Auctions and Antiques Examiner

Auctionwally's self sufficient marketing tips and my "Ask me Anything" launch

  Due to the content of this article there will be no picture

Do you sell on eBay? Great, now get yourself a website that's easy to use, even a blog is great, and learn to market your items on your own. I'm always recommending Google's platform, Blogger for this venue because it's easy to set up right out of the box. You  get up and running literally in 5 minutes. In another  5  you can have a PayPal button and accept payments for a basic product or service.

This of course is not likely to come close to matching your eBay sales but the well learned lesson is to how to do it yourself, in the event eBay becomes too difficult to deal with, or you just don't want to pay the fees anymore.  What your most likely to find if you have your own site, is that it can be a great companion to your eBay presence. There's no need to get rid of one when you can have both. Besides that  example  there are thousands of ways to become more independent with your marketing online. BUT, be extremely careful when you rely on other sites for a service or product that is crucial to your web existence, especially free services and products.

It's OK  to use them, and there are a lot of great  free products out there, but when your rely to heavily on them, things can go bad, very bad.

 What does that have to do with the disappearing buttons referenced in the title? I'll get to that right now. A few months ago I decided that I liked the way those convenient "click here" type of buttons looked.  I found a great site where I could make them for ...free. Yay!  They were nice and clean and just what I wanted, so I made them for hundreds of links on my pages. No problem, so far. Now of course you need a place to host the images, and the site even offered that for free! Yippee, this was too easy...until the site crashed today and now all I have in the places where the buttons should be are blank spots! All of those links are INVISIBLE!.

There is a fix of course, there always is, but it's a lot of work. Guess what I'll be doing for the next few days?

I didn't write this article to scare you off of free web tools, rather to demonstrate how, this type of thing doesn't have to happen to you. You see, I should have went with my gut insticnt to have the images hosted on a server that I have more control over or is more stable, such as a Google image hosting service.  It would have been easy to send the images of the buttons anywhere else once they were made, but I didn't do that. I had already made the buttons, it was an easy back-up step and I would have had access to them forever. If there was a crash, (very unlikely in this scenario) it would have been much easier to fix instead of the mess I have now.

It is very possible to become the master of your own web presence without having to learn a lot of code or become a geek. Take the prudent precautions, back up what you have, and you won't find yourself looking for disappearing buttons!

By the way, I'm launching a new feature today at Auctionwally.com, it's called Ask Auctionwally Anything. It's a live chat consultation session that starts at 12pm and runs to 4pm EST. Simply pop in the room to ask me anything you want about antiques & collectibles. I hope to see you there. In the future the service will have posted hours so you'll know when I'm there, and I'll be available on a "by chance" basis as well.  Oh, and the chat client service is hosted by Google, so I'm sure it will be up and running ;)  

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