eBay Buying & Selling

Selling Your Digital Products

If you have created an ebook or guide of some sort, as I have done, and would like to sell copies of it in pdf  format, you are not allowed to do so on eBay.

However, there are other alternatives and the one that I prefer is called e-Junkie.

I now use e-Junkie to promote all of my guides.  It is very easy to use their service and you may sign up with them by clicking on the logo on our sidebar.

To read about my latest guide on using Quick Books Easy Start click on this link: Quick Books Tutorial

To your bookkeeping success,

Eleanor McCallum

A Few Tips for Taming the eBay Search Engine

Use the categories: Whenever you search, you’ll notice a list of categories at the side of your search results. If you just searched for the name of a CD, you should click the ‘CDs’ category to look at results in that category only. Why bother looking through a load of results that you don’t care about?

Spell wrongly: It’s a sad fact that many of the sellers on eBay just can’t spell. Whatever you’re looking for, try thinking of a few common misspellings – you might find a few items here that have slipped through the cracks.

Wildcard searches: You can put an asterisk (*) into a search phrase when you want to say ‘anything can go here’. For example, if you wanted to search for a 1950s car, you could search for ‘car 195*’. 195* will show results from any year in the 1950s.

In this order: If you put words in quotes (“”) then the only results shown will be ones that have all of the words between the quote marks. For example, searching for “Lord of the Rings” won’t give you any results that say, for example “Lord Robert Rings”.

Don’t get too tied up learning the ways of the search engine, though: a surprising number of eBay users don’t search at all, preferring to look through eBay’s category system and save their favourites in their browser.

To your eBay Business Success

Eleanor McCallum

Most of the people who make money from eBay don’t actually make all of that money on eBay. There are all sorts of ways you can use eBay to give your existing businesses a helping hand.

The Supply Side.

If you have any leftover stock or used items from another business you run, then why not sell them on eBay? You can make this a regular thing, using it to get rid of things that won’t sell for the premium you ask for in a shop, or items that are no longer in demand in the town or city where your business is based.

You can really make a lot of money this way, if you know what you’re doing. You will, of course, already be an expert in the items you’re selling, as you use them in your business, and you’ll know that the items are of high enough quality to be sellable. This is a whole new market for your old inventory!

Not only that, of course, but remember that your good eBay reputation will make you a great buyer! If there’s ever anything you want to get for your business, the chances are you’ll be able to get it on eBay for a discount.

The Sales Side.

Here, though, is where the true power of eBay lies. eBay give you an ‘About Me’ page, where you can write anything you like and link anywhere you like. This means that you can get traffic to your business’ website by linking to your website from your About Me page and linking to your About Me page from each auction.

To create an About Me page, just click on ‘Community’ on the toolbar, scroll to the bottom of the page, and click ‘Create an About Me page’. You then get the option to either enter your own HTML or let eBay guide you through the process. All you need to do is write a little about your website, link to it, and you’re done – you’ll notice that more people start to come to your site straight away.

There are thousands of people who swear by this technique to drive traffic from eBay to their website – with a little persuasive sales copy on your site, they say, you can sell directly to buyers, cutting out the eBay middleman. What’s more, all the traffic you’ll get will be targeted – because the people who click through were interested in your auction to begin with.

This can be a really powerful technique, especially if you’ve already got an e-commerce site. Even if you haven’t, you might find it worth your time to set up a website that does nothing but list your eBay inventory with a few dollars off each item, with a PayPal ‘Buy Now’ button for each item. Then simply make the link to your About Me page read ‘Visit my website for even more bargains!’, and you’re done.

Step 6: Work out a business plan: A business plan doesn’t need to be anything formal, just a few pages that outline the market opportunity you’ve spotted, your strategy, strengths and weaknesses of the plan and a brief budget. This is more for you than it is for anyone else.

Step 7: Invest and expand: This is the time to throw money at the problem. Buy inventory, and start spending more time on your business. Set a goal number of sales each week, increasing it each time.

Step 8: Make it official: Once you’ve made a few thousand dollars worth of sales, you should really register yourself as a business. Don’t worry, it’s not expensive or hard to do – a lawyer is the best person to help you through the process.

Step 9: Automate: You’ll probably find that you’re writing the same things again and again in emails or item descriptions. This is the time to give up on the manual method and turn to automated software that can create listings for you, and respond to completed auctions and payments with whatever message you provide.

Step 10: Never give up: Even when it looks like it’s all going wrong, don’t stop trying until you succeed. If you keep working at it then you’ll almost always find that you make a real breakthrough just when things are starting to look desperate.

Once you get into the swing of things, you might start thinking that you should quit your job and take up eBay selling part time. But it’s not always as easy as that – there are all sorts of factors that you need to consider. My next post will weigh up the case for and against taking up eBay full-time.

Ebay Buying & Selling is proudly hosted by Hostgator

When Kevin Riley held his celebrated Traffic Generation Lab Workshop
in Internet marketing’s Warrior Forum, the praise poured in for this
fantastic step-by-step workshop. And, those who put the synergistic
traffic-generating system to full use profited from steady streams of
well-targeted traffic.

Then, Kevin Riley packaged the whole workshop (step-by-step video
lessons, transcripts in a handy manual, task layouts, worksheets,
templates) on a DVD-ROM. Pop this in your computer and a whole
workshop is at your fingertips. And, the menu leads you through one
step at a time – just like attending a real workshop.

By the time you complete the four-week workshop, you’ll have a
powerful system in place that will pump streams of traffic to your
sites.

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Right now (and I don’t know how long this will last) Kevin is giving
limited access to a Secret Deal. Right now, you can get this
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price – a FANTASTIC DEAL).

But, it won’t last forever. Go now to:

TRAFFIC GENERATION LAB

Watch the important video (it’s short and to the point). Then,
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To multiple streams of traffic,

Eleanor McCallum

Step 1: Identify your market. Take a while to sit and watch for what sells and what doesn’t out of the items you’re interested in. Any market research data you can collect will be very useful to you later on. You’ll probably see the ‘sweet spots’ quite quickly – those one or two items that always seem to sell for a good price.

Step 2: Watch the competition. Before you invest any money, see what the other sellers in your category are up to, and what their strategies are. Pay special attention to any flaws their auctions might have, because this is where you can move in and beat them at their own game.

Step 3: Find a product: Look for a supplier for whatever it is you want to sell, and see what the best rates you can get are – don’t be afraid to look into quite a few to get the best deal. If the eBay prices you’ve seen are higher than the supplier’s, then you’re set.

Step 4: Start small: Don’t throw too much money on your idea right away – get started slowly, see what works and what doesn’t, and learn as you go. Remember that it’s very cheap to try out even the craziest ideas on eBay, and who knows, they might just work!

Step 5: Test and repeat. Keep trying different strategies until you find something that works, and then don’t be ashamed to keep doing it, again and again. The chances are that you’ve just found a good niche.