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The Finer Points of Internet Auctions

WHAT IS A PENNY AUCTION?

Penny auctions have exploded in popularity with the massive growth of the internet. However, few people know the true origins of penny auctions.Beginnings actually stretch back to the Great Depression. Those were hard times for everyone, but even harder for farmers. Farmers struggled to bring in steady income because of droughts and crops not selling as well as they had previously. As a result, the banks would foreclose on the farmers who couldn’t keep up with their mortgage payments.

The banks weren’t satisfied with just repossessing the house, they wanted to raise as much capital as possible, so they resorted to selling off the possessions of the owners of the repossessed houses. There was not much the farmers could do about it so they began bidding ridiculously low prices, pennies, on the items while threatening others who dared to bid higher than a few pennies.

The auctions of today hardly resemble their tremulous beginnings. Being part of a penny auction today is exhilarating, fun, and addictive. It combines the selling format of auctioning with a little bit of chance factored in.Auctions are a game of strategy but also a game of luck.

The premise behind penny auctions is giving people the chance to win an item at a drastically reduced price.Auctions make that possible by spreading out the cost of the product among multiple bidders. In order for a person to take part in an auction, they must pay a set price for each bid. For example, if a person wanted to bid on a fifty dollar Amazon gift card then he would spend a dollar for each time a bid placed. If he ended up winning the gift card, then he would only have spent a few dollars for a fifty dollar gift card. Usually penny auctions sell bids in packages.

HOW PENNY AUCTIONS WORK!

The main foundation of penny auctions is the pay-per-bid format. It is the key that allows bidders to win items at the fraction of their retail value and allows the auction owners to keep their site profitable. Most y auction sites run on the same premise: people pay a set amount for each bid, whenever a person places a bid within the closing seconds of the auction time will be added, the last person left with a unique bid after the clocks runs out will win the item. There are a large variety of items that can be won, but they tend to be popular electronics or gift cards to popular stores.

There are two types of auctions: lowest unique bid auction and highest unique bid auction. Lowest unique auction sounds confusing but it is actually quite simple. A unique bid is when only one person has a bid at a certain price. Bids usually start at one penny, a bidder can then place a bid at two pennies. Until another bidder places a higher bid, the most recent bidder will be the lowest unique bid because that was the only bid at two cents and nobody bid higher. However, penny auctions generally don’t stop at one penny. It is not uncommon to find auctions that end up at a couple hundred dollars based on the popularity of the item being auctioned. However, the same principles apply for those auctions. Highest unique bid auctions follow the more traditional auction format such as eBay. The person with the highest bid at the end of the auction wins the item.

Auction site owners turn a profit by selling bids. Say twenty people are bidding on a ten dollar gift card at one dollar per bid, at the end of the auction if there were twenty bids placed in total then the site owner would have made twenty dollars with a ten dollar profit.Auctions do seem like a win-win situation:The site owner makes money while the bidder gets an item for dirt cheap. However, not everyone wins in penny auctions. The people who paid one dollar each bid but left with nothing to show for their investments will not be so happy.

HOW TO WIN!

Penny auction has a lot of chance mixed into it, but one can incorporate strategy that will help raise the chances of winning. Playing smart can make all the difference between gambling and auctioning.

The first crucial tip to winning penny auctions is to know how to manage your bids. Your goal should be to win as much as possible without spending a ton of money buying bids. Managing your bids means that you should already know how much you are willing to risk in order to win an item. The amount of capital you are willing to risk will determine how many bids you can use. Once you know how many bids you have to spend on an item, then you will be better able to manage how and when you place a bid. That will keep you from blowing away all of your bids in the first few seconds of the auction.

The next tip is to practice time management. When fighting in the trenches of penny auctions, you have two enemies: other bidders and time. Knowing when to bid is a must if you want to have success. Placing a bid when there is a lot of time left on the clock is never a good idea. You have to remember that the key to winning a penny auction is being the last one standing when the clock runs out and that each bid increases the amount of time left. It would be a good practice to wait until the last few minutes of the auction before you begin to bid.

The final tip for successful auctioning is to keep your emotions under control.Auctions have a lot of similarities to gambling, and just like gambling, your spending can get out of control. If you keep your emotions level, it will keep you from making rash decisions and blowing loads of cash. Keep your mind clear so that you can gage the behavior of the other bidders and outsmart them.

HOW TO AVOID SCAM SITES!

Penny auctions are a great addition to the web whether you want to win an item that otherwise you wouldn’t be able to afford or if you simply enjoy the thrill that comes with bidding in auctions. Unfortunately, scam sites have tarnished the reputation of the legitimate penny auction sites. However, there are ways that you can protect yourself from scamers and enjoy your auctioning without having to worry about losing your money due to dishonesty.

Checking the reputation of the auction site before you start spending your hard earned money is always a good idea. Chances are other people have tried the site before you and some of them have left reviews. The reviews are your way to gage whether a auction site is trustworthy or not. If a site is getting overwhelmingly negative reviews, then that is a clear indication that you should steer your business elsewhere.

Another tool you can use to protect yourself is checking the Alexia ranks of the auction sites. Alexia rank will give a solid view of how much traffic the auction is getting. If you see a huge difference in the amount of traffic Alexia is projecting and the amount of active bidders on the site, then warning signals should be ringing in your head. Some auction sites have been known to set up robots that automatically bid on projects in order to keep the auction going and inflate the price. That is known as shill bidding. You can sniff out those sites by comparing the traffic the site should be getting to the amount of users using this site.

CONCLUSION!

New legislation may come out later down the road that will officially make penny auctions gambling, but until then, it is a fun, exciting auction that allows one to win the item they’ve always wanted but couldn’t afford.Auctions are also quite lucrative for the site owners because of the pay-per-bid strategy they’ve incorporated. Penny auctions had humble beginnings with farmers who just wanted to get back at the banks who kicked them out of their house. More recently, auctions have enjoyed an explosion in popularity with the rise of the internet.

There are two main formats fora auctions, lowest and highest unique auction, however they both run on the same premise where the last unique bid wins the item. Winning a penny auction will require a certain amount of mental tactic and a bit of luck. However, you can increase your odds of winning by practicing certain techniques such as managing your bids wisely, learning how to work with the time, and keeping a level head and your emotions under control. When you combine those three strategies to your bidding plan, you will find that you win a lot more often.

It is important that you do your due diligence to protect yourself when participating in auctions. Not every auction is run by honest and trustworthy people. There are people out there who just want to take your money. You can protect yourself by ensuring that you only bid on sites that already have a very positive reputation from real users.

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Interactive Advertisement

Striving to persuade others to impact on their behavior and the way of thinking is shown one of the essential needs of human being to his social living improvement .The ways of encouraging and convincing the audience, as it comes later, has had a great influence on human beings’ minds throughout the history.
The tablets found by the archeologists among the ruins of Babel, tell us about the primitive advertisements. This tablets which is belong to 3,000 B.C are about a kind of ointment and also a compliment about a person who has been skillful in sewing shoes.( MirHosseini 2004) But regulated persuasive refers to some centuries before Christian Era, when it was common among the people called sophisticated. The World War 2 ended to more comprehensive and scientific studies. Along with vast spreading of the mass media, such as newspapers, radio and television, advertising became more significant. We cannot deny advertisements` effects on our decisions and on our every day lives.

From the advertisements point of view, it is a new version to exhibit a good or service, with emphasis on specialized debate which is presented by beneficiary individuals or groups. The aim of writing this article is to answer this essential question; how advertising without its economical essence would be represented in cyber space. It is possible to put vivid distinction between the persuasive ways in internet with other media, and if the answer is yes which benefits is provided for cyber users in this distinction, owing to the fact that we live in an interactive world in which the relation between the advertisers and the customers has completely changed. I’m trying to analyze these changes with emphasis on active audience of this universal media and with stress on the role of advertisements in this space; I want to set these effective parts to find a clear view of future.

Essence of advertisement
In the terms of Tankard and Severin there is an obvious distinction between persuasion and advertisement. They refer to Roger Brown who gives a definition about nature of advertisement. Advertisements are those kinds of persuasive attempt which are made only for sender interests; and even may run to loss of the receiver. (Tankard and Severin ,1992, p299) Lasswell in 1937 defined advertisement as an affective technique in human acts, which works with manipulating audible, discoursing and drawing signs. (Tankard and Severin ,1992, p148).
Opposing to some theorists who believe advertisement contains any kind of commercial content and matter which companies utilize it for giving more information to consumer. What we focus on it is the scientific way of persuasion each commercial aim is one of its aspects. We can say, consequently, that advertising is a regular process to produce reasonable information about specific subject which is used to make an intensive effect on audiences minds’ and acts’.

Traditional methods of advertisements had been constructed on the basis of imagery. The effectiveness of advertising was limited by this very need to reach and influence the widest possible audience. The manipulation of images was necessary because advertisements should have attractiveness for the passive accumulated viewers. As much as the advertisements became more global, it was more needed (of new methods of audience attraction) to utilize modern of new methods. But the methods of satisfying and exciting viewers which had been forecasting single and lawful results in the mass audience up to this time, abolished by entrance of virtual space .For internet was an interaction and informative base media; so users traverse an active stage, to find their desired websites. Because they want to reach definite information about a company, a service or a product. Any irrelevant images or tampered information would dissuade them from continuing their way.

Apart from professional design of a website, its agents should be interacting with their costumers. They should know the costumers’ needs and should answer them in a good manner and the most important thing is assembling the information which the costumers are in search of them. In view of the fact that they would lose their audience easily with decreasing or increasing the information .A propaganda would be effective when it could use all the facilities of cyber space to be able to assemble attractiveness, giving awareness, interaction experience. Levinson considers a website as an island which the advertisement is a bridge to reach it. He believes the aim of convincing people to buy or use the products cannot persist no longer; in case that in internet we are leading the viewer to watch the advertisement an our website.(Levinson 2004)

Osgoodby believes that advertisement in cyber space is like a party , until you didn’t invite others into it, nobody would come to see you. More over information you are demanded by your guests, would mean that they are more fond of your party .He also believes that advertisement methods in internet are the most attractive methods from the audience point of view.(Osgoodby, 2005) We should consider how and in which language the message is being packaged .In the other words , “we should be careful in using words because using incalculable of language can reveal advertisement in a treachery way”. (Mehdizade, 2001, pp 65-66)

Traditional advertisements have been inclined their affair to the creation of reading sense in the vast spectrum of the audience like the television extensive advertisement. But in virtual space you can base your activities on analysis of individual needs and definite needs of its viewers for reaching the product. As it was said before, in virtual space, the user is not a mass audience in front of a charming media that some global reliable websites would prohibit from more professional advertisement methods and have vast spectrum of global audience ,but if we believe in an audience as an analyst and critic individuals we should accept that he would use other opportunities which have then not always but sometimes he won’t be captured easily by direct advertisements. Of course, we should bear in mind that audience would enter to this space sometimes for fun. This audience would face to the advertisement messages with less critic view and his searching in virtual space is more for fun and satisfying his inquisitiveness. He would guide easily from one page to another page and he has no aim for this circulation. As a result he would be objected of these messages and he would be impressed by them. In a research which I have done to study the advertisements and the utilized technique in these advertisements, I have reached to an obvious image of such advertisements. The advertisement websites, which I have named them popular, had been used the least methods of scientific documentary evidence or intellectual well reasoned to code their convincing messages. In my opinion if we factorize from special form of such websites which would recognize from these contents, we would see that summarizing and more benefiting from images are inseparable from advertisements. The reason of this subject is in the hyperlink feature of virtual space. Whatever the message sender needs is to attract the attention of receiver. The audience should push the bottom of mouse on this message among other different subjects and then the message communicator would have enough time to give information to the audience and identify the existence of viewer who are considered as a message receiver.

Other points are hidden in accessibility of information. The audience can catch more information in less time about advertisement. This information could obtain from even conflicting resources. The most important distinction of advertisement in traditional media and cyber space could be defined as follows: in virtual space, the audience would always change his role from audience to producer and from producer to consumer. The possibility of using cyber space would be possible for all people. In such space, the user can show off her/his idea or product with using of convincing skills and depend on the way of presenting it could reach to success .In other word cyber space is on the contrary of the traditional media. There is no selling of idea or product; but they would sell viewing the site or advertisement. Now if we are capable to convince our superiority to the users, we would reach to success. The forms of traditional advertisement have many limitations in case of commercials form .Size and vast distributing; in a case that virtual space would assemble the possibility of showing any advertisement in various cyber pages and in a cheap expense. In other words, there is no real limit in volume and kind of advertisement presentation.( Jim Calloway and Don Murdock 1998)

How we can get more benefit from this space?
Today the world can not be imagined without advertisement .The audience and people would learn from advertisement what they should eat, how they can dress, which book they should read and how they can think about a special subject. In the age that is full of advertisement messages, there should be more attention to this science. Today the virtual space and the media channel would be discussed in our real lives as the main media in 21 century. By emphasizing vast and complex communications which are possible in this space we would understand that we have unique chance to effect on the unlimited spectrum of viewers, the chance which was not possible in dry previous media. from this point the importance of using advertisement messages would be declared .Our current era has been named the communication and advertisement age .Pratkanis believes that the messages construct our world .We are in thought of other satisfying in our social lives . There are many bulletin boards, subway and bus advertisements in streets.( Pratkenis , 1999).But whatever we are facing to as an advertisement in global media of the internet, has differences with such messages.

Effective and Successful cyber marketing means taking full advantages of the medium to offer all kind of customers an interesting, informative, interactive experience, a give and take of needs, wants, and information. Virtual space is not transient and temporary phenomenon. It is at the beginning way of its evolution. Today, the goal of much advertising is not to make the sale but to direct people to websites. It means we have to be really cautious about what we are presenting. Internet advertisement would not neither be a passing affair a phenomenon forked of the internet influences .Although today the internet advertisement is facing to problems and obstacles and we have no attention to using such an opportunity; but we should believe that in cultures, civilizations, belief, ancestors and all nations pillars which are forming identity are in confrontation with each other, prosperity is with a group which could use better form of convicting skills and methods.

Settle Your Small Business Taxes With a Peer-To-Peer Loan

Like the saying goes, “The only things certain in life are death and taxes.” Unfortunately, small businesses know this saying all too well.Unlike employees who look forward to their refund every April, small businesses loath the approaching spring, knowing they will have to pay Uncle Sam its share of their profits. Each year, small businesses struggling to turn a profit in an increasingly competitive business environment must pay taxes in order to keep their doors open.With dwindling profit margins and tightened lending restrictions, however, many small business owners find themselves between a rock and a hard place when it comes time to pay the tax man. Although a business may have steady sales and revenue or thousands of dollars in inventory, banks and traditional lending institutions simply aren’t handing out small business loans like they were in year’s past, leaving small business owners with few funding options to pay their tax bill.Thankfully, peer-to-peer lending, or social lending, has solved this growing dilemma. These modern social lending marketplaces have connected millions of borrowers with individual investors. Borrowers receive low-interest, fixed-rate loans that can be paid off in two to five years, while investors are able to benefit from decent returns in an economy with sinking bond and savings rates.Thus, it’s a win-win situation for both small business owners in need of immediate funding and investors looking to make a small profit while helping others.From Desperation to Exultation: One Man’s Venture into Peer-to-Peer LendingJohn Mitchell is an Ohio-based small business owner who found himself in such a predicament just last year. As the owner of the only hardware store in a small town, John’s store flourished the first few years it was open.After getting his inventory levels, pricing models, and management just right, he decided to expand his business by opening a second location in a neighboring town. John sunk all of his profits into opening his new store, which meant he was short on funds come tax time. However, knowing the success of his business, he thought he would simply get a small loan from the bank that housed his accounts and provided him with the initial loan he used to launch his business four years earlier.Unfortunately, he witnessed first-hand the effect the recession has had on lending regulations as the banker he’s known for years denied his loan application. If he couldn’t get a loan there, where could he?On the brink of despair, John took to the Internet to research loan options. After digging through forums and trying a few different searches, he ran across peer-to-peer lending. In less than a week after going through the quick and easy application process, he received a personal loan at a low rate for the amount he needed. A week later, John sent a check for the full amount to the IRS, and less than eight months later, he was able to pay off the loan with the profits from his new store!If you are a small business owner who has found yourself in a similar circumstance, peer-to-peer lending can do the same for you as well, but how does peer-to-peer lending work?How Peer-to-Peer Lending WorksA breakthrough product or service emerges every generation, and in the early 2000′s, the emerging breakthrough was social networking. From helping in the organization of overthrowing political regimes to staying in touch with friends and family members, social networking has had a profound effect on our daily lives. Now, it’s changing the small business financing landscape as well.Peer-to-peer lending is a modern social networking solution for small businesses in search of a way of securing alternative funding. The goal of peer-to-peer lending sites, such as Prosper and Lending Club, is simply to connect individual investors with those in need of funding, and these sites are becoming an increasingly useful tool for small business owners who are unable to secure funding from traditional lenders.Rather than jumping through endless hoops only to be denied by a bank, small businesses can receive funding via peer-to-peer lending in no time at all by following three simple steps:Step 1: Create a Profile and Loan ListingThere are a myriad of peer-to-peer lending networks to choose from, so your first step is to research the best ones and create a profile and loan listing on the site you choose. The loan listing is essentially a cost-free ad that indicates the amount of money you need and your desired interest rate.Step 2: Let the Bidding Process BeginAfter your listing goes live, investors have the opportunity to begin bidding on your listing, providing you with the interest rate and loan amount they are willing to offer you. A major advantage of this bidding process is the fact that it can intensify as more and more lenders begin competing for your business.When this happens, interest rates will begin dropping, potentially allowing you to obtain a much lower interest rate than you expected. It’s important to note, however, that your credit score, income, and debt-to-income ratio plays a role in the lending decision process.Step 3: Funding and Paying Back the LoanAnother benefit of borrowing from peer-to-peer lenders is that you can accept several bids to receive your requested loan amount. For instance, if you ask for $10,000 in your loan listing to pay your business taxes, you can acquire the amount from collecting $2,000 from five different borrowers.This makes it much easier for borrowers to receive the money they need. However, instead of making five separate payments, you would only make one payment, because the peer-to-peer lending site is responsible for dispersing the money to lenders until loans are repaid in full. They simply charge a small fee for this service.With increased lending regulations, banks are tightening their purse strings more than ever before, making it much more difficult for small businesses to receive the funding they need to expand their business or even pay their taxes. Thankfully, peer-to-peer lending has proven to be a worthy competitor in the small business lending marketplace. If you are a small business owner and find yourself unable to pay your taxes as April approaches, or backed taxes for that matter, a peer-to-peer loan is an ideal option.

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