Here is the original post about this. I bought a $100 gift card from a local business and planned to auction it off as a way to get the attention of a local business I want to work with. Ran the auction from 7PM Aug 22 to 7PM Aug 23. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19L7GiQsKX/ 14 bids from 9 different people... Aug 22 7:07p - $1 James 7:10p- $25 Lynne 7:16p - $30 Kim R 7:25p - $35 Dan 7:27p - $50 Lynne 7:40p - $55 Casey 8:05p - $60 Jess 8:05p - $60 Tracy 8:27p - $61 Mary 11:49P -$62 Casey Aug 23 10:20a - $65 Darra 11:15a - $75 Lynne 3:15p - $76 Casey 6:57p - $77 Lynne A change from my original plan is to take the winning amount and buy (in this case) a $77 gift card to another business....calling it "Auction It Forward". Sadly, there was no participation from the restaurant. Email and DMs have gone unanswered. If I happen to hear from them. I'll update. For this next auction, I will communicate with the business BEFORE I buy the gift card so I get participation.

To recap...I buy $100 gift cards to local restaurants and auction them off on my local Facebook page with 5020 followers. The idea is this gets me in conversations with business owners I want to work with. In this example I paid $100 for the gift card...it sold for $73...which means it cost me $27 to get a conversation with someone I can help. You can see how it worked in Round 1 here This time I had the full participation of the owner. She promoted the auction on her page and allowed me to offer the winning bid price to all the bidders. The bidding started at 7PM on Sept 10 and ended at 7PM on Sept 11. 7:03PM $1 Casey 7:03PM $5 Lynne (Winner of Auction 1) 7:09PM $15 Loreen 7:25PM $50 Andrea 8:28PM $51 Donna 8:38PM $55 Colleen 8:39PM $60 Mary 8:48PM $65 Sheryl 10:26PM $71 Casey 10:33PM $72 Sean September 11 3:25PM $73 Andrea The winning bidder paid me immediately. I sent the follow up offer to the other bidders with an expiration date of September 19th. They'll have to show the personalized certificate I DM'd them to claim it. Just had one say she's going to go buy one this week....another one said "will do". Unfortunately, this restaurant doesn't have a way to send a link where people can buy a gift card online. I spoke with a Toast rep yesterday and he doesn't believe they can create a link which would allow a restaurant to sell a $100 face value gift card for less than face value... $73 or whatever. I told him to put that in the suggestion box. It would allow their clients to create their own groupon-style promos and keep all the money themselves. So, I love this method of getting in conversations with business owners. I'd pay $27 all day for those conversations. Step 2 is getting them signed up as a client. Any questions or suggestions welcome. You can see the auction here: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Ejy8Qqx4V/

I haven't seen this approach mentioned and would love some feedback, especially if you see a flaw I'm missing. If you sell to local businesses , web design, social media, SEO, etc. , one of the biggest challenges is simply getting the business owner's attention. They're buried with people trying to sell them the same things. I'm going to try a provide-value-first approach this week: 1. Buy a $100 gift card from a local business you'd like to work with. 2. Auction it on your business Facebook page or personal page, starting at $1, and tag the business so they can watch the auction happening. 3. Let's say it's a $100 gift card from a massage therapist. You get 29 bidders and the winning bid is $79. 4. The winner pays you $79 and gets the $100 gift card. Your cost to get the attention of that business owner was $21. ($100-$79) Let's say you now have 28 other people who have demonstrated that they're interested in buying what that business sells. So you approach the massage therapist: "29 people bid on the $100 gift card I auctioned. It sold for $79. Would you be willing to let the other bidders buy a $100 gift card from you for the same $79 winning price?" If she says yes, you send the losing bidders a link to purchase directly from the massage therapist for $79, with a deadline. The money goes directly to the massage therapist. You're out of the transaction. So instead of just cold calling the owner saying: "Can I help you get more customers?" You've spent $21, bought something from their business, created some social media attention for them, and potentially brought them several new customers before you've tried to sell them anything. Then you can ask: "Would you like me to do more of this?" That's the experiment I'm going to try. What am I missing? Where does this break? And how would you improve it? Thanks!