Ah, the old-fashioned country auction! The idea of a country auction conjures up certain images for people. The image of a fast-talking auctioneer offering up an antique table or chair is a popular example.

People who are buying household goods or collectibles are looking to get their items at the lowest price possible. However, the people who are selling their items at auction are hoping for the highest price!

Unless a person is in the business of buying and selling antiques or other items, not a lot of thought goes into how goods are prepared for sale via the auction process. However, if you are one of the growing number of people using auction venues to sell your collectibles or other inventory, there are a few things to learn first about how to sell at auction before you bring a truckload of stuff over to the next event.

Tip 1: Make sure the things you want to sell are a good “fit” for the auction house you’ll be using.

Never bring a load to an auction house without actually having been to one of the previous auctions. It’s important to get a feel for the type of goods that the house sells. For example, at one very rural country auction it was common for the owners to sell live chickens, pots and pans, car parts, and farm equipment.

After close investigation, this would not be the right venue for selling your daughter’s “Hello Kitty” collection. On the other hand, the spare John Deere parts that you bought at last week’s yard sale might be just the right thing for the buying crowd at this auction.

Tip 2: Be sure you clearly understand the terms and policies of the auction house.

Visit with the auctioneer ahead of time. Call to find out what the best days and times are to visit. One of the worst possible times to drop in for an informational visit with an auctioneer is the day of the auction. Call ahead and ask. While you’re at it, find out what are the best days and times to drop your stuff off.

Once you have a little time with the auctioneer, you’ll be able to find out what type of commission he or she takes from consigners (which is you), and what type of paperwork might be needed. Some auction houses send out Form 1099 tax forms at the end of the year. An auctioneer may need to see your identification and have you fill out a W-9. Be prepared.

Find out what happens to your items if they don’t sell. For example, some auctioneers may have a minimum starting bid. If, for some reason, one of your items does not sell, it may be grouped with another one of your pieces. Know the auctioneer’s strategy beforehand so that you aren’t surprised on pay day.

Tip 3: Make sure the auctioneer knows what you’re selling.

It might be perfectly obvious to you that the signed print you are consigning is a rare and valuable piece of art. However, the auctioneer may not know this particular artist. Make a note of anything particularly special about your items, and leave the note with the piece. Be sure to tell the auctioneer about it as well. He or she might determine that this is something to highlight on the company website or in the newspaper listing.

Tip 4: Present your items neatly.

No one likes to have to dig through a box full of grimy and greasy car parts to see what treasures might be in there. Separate the parts and lay them out on a flat, or use more than one box to de-clutter the lot.

There is no need to buy fancy display boxes. It’s easy enough to go to the local convenience store or supermarket and ask if you can have the emptied boxes or flats that they are discarding.

While it’s good to present clean items, take care not to ruin the value of anything by over cleaning. For example, if you find some old cast iron cookware, clean the obvious dirt and grime, but don’t scrub it to its original finish. For many people, this ruins the value of the item. So, clean and tidy and organized is the key here.

Tip 5: Don’t complain to the auctioneer if your stuff doesn’t sell for as much as you’d like.

The phrase to remember here is, “You win some; you lose some.” That’s just the way it is. There are some days where an auction house is loaded with people who all seem to want what you’re selling. There will be other days where the crowd is sparse, and the bidding is simply not competitive.

Remember that it’s in the auctioneer’s best interest to sell your things for the highest possible hammer price. But sometimes, it’s just not going to be a stellar sale. The auctioneer is only human, and is also disappointed if a sale doesn’t go as well as planned.

If you notice that every time you bring a bunch of goods to sell that you’re not realizing as much as you think you honestly should, try another auction venue and compare apples to apples. That is, bring the same types of items to the new auctioneer and compare the results.

Unless the auctioneer is particularly disagreeable or inconsiderate to you or buyers, there is no reason to confront him or her about a sale. If you find you just don’t care for an auctioneer’s style or methods, find another one. Believe me, there are plenty of them out there!

The primary thing to remember as you learn how to sell at auction is that the business is unpredictable at best. You will have good days, some not-so-good days, some great days. The more you sell, the more experience you will gain, and the more enjoyable the business will be.

Advertising is an important tool for any company to reach a wider audience. Behind every successful brand lie great advertising campaigns. Even in the age of the Internet and broadcast media, newspaper advertising has not lost its importance. In fact, advertising in the newspaper offers many benefits which make your investment worthwhile. Here is how newspaper advertising helps a brand.

Specific Target Audience

Every brand has a specific target audience. Through newspaper advertising, companies can reach that particular audience. Most newspapers have special sections whose target audience is based on events, geography or group. A brand can appeal to the emotional as well as the intellectual senses of a customer by producing good and relevant creative for a newspaper advertisement.

Wide Reach

Though penetration of the Internet and broadcast media has increased by leaps and bounds over the years, yet there are many remote areas where people get to know the events of the world only through newspapers. They are still read by a majority of the people and this is one of the major reasons why many companies prefer advertising in them. A newspaper is not only read by the person buying it, but also by members of the family and quite often visitors. Thus, for the same circulation, a newspaper’s readership is 3-4 times or even more, giving the newspaper ad a wider audience then what its circulation suggests.

Newspaper Advertisement can be viewed Multiple Times

A newspaper advertisement can be viewed multiple times. People may miss a particular advertisement on television or radio, but it’s very difficult to ignore a large size advertisement in a newspaper. The reader can go through a newspaper advertisement taking his own time and can even re-read and archive it for future reference. This proves fruitful for the brand.

Flexibility

Newspaper advertisements offer great flexibility to firms in terms of content, design, placement and frequency. A company can promote its brand in several ways in newspapers. The display classified section clearly groups an ad in terms of nature and day of the week. A normal display advertisement gives the flexibility of choosing any page in the newspaper. One can change the creative for different insertions in the campaign period while advertising in newspapers and even promote last-minute deals.

Affordability

One of the biggest advantages of advertising in newspapers is that it is still quite cheap as compared to electronic media. Emerging brands may not have adequate funds to undertake an advertising campaign on television and radio. The only option left for them is the newspaper and mostly for the good. Newspaper campaigns can be tailored according to any budget.

Advertising through newspapers is extremely beneficial, especially for small business owners who want to increase their brand recognition and value. In broadcast media, it becomes extremely difficult to stand out in the crowd with limited budgets. There are many who start their day with a cup of tea and a newspaper.

Agreed that there are certain disadvantages too, of advertising in newspaper, but there is no denying the fact, that it is still a potent tool for advertisers to enhance the reputation of their brands.

Are you looking for home based business leads, but don’t know where to look or for what you should be looking? In this article, I will outline the different types of home based business leads, tell you what you need to pay attention to, and how to decipher between the different leads to know which ones you should (and shouldn’t) buy.

When it comes to home based business leads, there are a whole slew of options out there in the marketplace. While I am not a big fan of using these as your main source of list-building, income-generating leads, I am a fan of using purchased leads to build your phone skill set (so that you can dramatically increase your percentage of closes).

With so many different types of home based business leads available, how do you know which ones will best work for you? Well, the first thing you need to be able to do is to understand the “math” associated with these leads as it pertains to your business.

You need to figure out what the average value is of each distributor who comes on board into your business. Let me give you an example to show you how to come up with that number. Let’s assume that you receive $100.00 in commission when someone new joins your business, then you receive $20.00 per month for every month thereafter that this person stays on autoship. So if a person stayed on the book for five months, the average lifetime value would be $200.00 ($100.00 + ($20.00 x 5 months)).

So using the above example, let’s assume the average lifetime value of each prospect in your business is $200.00. Well then if you were to spend $5.00 per lead, then you would need to close 1 in 40 of those leads to just break even. This is not a very likely scenario unless you are a seasoned veteran.

Sticking with that same example, how much would it be reasonable for you to spend on leads? You would probably not want to spend much more than about $1.00 per lead. Spending that much per lead in this scenario would mean that you would need to close 1 out of every 200 leads to break even. This is a MUCH more reasonable scenario, even for someone who is just getting started in their business and is still working on getting “smooth” with prospects.

With all of that said, to get home based business leads at that price, you’re probably looking at opportunity seeker leads that have aged at least a week or so. That’s okay. Start off with those. As your skill set improves — and you’re creating a marketing funnel where you’re walking prospects through a system from one step to the next and putting your whole marketing campaign in place — you can start to buy more expensive home based business leads or (better yet) start to generate your own leads.

Generating your own home based business leads is your best long-term strategy. It is advantageous for you do for several reasons, the most important of which is that it gives you total control over your website, data capture page, the traffic going to those pages, the advertising variables and the follow-up emails going out to your list.

Remember that your home based business leads will hopefully ultimately become part of your list — which is the most meaningful and valuable asset your business will ever possess. Done right, your list can lead to millions of dollars in revenue. So how you generate your home based business leads have bigger consequences than just the immediate ones.

Your list is an asset that gives and gives and gives, and if you treat it right you are building and creating relationships no matter where your audience is located. That is why you want to generate your own home based business leads. This is how the top and most productive network marketers are quietly (and under the radar) creating big, wealth-producing organizations that put them at the top of their company leader boards.