Brace yourself for more fee increases.

AuctionWatch has begun to charge for their auction management service and image hosting, eBay has restructured their image hosting fees and auction sellers are feeling a dozen hands sliding in their pockets, picking away at their profit margins. The more you learn to handle in-house, the less reliant you'll be on third-party services. For instance, you can include multiple pictures in your auctions without paying any extra fees to image-hosting and auction sites.

There are three things that you can do to keep a little extra cash on your side of the ledger:

1) Use the server space that your ISP provides with your internet service
2) Learn basic HTML and embed your images into your auction descriptions
3) Learn to composite your images into one, easily viewable file

Most Internet Service Providers - including AOL - give you server space with your Internet account. You can upload your picture files to this space and become your own image hosting service.

To transfer your files to your server space, you'll need an FTP program. I recommend a program that's been around a long time and is still one of the best: WsFTP. You can download the Pro or Limited Edition versions for evaluation at http://www.ftpplanet.com/download.htm. Its a simple program to use and comes with a great tutorial page that explains the basics of file transferring at http://www.ftpplanet.com/ftpresources/basics.htm. If you are subscribed to AOL, check out http://twaze.com/aolpix/aolintro.html for a nice explanation on how to upload your files.

Once you begin transferring images to your server, you'll want to be able to display those images in your auction. Become very familiar with one line of HTML: Replace the URL with the appropriate one that hosts your picture.

Type this link into your auction description using HTML, then cut and paste the entire description into the appropriate field of the auction site (or into your auction management software program). Here's an entire template that I created and used for several years. It's simple, but gets the job done. Simply replace the information in Caps.

REPLACE WITH YOUR TITLE REPLACE WITH YOUR ITEM DESCRIPTION Click Here to See ALL the Auctions I have running! GOOD LUCK AND HAPPY BIDDING!

The "img src" should be the URL where your auction picture is located. The link to your auctions should be the URL of the page that lists all of the auctions you have currently running. To find this URL on eBay, for example, simply do a seller search of your own user name. Cut and paste the resulting URL into the appropriate line in the template above.

Once you've filled out all of the information in the template, copy and paste all of the text into the description box on eBay's "Sell Your Item" page, and you're in business. (If you are using PC-based auction management software, paste the text into the description box.)

What if you want to show several images of your item? Make the following changes to your template:

REPLACE WITH YOUR TITLE REPLACE WITH YOUR ITEM DESCRIPTION Click Here to See ALL the Auctions I have running! GOOD LUCK AND HAPPY BIDDING!

Notice that all I've done is added two
(break) tags and copied and pasted my tag. Of course, the URLs for each image should reflect the locations of each picture.

One thing you should be aware of: If you embed your image into the HTML that you are entering into the eBay description box, the camera icon will not show up next to your auction. The camera icon indicates that there is a picture of the item, and people are much more likely to click on an auction if they think there is an image. To get the icon to display, I create a small "Satisfaction Guaranteed" image that I manually enter into the "Picture URL" on eBay's "Sell Your Item" page.

To get the icon to display, you may want to create a small "Satisfaction Guaranteed" image that you upload to your server and link to in the "Picture URL" on eBay's "Sell Your Item" page. I'll show you how to make such an image in the next part of this article.

For those of you who have a good understanding of HTML, this may seem pretty basic, but for users who have no prior experience, this is a simple template that can serve you well. No, it's not going to list your auctions automatically, but it will allow you to access your own privately hosted images and use them in your auctions.

Next time: Managing the size of your image files and creating composite images.