Auction Site Owners Blog

While researching how we would promote the site we discovered a lot of the problems we faced are faced also by other auction sites, namely the power of companies like Amazon and Ebay to dominate search engines and advertising space.

Our solution was to setup www.AlternativesToEbay.com to promote
independent sites trading in eBay's sector. We feel rather then banging the drum for "Xauction the ebay alternative" it's possible to promote the suggestion that buyers and sellers should try using something other then eBay. If we attract the person on that idea then we can show them the alternatives. The result being rather then that person looking at one site and perhaps not liking what they see they then can try another because we give them the alternatives. Also as many of the site are free and use the ame software it's a simple process for sellers to sign-up to all the free site to list their items in many places at once by repeating the same process over and over. Most sites also have the ability to import eBay listing so those site don't need to be seen as alternatives rather expansions of the selling process.

It's still early days for A2E and at first sight it does look like just an link exchange but behind that is a blog which will build into a information and resource area. As part of the blog -
http://www.blog.AlternativesToEbay.com . We also issue a monthly
Newsletter in the form of a press release. This is sent out to over 100 article directories and also is published on our own sites at places like Squidoo - http://www.squidoo.com/Independent_Online_Auctions_Sites . The
real purpose of the newsletter is to gain back-links for out member sites as we always include ten sites, five general auction sites and five item specific auction site.

A2E is proving very popular and because our past experience is in SEO we have managed to gain some decent exposure for the sites included already, currently the are 133,000 references in search engines to
www.AlternativesToEbay.com and it's going up. Still a way to go to catch eBay.com but when compared to say www.Ebid.com who have 609 and
www.craigslist.com with 160,000 you can see we have made great progress already.

Our site is free, all we ask is a reciprocal link that must be plain html and on the homepage only. We accept all types of marketplaces and sites that provide services to marketplaces like hosting and development work.
Those wanting extra exposure contribute a payment to get that placement and that all goes to promoting the site.