By BloggerKhan

My profession is Management and Marketing and it revolves around outsourcing, ecommerce and marketing on the internet. Wise men say identify what you are passionate about and then see if ...

The objective of marketing and advertising is to get in front of as many prospects as you can. The more people see your products, the better your chances of making a sale. That’s why people advertise. But what do you do when you don’t have the funds to buy paid advertisements or hire an SEO / Social Media Marketing expert? Is there a way to still promote and market your products? Yes there is.

Have you heard of marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Etsy etc.? They are marketplaces. They are like conventional malls. The malls advertise to attract shoppers to the mall. The larger stores also promote themselves. If you open a store in the mall, the shopper stream brought in by the paid advertisements of the mall along with the unique entertainment and decor offered by some malls will also benefit you. The more people visit the mall, the better the chances of they stopping buy and taking a look at what you have to offer. In return, you pay the mall rent. The higher the traffic at the mall, the higher the rent.

What should you do? You sign up at these online marketplaces, open an account and start listing your products. The marketplaces buy Ads on search engines and will include your products in their keywords too. Here is an example.

We have a client that specializes in industrial computers with ISA slots. Small company. Does not spend hard dollars on advertising. They upload their products to eBay, Amazon etc. How does that help? Well Ebay heavily buys Pay Per Click Ads on Google. See picture.

A user comes to Google and does a search for “Computers with 10 ISA slots” – Google first presents the user with paid Ads. The very first Ad with a picture is an Ebay Ad promoting a product from http://interloper.com but the click is not going to http://interloper.com . It is going to their listing on eBay. If the user makes the purchase on eBay, eBay makes 10 to 15% commission depending on their tier, Interloper.com makes a sale, Google gets Ad revenue and the user gets the computer he wants.

The cost is there – but not out of pocket. It’s after the sale.

Now such a model can work best for physical products as well as digital products. In the services industry, companies like Angie’s List, Home Advisor etc. follow a similar model. They charge per project that you get through your listing with them. They advertise, you list your services and if you get a client, both sides make money. Win-Win.

What if you have a large number of products that you want to list on multiple marketplaces? Inventory synchronization can become a problem. In that case, use a service like http://uploadmyproducts.com to upload to multiple marketplaces.

Did that help?