There is a gorilla, or if you prefer, an untraditional way, of reaching and researching your target market using online auctions. Online auctions have become so popular that it's now possible to use them to extend your offline marketing initiatives at a price point no traditional, offline marketing method can touch.

There is a lot of talk about online auctions, because people enjoy them, the variety of products and the buying and selling experience they offer, have made them some of the most popular sites on the web today. For businesses, they offer all kinds of new possibilities, from the sales and inventory management, to the marketing research and web site promotion medium they offer.

Auctions get an estimated 70 million visitors per month. With all this traffic some promote their products in order to take advantage of this visibility to targeted groups of potential customers. Leveraging the auction's combined traffic to promote your products can give you more exposure than any single web site traffic could.

Among the first to realize the potential of auction were the computer and hardware vendors who quickly realized how to move obsolete inventory using them. Today many brick and mortar stores realize that their unsold inventory is doing them no good collecting dust on their shelves, so it's an effective way to offer them to interested buyers, letting the buyer fix the selling price and generate the extra income from stale inventory that could, otherwise become a total loss.

From a marketing perspective some use auctions for new product price testing and testing sales copywriting efforts. It's an effective and inexpensive way to test new product prices, to see what people are willing to pay for a product, offering features like your new product promises. Some sell their products at three or four different online auctions, and then calculate the average selling price in order to determine the suggested retail selling price before the launch of a new product. Similarly some test the copywriting to determine the best description and conversion potential of ads and brochures before getting them printed.

In order to get started all is needed is an online auction store. For 16$ per month and a bit of page editing this eBay site will allow you to advertise your store with links back to your main site and your products information pages. You'll be able to design ads offering product details with all the proper images, effective copy writing and of course the proper use of keywords. This will allow you to position this auction post in front of the proper audience, leveraging the power of the auctions own, search engine and driving more traffic to your site, generating interest for your product.

Online auctions were never intended to complement offline marketing and promotion efforts, they were created to move products and create value by bringing buyers and sellers together. But over the years these sites have attracted so many buyers, they've become a great traffic generation tool for your products, giving your web site and your company more exposure and international visibility.

Although in many cases, they won't replace your offline initiatives, but for a lot of products, online auctions are an excellent alternative to the traditional ways of moving inventory, gathering marketing information and generating visibility for your products, your site and your company.