I can tell you from experience that it is EXTREMELY difficult. In order to promote an auction site without a HUGE budget you need to be able to rank well in the SERPs for your auction listings. Which is also very hard to do. But if this isnt a general auction site but has a certain niche to it (link gun auctions) then it is much easier to do.
General.. makes it harder to promote. Is it too late to make it a specific niche? That'll make marketing much easier.
This is what you need to find yourself Look for a topic that's highly searched AND that has low competition (will make marketing and SEO easier for you). What are you interested in?
Give up. Sorry but if you don't have a big budget you can't compete with ebay or even the smaller general auction sites. You can try a niche auction site, but even then it's hard. You effectively have to get a whole lot of listings and a whole lot of buyers and then have them all on your site in the same weekly period. Or else your listings will expire and not want try again and you'll have to start all over again. The problem being, of course, is that buyers won't come without listings and sellers won't list without buyers. If your still interested here are some general strategies - I've had some success with some of them: - Advertise a lot - Pay people to list auctions - Leverage traffic/connections with a larger site you own/are affiliated with. - Purchase/partner with a similar auction site and merge listings To make matters worse you can't really make any money until the site takes off and because the odds are against you, you'll likely be throwing money down the drain.
I know of an auction site that offered 30 minute no reserve auctions. Find some good items and offer them no reserve. Once people start to see the very low prices the word will spread like wildfire!! This will take an investment but the long term payoff is great!! The site im talking about was a gold nugget auction site. people could get 3-5 dollar grams of gold. they now have like 3k users and a mess of other sellers that the webmaster makes money on. most of this took place in a year!! hope this helps!! J
Maybe if its not against Ebay tos just start the auction with your stuff add something to ebay mention you have a new auction site to get more great things like these at great prices...it might work.... Advertise on any forum you can....look for forums on mothers helping single mothers or some other site (sorry im stereotyping mothers as shopers) Also mass spam email....I think the first time I heard about ebay was from spam..... Also make your site so that people can email the auction to a friend....
i would say the best thing to do is make a niche. i was going to try out an auction but dont have the budget to try to get the word out. i think if you focus on one subject rather than a ton you will have a better change to survive. eg antiques.
the money is virtual, i give that just for atract users to signup and use my services , then when they pass $500 , the account is suspend until they pay the respective account balance.
i have to atract users. the they will post all their products with $500 that will make site will all kind of products to users to see.