It may be a clich 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, you got the idea that a photo will increase the sales for your auction item. Now asking yourself, how do I get the photo on the auction site? That is a good question, the next paragraph will show you exactly how to take a photo for your online auction.

The first step is you need to get photo to your computer: this is simple, even for newbie but there are some ways to do it. The first way is a old technique that you take photo on normal camera and take to local development shop to get printed. Once you get the photo in hand, you need to scan it to your computer.

A scanner is cheap, you can get it for around $50 and up at local computer stores, 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 cameras are great to use, but 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. With these programs, you can use to adjust brightness and contrasts of the pictures, or you can even add some cool text over the photo to create a cool advertisement. If you have Adobe PhotoShop then it is perfect, this program is can help automate some tasks like processing photo and adding cool text, even create some effects to both graphic and text any way you like.

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.

Next, you will need to adjust the brightness, contrast and sharpness of the picture to the way you need. Try to get as much visible detail as possible. Remember that the better the picture is, the more bids you will get!

Adding text to your photo may or may not useful for you, since you can add many of text before and after the photo. But adding a short descriptive text can be good idea in some cases. 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!

Third, post the photo to the web: 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 normally allow you to upload only one picture on their site, additional pictures are charged, so you have to have some web space of your own in which to store the picture. A good place is Auctiva which have plug in store to your auction site, and the most important is free.

OK, now you got the idea to make a better photo and put as much pictures as you want for free. Good luck.