Posts filed under 'ebay'
Hope that you are having a great weekend? If you are in the UK I hope that you also remembered to put your clocks back an hour! Although I know there are other countries for whom the clocks change as well I must admit I get confused as to which ones and didn’t want to confuse you and make you early for work!
A couple of Free Programmes that are worth checking out!
I downloaded a programme called Picasa the other day which is excellent. I have trouble organising all of the photos I have so I decided to check it. It’s definitely the best photo organiser I have come across and it’s 100% free for life!
I am now using Picasa to organize my photos! Take a look at it by going to this article I have added about Google’s Photo Software.
The other free programme that I love is Google Earth with which you can zoom in on both your ancestors towns and villages as well as current locations. You can read about that at Google Earth and download it.
An Unusual Week
This week has been a little different than normal as we have had to adjust to my partner recovering from last week’s knee operation - however we are getting there! We have also been kept busy with the continuing development of sites that we have identified as meeting the needs of our visitors. There has been a tremendous reaction to the launch of our Hobbies and Home eBook Store and if you want to take a look then just click on the link.
Alongside that we have also launched The Hobbies Blog again which you can take a look at by clicking on the link. You will find it packed with information on a whole range of Home and Hobby subjects and I am sure you will enjoy it!
Time For The Ancestors
GenMates continues to grow and grow and we are continuing to get tremendous publicity for it. if you haven’t visited recently then you can do so just by clicking on GenMates! If you haven’t joined yet then click on GenMates and sign up today!
We are also currently investigating establishing another Genealogy Membership site which will have some additional resources and information available. More news on that as it becomes available.
Watch Out On Ebay!
A couple of subscribers emailed me recently having purchased Adsense/Amazon or TurnKey Membership Sites from sellers on eBay. Despite bing promised instructions on how to operate the sites they had not been forthcoming and the people were struggling to see how they could make the sites work. They asked me to take a look at them and see if I could offer any advice.
As soon as I took a look at them it became obvious what the problems were. On the Adsense/Amazon sites the seller had left their own account details deeply embedded within the sites so that all the efforts at promoting them were lining the pockets of the sellers! In terms of the Turnkey Membership site the MySQL database had not been set up and all the members that were joining were in effect joining the seller’s lists!
I would strongly caution against anyone buying any website through eBay unless they are 100% confident that the seller is above board. You will want to be absolutely certain that they will provide the details of how to change publisher and affiliate information or set up the MySQL Database for you.
It really disgusts me that there are sellers out there who will treat their customers like this. On top of all of that many of them also tie you into expensive hosting packages and apply heavy if not to say extortionate fees if you want to move your hosting.
My VIP Site
Turning now to happier things! The development of the Internet Marketing Coaching site that those of you who are subscribed through Internet Business Creators will be aware of is going ahead at great speed.
Essentially I will be running a subscriber site/Blog where I will share exactly what I do to earn a very comfortable living which gives me freedom of choice. Price point set at something like $19.97 per month (reduced by 50% for subscribers).
The aim is to launch by 1st December 2006 - so November is going to be a busy month!
Finally….
Later in the month Santa will be making a welcome reappearance at his Advice Blog so make sure you stop by now and add him to your Favourites: Santa’s Advice Blog.
Oh by the way did I mention the great deal that is available if you like to watch Movies On Your iPod? Just click on that link!
Have a great week!
October 29th, 2006
The fundamental mistake made by many niche marketers is they create products based on what they think people want to buy. The correct way of deciding what niche product to create, is to find out what people are actually buying at the moment.
Here are five ways of discovering ideas for niche products which you can sell to make money:
1) Use Forums
With the rapid expansion of the internet, forums (or discussion groups or bulletin boards as they are also called) have proliferated. There are forums hosted all over the internet based on practically every theme imaginable.
Forums are websites where like minded people gather to discuss all sorts of issues pertaining to the theme of the forum. Some of the well moderated forums are extremely active and a good place to conduct research.
When it comes to finding ideas for niche products, you need to use the search engines to locate a number of forums on the theme you are interested in. For example, if you’re interested in needlepoint, you could enter needlepoint+bulletin board into the search engine.
Visit each forum and find out what questions people are asking. In addition, find out how many times similar questions are asked. The more frequently a question is asked across a number of forums, the more likely you have found a topic for your next niche product or website.
2) Visit Your Local Book Store
If you are completely stumped for ideas, a visit to your local book or magazine store is in order. People who are keen on a hobby almost always subscribe to related magazines, and if they buy magazines there’s a good chance they will buy niche products.
Your task is to discover what magazines are being sold and how quickly they move. It is best to visit a number of stores and compare the common magazines sold in all of them. Try to find out from the sales assistants how many copies they sell of the popular magazines you have identified.
A magazine sold in great number by each store, month after month, is a sure sign of a profitable niche.
3) Investigate eBay
eBay is one of the biggest, if not the biggest single market place on the planet. Millions of people buy a gigantic range of products month after month.
Go to eBay.com and scroll down the left hand menu, click on “All Categories” and scroll down to the bottom of the page that opens in your browser until you get to the section titled “Other Ways to Browse”. Included in that section are four sub-sections, each being ways to conduct your research:
i) eBay Keywords (popular terms being searched for)
ii) Common Searches
iii) eBay Pulse (a daily snapshot of current trends)
iv) Popular Products
From these four you will be able to spot a multitude of popular ideas for your next niche product.
4) Survey Your Website Visitors
If you have an existing website which receives a fair bit of traffic, you can survey that traffic using a popup. In order to entice people into taking the survey you will have to offer some kind of reward. You could even offer extra rewards for people who refer others to your survey.
Normally any web survey you conduct would have to be of a similar theme to your website, but it is possible to conduct a survey to find out your visitor’s interests and whether they would be prepared to spend any money on their interest.
They key is to ask simple questions in a manner that won’t lead your respondents to any particular answer. When designing your survey, keep in mind you will have to analyze the data and draw conclusions from it. This means keeping your questions “on topic”.
The simplest surveys to analyze are those constructed with multiple choice questions. The disadvantage of this is you don’t know for sure that the answers are absolute or close (i.e. “second best”).
5) Survey Your eMail List
If you have your own email list, you could survey them to find out what problems they are currently facing, or what interests they have. People on your email list will tend to answer more truthfully because there is a degree of trust between you and them.
This degree of trust not withstanding, you will still have to offer an incentive for your subscribers to take the survey. Design your survey the same as you would for a popup on your website.
June 24th, 2006
Over the years, eBay has introduced all sorts of different auction types, in an effort to give people more options when they buy and sell their things on eBay.
For every seller who doesn’t like the idea that their item might sell for a far lower price than they intend, there’s another who wants to shift hundreds of the same item quickly. eBay tries to cater to all tastes. This email gives you an overview of the different kinds of auctions and their advantages for you.
Normal Auctions.
These are the bread-and-butter of eBay, the auctions everyone knows: buyers bid, others outbid them, they bid again, and the winner gets the item. Simple.
Reserve Auctions.
Reserve auctions are for sellers who don’t want their items to sell for less than a certain price – a concept you’ll know about if you’re familiar with real auctions. They work just like normal auctions on eBay, except that the buyer will be told if their bid does not meet the reserve price you set, and they’ll need to bid again if they want the item. If no-one is willing to meet your price, then the auction is cancelled, and you keep the item.
Fixed Price (‘Buy it Now’) Auctions.
Buy it Now auctions can work in one of two ways. You can add a Buy it Now button to a normal auction, meaning that buyers can choose either to bid normally or to simply pay the asking price and avoid the whole bidding process. Some sellers, though, now cut out the auction process altogether and simply list all their items at fixed price. This lets you avoid all the complications of the auction format and simply list your items for how much you want them to sell for.
Recently, eBay added a twist to fixed price auctions: the ‘best offer’. This means that buyers can contact you to negotiate a price, which could be a good way to get sell some extra stock at a small discount. The only downside to reserve and fixed price auctions is that you pay a small extra fee to use these formats. In general, it is more worth using reserve auctions for higher-priced items and fixed price auctions for lower-priced ones – but remember that you can combine the two formats.
Multiple Item (‘Dutch’) Auctions.
These are auctions where you can sell more than one of a certain item. Dutch auctions can be done by bidding. Buyers bid a price and say how many items they want, and then everyone pays the lowest price that was bid by one of the winning bidders. If you have trouble getting your head around that, then don’t worry – everyone else does too! These auctions are very rare.
What is more common is when a seller has a lot of one item, and lists it using a combination of two auction types: a multiple-item fixed price auction. This just means that you can just say how many of the item you they have, and offer them at a fixed price per unit. Buyers can enter how many they want and then just click Buy it Now to get them.
June 5th, 2006
If you’ve ever read an article about eBay, you will have seen the kinds of incomes people make – it isn’t unusual to hear of people making thousands of dollars per month on eBay.
Next time you’re on eBay, take a look at how many PowerSellers there are: you’ll find quite a few. Now consider that every single one of one of them must be making at least $1,000 per month, as that’s eBay’s requirement for becoming a PowerSeller. Silver PowerSellers make at least $3,000 each month, while Gold PowerSellers make more than $10,000, and the Platinum level is $25,000. The top ranking is Titanium PowerSeller, and to qualify you must make at least $150,000 in sales every month!
The fact that these people exist gives you come idea of the income possibilities here. Most of them never set out to even set up a business on eBay – they simply started selling a few things, and then kept going. There are plenty of people whose full-time job is selling things on eBay, and some of them have been doing it for years now. Can you imagine that? Once they’ve bought the stock, everything else is pretty much pure profit for these people – they don’t need to pay for any business premises, staff, or anything else. There are multi-million pound businesses making less in actual profit than eBay PowerSellers do.
Even if you don’t want to quit your job and really go for it, you can still use eBay to make a significant second income. You can pack up orders during the week and take them down to the post office for delivery each Saturday. There are few other things you could be doing with your spare time that have anywhere near that kind of earning potential.
What’s more, eBay doesn’t care who you are, where you live, or what you look like: some PowerSellers are very old, or very young. Some live out in the middle of nowhere where selling on eBay is one of the few alternatives to farming or being very poor. eBay tears down the barriers to earning that the real world constantly puts up. There’s no job interview and no commuting involved – if you can post things, you can do it.
Put it this way: if you know where to get something reasonably cheaply that you could sell, then you can sell it on eBay – and since you can always get discounts for bulk at wholesale, that’s not exactly difficult. Buy a job lot of something in-demand cheaply, sell it on eBay, and you’re making money already, with no set-up costs.
If you want to dip your toe in the water before you commit to actually buying anything, then you can just sell things that you’ve got lying around in the house. Search through that cupboard of stuff you never use, and you’ll probably find you’ve got a few hundred dollars’ worth of stuff lying around in there! This is the power of eBay: there is always someone who wants what you’re selling, whatever it might be, and since they’ve come looking for you, you don’t even need to do anything to get them to buy it.
June 5th, 2006
