend."

So, a Bonanza can help market your items? Oh, yea! A Bonanza is a great sales tool for Bonanzle sellers, but just like any other sales tool, there are tips and tricks to using it effectively. Simply scheduling your Bonanza, sitting back and waiting for buyers to come is truly not the most effective way to ensure success. However, there are many things you can do to increase your chances for a successful Bonanza. Here are a few do's and don'ts for an effective Bonanza.

Don’t... schedule your bonanza in your booth settings too early. Why? Buyer mentality comes into play. Here’s the scenario: a potential buyer may be browsing your booth, and might see that “must have, can’t live without, must have it now” item. The sale is about to happen…YES! Then, the buyer sees that you have a Bonanza scheduled for Wednesday of next week. Of course, the potential buyer wants to wait and get the discount!  Two things can happen – (1) Wednesday comes along, the buyer is busy, doesn’t get to your booth during the Bonanza and you miss out on a possible sale. Basically, you lost out because the buyer didn’t click on the “Buy Now” button while he was in your Booth browsing.  (2)  Your seller sees the Bonanza and decides to wait until the sale where you have offered 40% off on that $100 item. Maybe you still make the sale, but if the item was reasonably priced, maybe it might have been purchased any other day of the week by somebody for $60.

Create or edit your Bonanza through My Bonanzle

Do... use people power. The Bonanzle Forums are a great way to market your sale. Starting a promotion thread in the Promote Your Booth section of the forums about 20 – 40 minutes or so before your Bonanza starts is a great way to get the word out to the Bonanzle community.

Don’t... miss your own Bonanza. With the hectic lives that everybody has these days, it would be understandable if you forgot your own Bonanza date. But, it would not be a good thing. You don't necessarily have to interact with everybody who enters your booth, but when a buyer has a question and asks it, they rather expect you to be there. You would not want to miss that great offer on one of your items, would you?

Do... market your Bonanza. How many email addresses do you have? Past clients from all of your selling venues, friends, family, etc provide you with a great marketing opportunity. Send out an email the night before or the morning of your Bonanza touting the wonderful items and awesome sale you are about to have. Include the date, time, and link to your booth. You may want to add a note at the bottom of the email allowing recipients to “opt out” of any future mailings. Change your email signature the evening before to include this information and a link to your booth. Ask them to forward your email to some of their friends.

Do... use Twitter effectively. Tweet your Bonanza an hour or so before it is to happen and ask your friends to “re-tweet” it for you. A great strategy is to team up with “twitter buddies” and have them wait about 20 minutes until they re-tweet, and keep going in that manner having other people re-tweet your sale for you. This way you can keep reaching a variety of people throughout the time period of your Bonanza. If you include “X% off” or “sale”, and you are following cheaptweet on twitter, it will pick up your tweet, and list it on the main cheaptweet page.

Put a notice as a listing in your Booth

Do... be in your booth ready and willing to answer questions, help with the checkout process, and give shipping quotes where needed. Be sure you have been through the checkout process yourself and understand it completely.

Once you are ready to have your own Bonanza, start by going to your My Bonanzle settings and clicking on Edit Bonanza (under Booth Management). From there, you can pick the items you want to place on sale (or pick your entire booth), pick a date/time, and pick a discount level to schedule your sale. Weekends are recommended, but you can pick any day of the week by entering the date directly into the calendar.

Be creative! Think of ways you can let others know you are having a sale. Think outside the box, and with just a little extra work, you can increase your chances immensely of having a profitable and fun Bonanza!

Submitted by Phaedra Stockstill (attheboutique)

Edited by Tom

Don't forget to check out the other BOP articles at www.bonanzle.com/bop

There's More Than One Way to Get Noticed

The experiences of starting and running several small businesses online can definitely be a revelation in many ways. Blogging, linking, sending out newsletters, designing a website... Here are some experiences that might be helpful to those thinking about starting a small business or and helpful to those Bonanzlers who already have started.  When someone asks, "Who's your webmaster?" tell him or her "I guess I am! " 

You don't have to shout to get noticed...  use one of these tips instead

•     Visit and comment on other people's blogs. Make your comments meaningful - not just "Hi, I agree."  Leave your business name or link to your Bonanzle booth or your website URL.  Start by doing a search by doing a Google search for "small business blog" or "rural business blog".  You will find hundreds of blogs, including plenty by fellow Bonanzlers. Of course, those Bonanzle bloggers already know about Bonanzle. Therefore, there will be a bigger payoff for you if you leave responses on blogs where people do not already know about Bonanzle.

•     Find sites that have Top 100 lists of website like yours. For example, "Top 100 Craft Sites", "Top Wood Working Sites", and "Top 100 Jewelry Sites" would be great sites for sellers who deal in craft items. Get on their lists. See if they share links, reciprocal links, etc.

•     Google Base, Google Base, Google Base!  Submit your Bonanzle listings to Google Base (combined with adding item traits/attributes to your listings) and watch your business traffic increase. Your listings will show up in Google search results when shoppers use Google to search for an item. Talk about Internet presence! This is the #1 thing you should do if you want to be seen on the Internet. Oh yeah, one more thing... Google Base!

•     Get listed in the Yahoo! Local business finder. List your business in online yellow pages. Search Google for "free business directory". There are plenty to choose from. If permitted, upload a logo or photo to go with your directory listing. Put a link to your Bonanzle booth on your webpage. Find local websites that allow you to add your business to their directories.

•     Consider advertising in your local newspaper to target local shoppers. Many newspapers also have free (or cheap) online business directories.

•     Offer coupons for your business at sites like merchantcircle.com, googleocity.com or tjoos.com. They are easy to set up, fast and painless.

•     Send out a newsletter to friends and family with plenty of links to your store. Tell them they can forward to whomever they like.

•     Add your Bonanzle booth URL to your handouts at trade shows and make sure that it's printed on your business cards. It's relatively cheap and easy to do.

•     Start a blog and link back to your webpages. Create links to others, as well. Also, ask your friends to link to you if they have a blog or homepage for business or pleasure.

•     Sign up for Google Analytics and add your Bonanzle booth to this service. It takes a Google Gmail account and some technical no-how, but worth the extra effort to see how the effect of linking and if your Internet presence is paying dividends. Maps and charts help you figure out when and where others see you, and who is watching. Of course, if you are a Bonanzle Plus or Premiere member, this is a FREE benefit available to you.

Promotion and the Art of Sales

 Sales: the act of exchanging items for money.

There, that's plain and simple. Easy to understand. Nevertheless, it is sometimes easier said than done. So, what can you do to improve YOUR sales? Let's start with the obvious:

1. Have good, well-priced products. A wide variety of items increase the chance that you have something that somebody wants.

2. Present your products with good descriptions, good titles in the listings, and good photographs. Items that look good do sell better than those with bad descriptions and bad photos.

3. Promote the products and your Booth. (Psst...promote where the buyers are)

4. Rake in the dough.

Well, that sounds simple enough. If you can handle #1 and #4, we will concentrate on helping you with #2 and #3 over the course of this series.

Titles and Descriptions - The Key(words) to Sales

1) A lot of prospective buyers search ONLY titles when shopping, so give some thought to your listing's title. If you were looking for your own product, what would you type into a search box? Keywords are very important in your listing title and in your description of the item. When writing these, make sure to include words that buyers would use to search for your items. A keyword is a word that forms all or part of a search engine query--the word or phrase that Internet users type in a search box when they are seeking information in a search engine. The more a user matches words in the search to your title/description, the higher up your item is displayed in the search results.

In the description of the item, include additional text that would describe your item, since many search engines also search more than the title of the item.  In fact, Google will even help you generate keywords by suggesting keywords to use based on words or phrases you enter. Try THIS website for Google help: 

2) Consider putting attributes (currently invisible to viewers, searchable on Google) into your descriptions. Use keywords throughout your description (especially if you're using stock descriptions that a drop ship company or other supplier provides). These will differentiate you from other sellers. See HERE  for help from other Bonanzlers and a great thread from the Bonanzle help section HERE. Click on the "Learn more" link next to the "Set search attributes" option for more detailed information.

Photographs - If it Looks Bad, Will Anybody Buy it?

I won't reinvent the wheel here. You can read the PHOTOS 101 blog series titled "A Picture is Worth a Thousand Dollars" HERE for technical tips on creating better photographs. However, I will briefly touch on the topic. After making sure that the photos you post in your listing description are technically good, consider adding additional photos. Use close-ups, different backgrounds, or different angles. Have your photographs stand alone in the search results instead of being one of many.

What was that third thing, again? Promote? How?

1960: Toot Your Own Horn.  2009: Tweet This!

Oh, the years have gone by fast. Many years ago, if you wanted to tell somebody something about yourself, you "tooted your own horn." Today, you Tweet 'em on Twitter, you put your best face(book) forward and you tell somebody to "come into myspace." You can spend countless hours worrying about your SEO, Google Base, and can spend your nights wondering whether your attributes are up to par. On top of that, it seems like a new promotional group is tugging at you every five minutes. "Sign up to promote your Booth. It's FREE" or "I've got the way to get billions of people to see your Booth. Just link with me."

What does it all mean?  It's called P-R-O-M-O-T-I-O-N and it's the hottest thing on the Internet. Does it work? Yes. Do you know how to use it all? Probably not. Well, buckle up... give me some of your time and this series will do its best to toot ya! Oops, I mean help you with tweeting, help you understand Google Base, explain Search Engine Optimization, and generally make you a better promoter of your Bonanzle business.

SEO in a Nutshell

For Bonanzlers, SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) is a variety of techniques applied to reach the goal of increasing the chances your items will show up (near the top of the list) on Internet search engines like Google, Yahoo, and others. Google Base, Twitter, and other products are the strategies you use to help you achieve that goal.

First Up - Google Me This!

The most effective strategy is the use of Google Base to submit your items to the world's largest search engine provider, Google. Google Base is a service provided by Google and can result in your items prominently displayed when prospective buyers are searching the Internet for items they wish to purchase. Submitting your items to Google Base is a fantastic way of increasing the on-line exposure of your items, since your items will be included in search results that prospective buyers see when they submit an item search to Google.

The best way to increase sales on Bonanzle is to draw buyers into your Booth from outside of Bonanzle and Google will help with that. As many Bonanzlers in the forums have stated, there are sellers on Bonanzle selling the same items. So, not only might you be competing with other venues, you are competing with other Bonanzlers for the same sale. It is imperative that your items appear on Google searches and that the pricing on your items puts you in the price range of other sellers. I believe this is especially important for sellers who are selling drop-shipped or commodity items that many sellers have available to sell. Outside promotion is essential since there are millions of potential buyers outside of Bonanzle.

Submitting your items to Google Base is not difficult and the detailed steps in the links below will allow you to set up a Google Base account (with Google) and submit the contents of your Bonanzle Booth to the search engines. In addition, there are tips that will optimize your Bonanzle Booth and could put your items near the top of search engine results, instead of getting lost in the mix. 

On the next post in this series, I'll try to make sense of Google Base for those Bonanzlers who need help setting up a Google Base feed by compiling it all in one place with examples, screen pictures and a FAQ section. Meanwhile, if you're ambitious to try it on your own, these Bonanzle pages do a good job of walking you through the process.

To create an account with Google or to log into Google to start using Google Base, click HERE.

To set up a Bonanzle feed to Google Base, click HERE.

What About the Other Ways to Promote?

Of course, there's more to promoting your Bonanzle Booth than just Google. I didn't forget Twitter, facebook, Squidoo, RSD, etc. Some of these will be covered in the next few blog posts in this series. I will start with the tools that provide the most bangs for the buck and work down the list. Have you figured out yet which technique is the #1 method of increasing traffic to your Bonanzle Booth? You could always GOOGLE it. 

Of course, you can always find helpful Bonanzlers online in the forums if you can't wait to hear about the other tools.

Don't forget to check out the other BOP articles at www.bonanzle.com/bop