How To Sell Your Car Online Fast

Saturday, May 17, 2008

Back in the old days almost all private sellers placed ads in the local newspaper and maybe even in the auto shopper journals whenever they wanted to sell a car. But the internet has added a whole new dimension to car selling that can help you sell your car on line fast. Of course, you can still use the old print methods too but you really need to consider adding internet advertising too.

It's just simply an established fact that you will make more money if you sell your car yourself rather than trade it in at a car dealer. In fact, if your car is less than 4-5 years old, you can lose several thousands of dollars by trading it into the dealer instead of selling it yourself. And if your car is more than 5 years old, you are really going to take a hit by accepting a car dealer's trade. So the amount of profit that you stand to make by selling your car certainly more than makes the whole process of doing so worthwhile.

If you want to sell your car fast, newspaper advertising is probably not the way to go anymore either as newspapers still charge outrageous amounts for classified ads that have very few words to really be able to describe the car and no pictures at that. Savvy shoppers have come to recognize that if they really want to get as much information as possible about used cars in their area before test driving them, they need to go online where the information on each car can be abundant, even including photos.

So if you want to sell your car on line you have to first set an advertising budget. Very often you can get an ad on one of the most popular car classified sites for about $20-25 for a month. So if you want to spread your ad around to 3-4 different sites this would be an ad budget of $75-100 for that month. When you compare that cost with most newspaper ads that cost around $35 for just a week you can begin to see why you can often do much better for the money you spend when you sell your car on line instead of through local print.

You also tend to get much faster response times from online ads too, simply because they are reaching a much larger audience than your local newspaper. Buyers that live outside the distribution area of your newspaper may be willing to drive a little extra to get the car they want, and most online car sales sites let visitors search their entire region by a 50-100 mile radius. So your ad will simply be put in front of more people when you sell your car on line than you could expect otherwise, and that usually translates to faster sales.

So if you have been thinking about how to sell your car on line, just make a search for online used car sales sites, and pick a few that you think would be popular in your area. Search through the listings and you will most likely see that lots of folks are coming to realize that selling cars online is the best way to go these days.

Jim Johnson writes on many consumer related topics including autos. You can find out more about how to sell my car and sell my used car by visiting our Auto Review website.