Tuesday, June 30, 2009

7 Ways to Make More Money on eBay

Making money on eBay requires consistent effort and attention to detail. Here is a great article with tips to help eBay sellers make more money on eBay. The article is by Sean Eyring from HammerTap. HammerTap is our recommended eBay research solution. At the end of the article is some information about HammerTap and how it can help eBay sellers make more money on eBay. Karen and I have been using HammerTap for the past six years with good results.

Make Your eBay Listings Get the Attention they Deserve
We've all been there. You visit a Web site looking for information.. You're bowled over with bright "circus" colors, animations going everywhere, and text that's hard to read.

The site almost begs you to click your browser's "back" button. Many eBay listings look the same way. If you want to make more money on eBay follow these tips.

eBay's "Create Your Listing" page makes it easy to use backgrounds, change text colors, add graphics, and so on. But the question is, does the look of the listing increase your chance to sell your product? Read on to learn when using eBay designs makes sense... and "cents."

"Branding" Yourself Online

Is there a time when consistency of appearance counts? Here's a quick mental exercise. Think of the Coca-Cola logo. What colors are used? If you thought red and white, their multi-million dollar branding campaigns did their job.

Why not blue and white? It doesn't matter, really. What matters is that they use red and white over and over to "brand" themselves into your mind. Put a Coke, a Pepsi and a Dr. Pepper at the bottom of a cooler filled with ice water. Even without being able to read the labels, if I want a Dr. Pepper, I reach for the dark red can.

Sure, ass an eBay seller you don't have the advertising budget of Coke or Pepsi. But you have one advantage. If you sell products on eBay, especially in any kind of specialty "niche" market, it's likely that many of the same people will see several of your listings. Here's where branding comes in.

Create a consistent and unique look for your eBay listings. Use the same background image if you choose to use one. Use the same text color and font. Create a unique "theme" and use it for all your listings.

Consistency Pays

What's the value of consistency? On eBay, people may fear buying from those they don't know. That's why eBay has their feedback system. It gives you some confidence in the person you're buying from.

If a person recognizes the "look" of your eBay listings, you increase your chances to sell to them. If an eBay buyer purchases from you and has a good experience, the next time they recognize one of your listings, you further increase your odds of selling to them. The more sales you make the more money you make on eBay.

Designing Your Unique "Look"

So now that you know the value of a consistent design, how do you create your own look? I'm an online marketing consultant. When I work with a client, the first question I ask is "Who is your audience?"

If you're mostly selling electronics, you probably don't want to go with a border with flowers and dolls. On the other hand, if you specialize in selling teddy bears and plush toys, this may fit your audience perfectly.

Think of your audience. Are they predominantly male or female? Is your product high-tech or high-touch in nature? Take a moment to write down what you know about potential buyers of your products. Keep this in mind when designing the look to use with your listings. But there are a few absolute do's and don'ts.

Absolute Design No-No's

Make your eBay listings easy to read. First of all, let's choose the text color and background. Use black on white or on another VERY light color. Never use light text on a dark background. Especially on older monitors, it can be too difficult to read.

Use a font size that's large enough to read easily. Stay away from small print that many readers will have to strain their eyes to read.

Use a "sans-serif" font like Arial or Verdanna. "Serif" fonts like Times New Roman are easy to read in print, which is why they're used in newspapers and novels. Studies have shown however, they are much harder to read on a monitor.

Composing Your eBay Listings for Maximum Effect

Studies have shown that any Web page (such as your eBay listing) has between 3 and 10 seconds to grab the interest of your reader. If you haven't made at least one "benefit" statement they connect to, chances are they're gone with a quick click of their browser's "back" button. And they're gone for good.

So how do you catch the attention of your audience in seconds? Simple. Put your best benefits at the top, and make them easy to read. Bullet points are great for that. Give short, to-the-point descriptions of why the reader should by your product.

Benefits vs. Features

I've read dozens of books on marketing. I'll save you a lot of reading. Here's the thing I've learned that's more important than any other. It's the value of clearly stating your product's benefits.

Let me illustrate the difference between two ads for computers, one based on features, the next based on benefits:

Features-based

3.0 Gigahertz Processor
256 Megabyte Video Card
350 Gigabyte Hard Drive
Benefits-based

Fast processor lets you get more done quicker
Powerful graphics card lets you play all the latest games
Roomy hard drive, so you can install all your programs and still have room for music and video
A feature describes an attribute of a product. A benefit tells why you should care. For example, stating a computer has 256 Megabytes of video RAM says nothing to the average computer user. It's a feature. But they may be purchasing the computer for someone who's really into the latest computer games. Many of these require a lot of video RAM.

Now we've turned the feature into a benefit by telling how that feature makes the product more valuable. Make sense? But one of the strangest things I see as a marketer is how even professionally produced advertisements costing thousands of dollars to create and sent out break this one simple rule.

Well there you have it. A quick Marketing 101 course as it applies to creating a winning "brand" for your auctions. We also described how to sell more often by focusing on benefits, rather than features.

Make the most of your auctions with research!

If you want to make more money on eBay, determining what works and what doesn't when it comes to your listings requires research. Anything less puts you at risk of not making the sale or not making as much as you could be on each sale. A research tool like HammerTap helps eBay sellers bypass the costly trial and error process by quickly giving them the key information they need for profitable online auctions.

Start making more money on eBay now: Take HammerTap for a FREE test drive? We'll give you 10 days to put HammerTap to work for you. Use its power to determine:

Successful Keywords
Best Auction Type For Your Products
Best Listing Duration
Which Listing Features Improve Your Chance to Sell and Which Increase the Closing Price
Optimal Start Price to Use
Best Day of the Week to Start and End Your Auctions
Seasonal Trends
And much more!
As a bonus, you'll receive a 10-lesson Power to Profit course to help you immediately see the effects research can have on your auctions. We'll also throw in selling tips from Industry Experts in our members-only Auctionography newsletter.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

eBay Secrets: Tips to Make Higher Profits on eBay

One of the secrets to making money on eBay is to reduce your costs, fees and expenses. Here are ten eBay secrets to help you make more profits on eBay. Many of these are very simple and easy to implement. If you do all of them your savings can really add up and your eBay profits will increase.

1. Save eBay Photo Hosting and Scheduling Fees
There are two fees paid by almost every eBay seller that you can reduce or avoid altogether. The first is the photo hosting fee. eBay gives you the first picture free. After that they charge 15-cents per photo. Since I always use at least 3 or 4 photos in a listing, this can add up. The other is the scheduling fee. eBay charges 10-cents when you schedule an auction to list at a specific time. Unless you can create and launch your auctions at exactly the right time of day, almost every seller uses this service. You can avoid or reduce these by using an auction management service to launch your auctions and host your photos. A free program is Auctiva at Auctiva.com. A low cost program -and the one I prefer is InkFrog at InkFrog.com. Although Auctiva is free, I prefer InkFrog at $9.95 a month as you get a lot more services and features that easily make the extra little expense worth the while.

2. Pay your eBay fees using a credit card with a cash back program.
This is not exactly an eBay secret, but it is amazing how many people pass up this free source of money. Check your credit cards to see which ones offer a cash back program. Using these types of programs can result in between 1.5% and 3% credits back to your card. Some sellers prefer to get airline points, but personally I always go for the cash. I have a card that pays a 2.5% cash-back credit. Last year it saved me $726 in fees.

3. Control Your Insertion Fees
Pay attention to the tiered pricing in your eBay Insertion Fees. Pricing an item between $10 and $24.99 will cost 55 cents. Pricing an item between $25 and $49 will cost $1.00. Analyze your costs here and determine if it is more cost effective to set your starting price in the lower tier to save money on your insertion fees. Assuming your item sells, pricing the item lower will cost less in fees than pricing it in the higher tier. Here is a link to the eBay fee schedule: http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/fees.html

4. Use listing Upgrades Selectively
Listing upgrades can get expensive. A major eBay secret is to experiment with anything that costs money to make sure it works. eBay charges hefty fees for bold, highlight, enlarged photos, and other upgrades. Run listings with upgrades and without and determine if the upgrades have any effect on your sales. The Bold listing upgrade tends to work the best for me, whereas I rarely use the other ones. On the other hand, when I tested my bold feature on my auctions, I found there were two categories of product where it didn't matter. Cancelling the bold listing on those categories saved me over $600 a year in listing fees.

5. Use the new eBay Fixed Price Listing Feature
You can now list an unlimited number of items at a fixed price for 30 days for 15¢ in books, movies and music and 35¢ in other categories. The final value fees are higher in some categories and cheaper in others but items in fixed price listings come up in search whereas eBay store listings do not.

6. Open an eBay Store
Running all auctions gets expensive. You can add items to store inventory for 5 cents per item for a 30 day listing. Basic store subscriptions start at $9.99. Although there is a monthly fee for an eBay store, in the long run the lower listing fees can easily offset this. Be sure and use your auctions to cross sell to your store by placing links in your auctions to your store listings.

7. Save non-paying bidder fees with mutual cancellations
If you've sold an item but can't go through with the sale, or the buyer refused to complete the sale, you can cancel the transaction in the eBay Dispute Resolution Center and you may receive a credit on your Final Value Fee.

8. Always file Unpaid Item Disputes
You will see these on your eBay Selling Manager if a buyer has not paid for an item within 7 days. After filing the Unpaid Item Dispute, the buyer might pay. If buyers don't pay within another 7 days, eBay will refund your Final Value Fees. However, you want to be a little careful doing this when your feedback score is low as these buyers often leave you a negative feedback anyway. I think its better to use number 7 above as once a transaction is cancelled, the buyer can no longer leave feedback.

9. Use Free Relist Credits
On average, about one-half of all auction listings result in a sale. eBay will give you one free relisting credit on auction listings that do not sell. You can relist unsold items by selecting the "relist your item" drop down on the unsold items module on you're My eBay Page. If the relisted item sells, eBay will credit the Insertion Fees back to your account.

10. Major eBay Secret, Watch your packaging costs
A key eBay secret of professional sellers is Don't over-package your items. The more packing material you use, the more your item will weigh. More weight = more postage. In some cases, reducing your packaging by just one ounce can mean the difference in a few dollars per package.

Packaging materials can get expensive. Check with your local gift shop, kitchen shop or Radio Shack. These stores will often give you boxes and packing material for free so they don't have to recycle it.

When shipping items USPS Priority Mail, we use the paper Tyvek envelopes instead of a box if a product in not highly breakable. Boxes weigh more than the envelopes, and cost more to ship.

If an item weighs less than 14 ounces, then use First Class instead of priority or parcel. You can purchase your own poly mailers and use First Class for these lighter items. Poly mailing bags cost a few cents when ordered in quantity. You won't have to spend the minimum $4.90 to ship an 8 oz item just to get the free Priority Mail supplies.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Ways to Make Money on the Internet


Unless you're a freegan and have found a way to live entirely off the grid, you probably need some sort of steady income in order to survive. The traditional way to earn money, of course, is by having a job. You work for a company or start your own, and the work you do earns you money, which you spend on things like a mortgage, rent, food, clothing, utilities and entertainment.
Most people typically work from their company's central location, a physical space where everyone from that organization gathers to exchange ideas and organize their efforts. But a few lucky souls have found ways to make money within the comfort of their own home. With the Internet, an ever-changing arena for businesses, some looking to earn money are finding ways to do so. Some forms are best for part-time endeavors for those looking to make a little extra money on the side, while others can lead to full-time jobs and Internet success stories.
We've put together a list of our top 5 ways to make money on the Internet, in no particular order. On the next page, we'll start with an old favorite

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Make money Selling Stuff on eBay


By ohagwu henry
­It's a fairly straightforward concept that most people are familiar with by now -- if you have a bunch of stuff that you don't necessarily need but others want and are willing to pay extremely inflated prices for, you can auction off the items on eBay or other online auction sites. Simply gather your goods, create a seller's profile and start selling.


It sounds simple, but takes some practice to sell successfully. Creating persuasive and legitimate product pages for the goods you're selling will help get buyers interested. It's also important to set reasonable minimum bids to ensure that people will buy. And remember to deliver the kind of customer service that will garner positive feedback ratings and to communicate with buyers to let them know you're reliable. The more positive feedback you receive, the more people will be willing to do business with you. And that, of course, means more money.


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