The true fact about photo is that it worth thousand of words, a good photo can increase your auction sales instantly. A simple picture together with your ads can boost your sales up by 200% or more. 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!
Now, you have an idea that a picture will help your item sell. Asking yourself, how do I get a picture up on the online auction? 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.
First, get pictures to your computer: 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 $50 and up, or you can take your photos to many local copy shops and they can scan your photos for you, and save them on flash USB.
Another way which consider better and more popular now is you use a digital camera which can take photo and synchronize to your computer instantly. These camera cost about $200 to $700.
You can also use a normal camcorder to grab the image. With a small device you can hook any video source. You can also use this small device to hook any video sources and grab images to your computer immediately.
The second step is to process the photo: you have the photo in your computer in either .gif or jpeg files. Now you need to proces the photo in a graphic program. Paint Shop Pro or Lview are available as shareware on the Internet. 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. All you need is to click on the tool that select a rectangular area of your photo. Then you will need to draw a box only for the area you wish to keep, and then select crop command from the main tool bar 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. You can add text simply by click on the menu button where the “T” present, the select the area you you to add text and type it right away.
The third step is to post photo to the auction site: the photo is taken and ready to used in you auction ads. Most of the auction site like eBay only allow you to upload one picture to their site for free, additional pictures are chargeable, so you need to have some place to host your own pictures. A good place is Auctiva which have plug in store to your auction site, and the most important is free.
Now you get the idea a tools to do it, hope this article can help you to increase your auction sales. Good luck.
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