The benefits don't stop there. As a merchant on a classified site, you can enjoy:

•A store that never closes. Your goods are for sale 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The Internet never turns off.

•A mall of online shoppers. Think of a classified site as a virtual shopping mall, with your grouping of ads under your own virtual storefront. By having a storefront, this allows you to have your own web page and listings, under umbrella of classified site.

•A chain reaction of shopping. "Real" shoppers go to a mall to visit one store, but often they end up browsing through all of stores in mall. The same is true of virtual shoppers. Even when they visit a classified site looking for one particular thing, they're likely to "spill over" to your storefront out of curiosity. At very least, it leads to advertising for your store; at best, business.

•An advantage over pure Web merchants. Your classified site will pit you against wily online vendors who only sell their wares on Web. This is where your brick-and-mortar business comes in handy. It's proven that shoppers seem to trust online merchants that have a real address and a real store somewhere.

•A solution to intricacies of Internet. Many classified sites can help with setting up your ads and with designing your storefront, providing you with instant IT IQ. For your buyers, sites offer security that Web shoppers demand to protect them from identify theft and fraud.

As mentioned before, many classified sites charge absolutely nothing for all of these benefits. The listings, shopping traffic, sense of business community, advertising-you receive all of these perks for free. Oh, and don't forget your piece of $117 billion dollar pie.

4. Demonstrate very strong credibility in your copy.

By showing all years of experience you have under your belt and many authority figures that recommend your products, you can bully customer into submission. The customer feels that it will be very foolish not to trust you when all these other top authorities do. Having someone whom potential customer admires and respects endorse your product can create magic here.

5. Show that you are not desperate for sale.

This is another technique that can place customer at ease or on defensive. Here you want to indicate that you’re already doing so well (mostly from benefits you’ve derived from product) that small investment they are making will make no big difference to you. This may seem at first to be counterproductive but it works! Again if prospect ever senses that you’re just dying to get that sale you can scare them away.

Another way of stating this is to show that you’re actually creating competition for yourself by sharing this product with them.

6. Tell them what will happen if they don’t get your product.

Most likely your product is satisfying a need or solving a problem otherwise you’ll not be selling it. So you can heighten prospect’s awareness of problems that they’ll continue to have if they choose not to purchase your product or service. Here is where you really want to ‘rub their faces in mud’. Spell out, in no uncertain words, pain they’ll endure and loss they will suffer.

These six approaches are all based on a deep psychological principle that controls us all - Our desire heightens for whatever is denied us or just appears to be denied us.

This reminds me of story I read some time ago of a small hotel that had problems with guests fishing from balcony despite clear warning signs to contrary placed in all rooms. In a simple experiment, hotel management removed “no fishing” signs and problem practically disappeared overnight! I guess that thrill of fishing from balcony vaporized with signs—fishing was no longer denied.

Try making your product or service appear ‘denied’ to casual prospect and see what happens to dollars ‘fished’ out of your advertisement account.

It’s about time to go out there and be a respectable “bully”!