Use Photos to Increase Your Sales

It may be a cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words, but it is one hundred percent true! A simple picture included with your ad can increase your sales by over two hundred percent! Like I’ve said before, people are not comfortable bidding on an item unless they are absolutely sure what they are bidding on. A picture gives the buyer a strong visual image of what they are buying. Take a look at the items that have the most bids in almost any category on the auction web site, and I’ll bet you that the ads that have pictures have more bids, and also have higher bids than the ads that don’t include a picture! It’s the simple fact that seeing is believing! Ok, so you're sold on an idea that a picture will help your item sell. Now your asking yourself, how do I get a picture up on the Internet? Well, that’s a good question, and this next section is dedicated to showing you exactly how to take a picture of your item and post it to the Internet. STEP 1- GET THE PICTURE INTO YOUR COMPUTER Ok, so this is no brainer, even for the novice, but there are a few different ways that you can accomplish this. The first is the old fashioned way, and that is to use a normal camera, take a photo, and then take it to your local photo shop and get it developed. Once you get the photo developed, you need to get the photo scanned into your computer. You can either buy a scanner at you local computer shop for approximately $100 and up, or you can take your photos to many local copy shops like Kinko’s and they can scan your photos for you, and save them on floppy disk. The other alternative you can use is a digital camera, which will take a photo and download it immediately to your computer. These cameras are great to use, but cost about $300 to $500. You can also use a normal camcorder to grab the image. With a small device (like SNAPPY) you can hook any video source, Like camcorders, to your computer and transfer the image that way. These devices cost between $100 to $200 and are a good alternative if you already have a camcorder at home. STEP 2-PROCESS THE PHOTO Ok, you’ve got your photo saved on your computer in either a .gif or .jpeg file. Next thing you may need to do is process the photo in a graphic program. Programs like Paint Shop Pro (http://www.jasc.com/psp.html) or LView Pro (http://www.lview.com) are available as shareware on the Internet. You can use them to do things like crop the photo using only a portion of the photo with your item. You can use them to adjust thing like the brightness and contrast of the photo, or even add some cool text over the photo to create the perfect ad! Programs like Adobe’s PhotoShop is a full blown graphics program that will help automate tasks like processing photos and adding some cool effects to both your photos and your text. Take a look at the photo of the item you want to sell. The first thing you need to do is crop the photo to only show the item that you are selling. Each program will do this fairly simply. You need to click on the tool that selects a rectangular area of your photo. You then need to draw a box only around the area you wish to keep, and then select crop command from the main toolbars image or edit menu. Then you should go and adjust the brightness, contrast and sharpness of the image as needed. Try to get as much visible detail as possible. Remember that the better the picture is, the more bids you will get! You can also add text directly over the picture of the item. This may or may not be useful for you, since you can type in as much text as you want before or after the image on web page. If you do want to add text, simply click on the text button, which is the "T" button in 99% of graphics programs, and select an area on your photo and type away! STEP 3- POST THE PHOTO TO THE WEB All right, the photo is taken, processed, and ready to be used in an advertisement on the auction web. The next step you have to do is to actually upload the picture to a web site. Most sites like eBay ™ do not allow you to actually put the picture on their site, so you have to have some web space of your own in which to store the picture. If you’re on AOL or a lot of other Internet Service Providers, you most likely have some web space allotted to you through them. You can check with your provider to find out how much space you have, and how to access it. If you are on AOL, you can skip down to the next section, which will take you step by step through the process that you have to use to get your pictures up on AOL’s web space! If your Internet Service Provider does not offer you any web space, you can always find free web space through the Internet from services like Geocities (http://www.geocities.com). These services allow you to sign up for free web space that you can use to display your pictures on your website, or to create your own actual web site. There are a variety of places that offer you small free web sites, just do a search on http://www.yahoo.com for web providers and you will find some others besides Geocities. Once you have someplace to put your picture, you have to upload the picture. Upload, for those of you who don’t know, simply means to send that picture file from your computer to your web space. There are a variety of programs, which are called FTP programs that you can use to transfer files over the Internet. You can easily find them for download on the Internet from places like http://www.tucows.com or http://www.shareware.com. The program called WS_FTP is very popular, and easy to use. You can download a copy directly from the manufacturer by going to their website at: http://www.ipswitch.com/Products/WS_FTP Once you have your FTP program, you simply log onto your server and choose the files you want to send to the web site. For example, let’s say that your picture file is called "auction1.jpg" and it shows the item you want to sell. You would start up your FTP program, choose the directory on your computer that your picture file is in, select your file "auction1.jpg" and press the button to transfer it to your web space. There is a great video tutorial on how to get started using your ws_ftp at http://www.freesitetemplates.com Entering the following text to your auction's description can now access your photo: http://www.yourhost.com/-directory/imagename.jpg AOL PHOTO INSTRUCTIONS This is for all of you who are on America On-line. This will take you step by step through the process that you need to follow to get your pictures posted to your personal web space with AOL. First, Go to the keyword "MY PLACE". If you are a novice, you may want to click on the section called "My Place Help" for a quick overview on what to do. Second, click on "MY PLACE" where you will find a folder that is called "private". This folder is where you will store all of your images for eBay ™. You can also create a new folder, call it something like "auction" or "eBay ™" and you can store your pictures there if you like. Then click "ok" and cancel to go back to the screen where you see the folders that you have. You are now ready to post your pictures to the web. You must know where your photos are located on your hard drive. Click on "UPLOAD". You will now see the Remote Filename Screen. In the space that is provided, you must type in the name of your photo file, including the file type extension. The two types of files you can use are .gif and .jpg files. Overall, .jpg files are better for photographic images, but you can experiment with your photos if you’d like. Press "CONTINUE". Click on "SELECT FILE" and find the photo file that you want to use. Click on the photo’s name to select it. You will see the name of the file that you selected on the bottom of your screen where it says "FILE". Click on "SEND"! Your file is now stored on AOL’s web server, where you can access it from anywhere on the Internet! Your file can now be called by using the following text on your eBay ™ listing: http://members.aol.com/yourscreename/filename.fileextention Please remember that web addresses are case sensitive, so be sure to type it in exactly as it appears on the server or you might have problems accessing them from the eBay ™ site!