The Bonanzle Marketing Checklist, Part 1

The basic list of tasks on the "Promote you items" section of the making more sales screen is quite good and will help to get your items in front of a lot of eyes. While you can certainly go through it blindly without any help, I put this walk through together specifically to help those newer to selling who might find a few tips useful.

While there is certainly a lot of other things you can do to promote individual items, I am limiting this lens to just those which are on the Bonanzle task list:

• Publishing your items to Google Base


• Creating an item widget to post to your blog or web site


• Posting your items to Craigslist


• Publishing your items on Twitter


• Give google detailed information about your items


• Optimizing item titles for search engines


• Ensure your items have categories specified


• Ensure all of your items have pictures

Google Base is a google program where people can put items up to be seen by people who use the google shopping module.

As google is, currently, the most popular search engine out there, it is a very good idea to do this. To check out the google shopping module for yourself, go to Google and, at the top of the page, select "more" and then "shopping". Do a couple of searches there to see how it brings up results.

To get started, you might go to the Bonanzle page on getting you items into Google Base and follow the instructions there.

I prefer to setup recurring feeds ( daily ) so that when I place new items online, they get loaded into Google Base for the following day. This also saves my time as I do not need to go manually update the list every thirty days to avoid having my items drop off of the list.

The only downside with daily feeds is that there will be a period each day during which your items are being updated, and not displayed.

Once everything is setup, you will be able to find your own products in the google shopping pages.

Analysis of views
One other nice feature of google base is that you can log into your google base account to see how many people have seen your items in google shopping as well as how many have actually clicked on them.

If you are targeting a niche and/or selling specific items, you can keep track of this information and use it to test different titles to see whether or not they result in people finding and/or clicking them more often. With some time spent doing this, you can optimize views and click-throughs ( how often people click your items ) for things which you sell on a regular basis. I'd also recommend finding your own items in google base to see how they look to people searching.

If you have a blog or web site, it should be a simple matter to create an item widget to embed into it, displaying some of your items.

An item widget is simply a bit of java script code which you can copy and paste somewhere else on the internet. In this case, it pulls a list of items from your Bonanzle booth and displays them.

The First Ten Items
When I first started using the Bonanzle widget, I was a bit disappointed as I thought it could only display the first so many items in ones store. Recently, I noticed that if you can fill any particular widget with the specific items that you want and also order them however you want...making it much nicer than I had originally thought.

If you have multiple sites, multiple blogs, etc, you can create special widgets for them displaying only relevant items and post those particular widgets up. Good stuff.

Creating the Widget
To create a widget, just select the "Create an item widget to post your items to your blog or web site" entry ( second on the list ) and then either edit an existing widget or select a new one.

Choose the size of your widget, the items per row, the title, and where on Bonanzle you want it to link to ( handy to link to a hand picked list of your items or a particular category in your store ).

Once created, you need to populate the widget
Select "edit" to alter the contents of your newly created widget ( to remove items or change their order ).

Otherwise, browse your booth ( while logged in ) and find each item you want in your widget. At the bottom of each items description you will find an "Actions" section.

Look for the drop down box labeled "Add to Widget", drop it down, and select the widget you want that item to show up in.

When all finished, edit your widget ( my bonanzle, make more sales, item widget, edit ) to order your items however you wish to. Then choose "Save all changes".

Placing the widget on your web site or blog
Once you select "Save all changes", you will see your widget along with a box below it labeled "Paste the following into an HTML enabled form to insert your Bonanzle widget:"

Just copy the contents of that box and paste them into your blog or web site where you would like them to be at.

Tweaking widget size on your page
Once you have the widget on your site, take a look at it and tweak the size if needed. You can do this by altering the second line you pasted into your site which reads something like:
renderBonanzleWidget(49320343, 164, 473)

The first number is your widget id, ignore it.

The second number is the width to display (in pixels) on your screen. Make it larger to make your widget wider, smaller to make it thinner.

The third number is the height to display (in pixels) on your screen. Make it larger to make your widget taller, smaller to make it shorter. When finished, the result will look just like that displayed on the bonanzle site...unless you tweak it.

For those not aware, Craigslist is a large site containing localized hubs for buying, selling, trading, discussion, job finding, etc.

Craigslist has sub sites for geographical regions all over the world. If you decide to post your items to Craigslist, you might well want to post them to the sub site covering (or nearest to) the area you live in.

Setting up a Craigslist account
Setting up an account on Craislist if you do not already have one is a breeze.
Simply go to Craigslist.org and create an account by selecting "my account" on the left hand side, entering an email address, clicking the link in the confirmation email sent to you, and agreeing to the terms of service and setting a password.

Getting your Bonanzle items up onto Craigslist
Once you have a Craigslist account, log into it.
Once you are logged in, go back to Bonanzle and click the green "Post your item's to Criagslist" link on the "Maximize Your Bonanza Sales" page. This should bring up something like the above image.

Just select the category you want to post to to open up a screen which will allow you to post to craigslist.

Once you see the "Title", "Price", "Location", and "Description" fields, fill them in.

You can copy Titles, Descriptions, and Prices from your item list ( shown on the right ) by clicking on the words "title", "description", or "price" under a particular item and then pasting it where you want to ( Ctrl+V on your keyboard or Edit->Paste in your browser on windows ). You Linux users should know how to use your particular flavor and I don't touch Macs...but the browser method probably works fine if you don't know the correct open apple shortcut.

Once you have the items you want in a listing specified, scroll down on the left side and select next. You will see what your posting will look like and can either confirm it or go back and tweak it.

One thing to keep in mind here is that craigslist is not for spamming commercial items, so if you post your items to criagslist, you might want to avoid putting up retail items at retail prices or entering two hundred separate posts. Get too carried away and you might well find your items deleted and/or your account killed.

If you have a twitter account, you can go to any particular item you are selling and, at the bottom next to "Actions" select "Tweet It".

This will make a "tweet" in twitter, which is basically just a little update you can put up to share something with people who choose to follow what you are up to.

Twitter can be a pretty spammy tool, and like most social networking sites, can suck up a lot of your time if you choose to let it.

On the other hand, if you use it wisely, it can be a great way to share new things with others. I have been meaning to set up a twitter account for a while now, so I went ahead and did so for the purposes of this lens...talk about quick and easy.

Just create your twitter account, go to one of your items, and select "Tweet it".

The first time you do this, instead of making a twitter entry you will get a box asking for your Twitter username and password. Enter them in and it will verify the link.

From there on out, when you select "Tweet it", a box will pop up letting you tell people about that item and provide a link to it.

And be sure to check out the Bonanzle Twitter Thread when you have time.

Just below this are displayed my five most recent "tweets" to give an idea of what they are. A lot of people really like Twitter...and perhaps you will too.

When you manually enter items, be sure to specify a category for them. Doing so lets people who are browsing items by category find your items.

If you manually imported your items and did not setup their categories before doing so, then it is more than likely worth your time to go through and edit them.

Fortunately, you do not have to go through and edit them one at a time. Instead, you can pull up the batch editor ( seen above ) by selecting "Sell" and then "batch edit items" next to "The Basics" under "Other things to try".

Simply filter groups of items ( or don't ) and then select the items you wish to set a category for, select a category next to "Set main category to", and select submit.

Alternately, you can also edit each item individually and set its' category that way...though it takes quite a bit more time.

When you load pictures to Bonanzle ( you have room for four ), by default the thumbnail used to display the image in a list is the center portion of the resized image.

In many cases, the thumbnails cut out important parts of the picture or do not display the best area of the picture. This is especially true for books, magazines, and such.

Once you upload a picture ( yes, you really should have a picture, people are visually looking for items, so pictures can help a lot ), you should put your mouse over it and edit it so that you can get the best thumbnail possible for viewers.

Personally, when dealing with the default image to be displayed to those browsing, I always edit it once ( making sure that the "replace original image" is checked to make a thumbnail that shows the entire picture ). After that, I edit it again ( making sure that "replace original image" is NOT checked ) to select the portion of the image I think makes the best thumbnail for people browsing through Bonanzle.

The reason I do this is because I want people to see the entire image ( and if you edit the image you uploaded and select a different part as the thumbnail, the image gets cropped to that area if you have the replace original image button checked...which is not normally what I want to happen.

Look up above and you can see the initial thumbnail for an item and then the one I replace it with by creating a second one without overriding the first. This lets me try to catch peoples eyes while still letting them see the entire image.

The only time it does not work so well is when I want to use all four images...in which case I typically just replace the original with one having a thumbnail of the entire image, unless the default one created is actually fairly good.