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Why You Have to
Speculate to Accumulate:
It’s a favourite dream of mine to run an eBay business where every
item I list fetches a minimum £300 pure profit each time. And
I know it can be done. I also know, if I manage to make at
least £300 from every item I list on eBay I only have to sell ten
items each week to bank three times more money than I regularly make
from a full week spent listing postcards on eBay – about £1,000.
But
how do I guarantee whatever I buy to resell on eBay really will make
me £300 or more pure profit each time?
Well,
in my opinion, there is just one way to do it and it’s usually done
at offline auction and it involves scrutinising the catalogue very
carefully and arriving on sale day with your catalogue clearly
marked with potential realisation values for items most likely to
fetch high prices on eBay.
Then
if such items fetch no bids at offline salerooms and auctioneers
offer a final ridiculously low bidding price – ‘to take it off their
hands’ – you buy those items, even if that means forking out a few
hundred quid for individual lots.
Let me
tell you how it’s done based on the following very common offline
auction scenario:
The
auctioneer refers to a lot by number and says: “What am I bid for
this valuable XYZ? Shall we say £1,000 to start us off?”
No one
bids.
Auctioneer: “£500 then, who’ll offer me £500?”
Again
no one bids.
Auctioneer: “Okay, I can’t much lower, so how about £100?”
Still
no bids.
Now
this is where it gets very interesting, because once he reaches his
very lowest acceptable price, the auctioneer will usually have his
gavel held high ready to bang on the table to declare the lot
unsold. At this point, with gavel raised, he’ll say something
like:
“Okay
£50 and that’s my final offer. £50! No one want it at
£50?”
That’s
when you jump in to bid because a split second later the hammer’s
going to bang on the table and, if you’ve done your homework
correctly, this is when you’re going to make possibly hundreds or
thousands of pounds pure profit on eBay.
The
fact is, at local auction sales, with just a few bidders present,
you will often find quality items attracting no bids at all, usually
because bidders at the event are saving their cash for later lots or
because those items fall outside their own field of interest.
Another common reason is that experienced bidders are missing on
the day and no one wants to risk bids on unfamiliar items. However,
just because no one bids on an item does not mean it won’t resell
for profit. In fact it often means quite the opposite.
What
you have to do is obtain your catalogue several days before the
sale, before viewing day if you can, and you research past auctions
on eBay for similar items. This way you can see how much other
people have made selling those items on eBay and, most importantly,
how many people bid first time round who might also place bids on
your listings.
You
research past auctions by clicking on ‘Advanced Search’ near the top
of any eBay page, then next page you key words to describe your item
into the search box, you also tick ‘Completed Auctions’. Then,
far right on the following page, at ‘Sort By’, you choose ‘Price:
Highest First’ from the drop down menu, and if similar items have
reached high prices recently on eBay this is where you’ll see how
much those items fetched and how many people were bidding.
Warning:
It’s important to
note how many people actually bid on an item, as opposed to how many
bids were placed. That’s because number of bids represents an
accumulation of bids from individual bidders. So two people,
for example, being outbid and increasing their bids on one item, can
show up as fifty or sixty bids on eBay’s completed auction facility.
To the untrained eye it may appear that fifty people want a specific
item, making it a very good idea to buy as many of those items as
possible to relist on eBay and hopefully attract double figure
bidders next time round.
But
there’s a major problem here, namely that if fifty bids are placed,
but only two people are bidding, the auction will end with possibly
just one person still wanting the item and that’s probably the
person who will bid on your copycat listing.
If no
one else subsequently bids against your remaining bidder, or Heaven
forbid your target no longer wants the item, your product will not
attract the same interest as its earlier counterpart and may even go
unsold. That means a potential loss of a hundred quid or maybe
more on an item you thought would sell, at a high price.
The
way to counter this problem is to ignore the number of bids shown
outside completed listings with high finishing prices and look
inside the listing instead.
Towards the top of the page, click on ‘History’ which reveals not
only number of bids placed but also number of bidders. Number
of bidders is the important feature of items you consider buying at
auction for possible high profits on eBay and there must be at least
three, preferably more bidders, which in turn indicates at least two
or more people may bid on a similar item.
Another Tip:
Try to list copycat items as quickly as possible after their high
priced counterpart or you risk remaining bidders purchasing similar
items elsewhere or just losing interest in the product. Either
way your profits may be severely restricted.
Let me
tell you more about the amazing potential of speculative bidding
based on personal experience at a book sale I visit in North
Yorkshire about four times a year, which also features lots of
postcards and other paper collectibles, and it’s these latter items
that interest me, not books, until recently that is.
At the
last sale, as I set down to sleep through three or four hundred
individual book lots until postcards finally came up for sale, I
decided to compare auctioneers’ estimates for individual books
against actual prices on the day, and I also hoped to locate some of
those items’ resell prices on eBay.
As the
sale progressed I saw books estimated at £100 to £200 apiece sell
for thousands of pounds, and some go unsold even at the auctioneer’s
lowest acceptable price, usually £50.
I made
notes in the catalogue about final bid prices and I also added
buyers’ names, notably those I know to be eBay sellers.
That
day’s work, rather just a few hours, turned out to be the most
lucrative of my entire life, and what I learned that day will set me
in good stead for my latest business start up as an antiquarian book
seller on eBay.
There’s one more thing I should tell you, and it concerns someone
I’ve known for many years. This man sells bric-a-brac at local
boot sales and I thought he knew as much about antiquarian books as
I did, which is nothing at all!
And
there he was throwing his arms into the air, bidding £50 on all of
those books no-one else wanted, at the same time sending text
messages on his mobile phone. Or that is what I thought he was
doing.
It
turned out he wasn’t sending text messages and over coffee after the
sale he told me, alongside bric-a-brac, he also sells antiquarian
books on eBay. And it turned out what I thought was the
texting facility on a mobile phone was actually a message feature
where he had previously stored information compiled from past
completed auctions on eBay for books being sold that day.
A few
days later I keyed book titles from the sale into eBay’s search
engine and discovered fifty similar items listed, including twenty
by my boot sale friend, every one of which eventually fetched
between one hundred and five hundred pounds pure profit on eBay!
Are
you impressed? So was I and that’s why antiquarian books are
now an essential feature of my stock buying expeditions at local
auction salerooms, also at boot sales and flea markets where you’ll
often find high price books priced in pennies by inexperienced
sellers.
Will eBay Work for Me? Will This Book
Work for Me?
The answer is always the
same: No, It Will Not Work for You, Not In a Million Years!
>
Continue
Be Careful What You Say in eMails, They Can
Earn You Negative Feedback.
I’m
going to have a moan today, but it’s a moan with a purpose, and it
concerns the way you are perceived by others and how a momentary
lapse in how you present yourself in emails can have terrible
consequences on eBay.
>
Continue
Recession
Busting and the eBay Dollar Shop, Charity & Thrift Shop Challenge!
Some people say there’s a recession afoot which can only be really
bad news! Incredibly bad news! Unless of course you’re one of those
people whose business positively flourishes during a recession, and,
even if you don’t have a business likely to flourish in a recession,
isn’t it time you got down to growing one?
In fact, though they may not know it, many people already have a
recession proof business, namely on eBay, where some amazing
opportunities present themselves if and when a recession takes hold.
When recession strikes people turn to buying items second hand
rather than new, they look for cheap rather than expensive goods,
they look to cut costs anyway they can and that means not paying
travel and parking fees to purchase those budget buys on the high
street. It’s much better to cut costs to the bone by buying online
and having items delivered at a fraction of the cost of travelling
to obtain those items personally.
Where better for those people to buy second hand goods than on eBay,
once a top class collectibles site, and latterly selling everything
from one off high value antiques to really low price second hand and
budget goods?
Consider that television news channels and newspapers are forever
reporting massive losses on the high street, with virtually every
shop being affected by the credit crunch and pending recession, with
one or two notable exceptions. Those notable exceptions are Dollar
Shops (called Pound Shops in the UK) and Charity and Thrift Shops
where record sales figures are being reported for second hand and
deeply discounted goods. One major charity reports a run on baby
hardware, such as cots and pushchairs, sometimes costing hundreds of
dollars brand new, but easily fetching $50 to $100 second hand and
almost certainly much more when relisted on eBay. Dollar Shops also
report record sales, unsurprisingly because evidence show much of
what’s being bought is resold on eBay for two or three pounds or
dollars profit per sale.
It’s those Dollar and Pound Shops that interest me most, and might
also interest you, when you consider all you need do to profit is
buy a few test items, invest £50/$50 or so, then list those fifty
items on eBay, see what profits and Second Chance Offers ensue, then
go spend the whole lot on more Dollar/Pound Shop stuff. Buy another
fifty test items, test those, if all goes well, now you have one
hundred repeat profit items. Then simply ‘Rinse and Repeat’, do the
same thing next week, and the week after that, and so on.
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Why
Resell Rights Titles are the Perfect eBay Product.
Imagine having a product you buy just
once, describe and list it one time only on eBay, and that product
continues selling week after week, month after month, year after
year. The product never has to be restocked and it costs just
pennies to list on eBay, you can in fact list this product a great
many times in one eBay listing and pay just a few pennies each time.
This product is also one of the most popular and profitable products
of all, on and off eBay, and it’s responsible for creating more
millionaires than any other business alone.
That product is information, information
in all its various forms, including eBooks and software, web
templates and picture folders, private label rights articles, and
much more besides. So, although we refer mainly to eBooks in
article you should use the same advice and information to make
really big profits selling virtually any of those other items.
An eBook is
an electronic version of a book (‘electronic book’ contracted to
‘eBook’) and can take several formats, including Exe and PDF
(Portable Document Format). You can’t see eBooks,
you can’t touch them, but they can generate tens of thousands of
pounds a month for online and offline marketers, on eBay or
thousands of other places besides.
But where do you get those eBooks, preferably hundreds of different
eBooks to make money daily on eBay? Do you write them
yourself? Do you pay someone else to write them for you?
Do you know
how much time you’d spend writing your own book? Do you know
how much it would cost to pay a freelance writer to create an eBook
for you?
You could
spend years writing your own eBook, you could spend thousands of
pounds having someone create an eBook for you.
Enough to put
anyone off eBook publishing for life, wouldn’t you think?
Unless, of
course, you’ve already heard about ‘Resell Rights Titles’, being
literally information products that allow others to publish those
titles and sell them as often as they like at whatever price takes
their fancy.
Resell Rights mean you
can legally print and market other people’s books, and sell as many
copies as you like with no ongoing fees or royalties of any kind.
You can sell copies at £10, £20, £100 a time, or repackage products
for even higher prices.
It’s as if the product
was yours, one you wrote yourself, one you paid writers and
marketing experts thousands of pounds to create for you!
Resell Rights
Are Perfect for Running an Information Business on eBay
As you will quickly
discover you really can publish a book and sell a million copies
without ever writing a single word yourself!
Also:
* Most titles
are very high quality, created by experienced writers, and come with
professionally created sales letters and web pages for you to use.
*
You can resell products
any way you like, either individually or by combining several titles
into your own unique product.
* It’s the easiest, fastest way to begin selling
information, it means you can begin selling literally the same day
your obtain your chosen resell rights titles.
*
No writing skills are needed, ever, and you can still market
the world’s best-selling books to countless eager buyers.
*
You can start on a very
low budget, sometimes just ten or twenty pounds for your first
product and plough back your profits into building an extensive
library of best-selling titles to sell as back end or lead products.
So you have no excuse at all for not getting into this easy
profitable business, starting today!
Defining
‘Resell Rights’
This report uses the term ‘Resell
Rights’ in the widest possible sense, to mean any information
product you have rights to market which you did not write yourself
or pay to have someone else create for you.
Sadly, a one hundred per cent acceptable
definition of the term ‘Resell Rights’ is impossible given it means
different things in different countries and even between individual
creators and resellers. That should present no problems at all
for you, as long as you always check what rights you have in a
product and you always abide by those rights.
Typically ‘Resell Rights’ describes
several methods of selling other people’s products and encompasses:
* Rights to sell copies to readers
* Rights to sell copies with
resell rights to other publishers
* Rights to repackage, rebundle,
and otherwise use resell rights titles to create your own unique
packages
* Rights to distribute free copies
* Rights to sell wherever you
like, on eBay, for instance.
But Be Warned:
On rare occasions you will find some restrictions placed on your
entitlement to market a specific resell rights title, so you must
always check titles individually to ensure you abide by the rules.
Sometimes, for example, you are
precluded from selling a specific eBook on eBay, sometimes you’ll be
prevented from repackaging a product or distributing it free of
charge.
Virtually all resell rights titles
include details inside the product or as a separate file alongside
indicating what you can and can not do with the title concerned.
If you can’t find those details, contact the person who supplied the
package and ask for a definition in writing.
Keep two copies of the reply in separate
safe places in case you need them in future.
VERY IMPORTANT
Just as quality and content vary between
resell rights packages, so do the peripherals, such as web sites,
sales letters, advertising and marketing materials, thank you pages,
product instructions, and more.
Some products have web sites, others
don’t. Some can be rebranded with your business name and affiliate
details, some can’t. Some include links and referrals back to your
supplier and act as a source of free traffic for that person, some
don’t. Some restrict the price you charge, others let you charge
whatever you like. Some must be sold as stand alone products; others
can be repackaged, offered in membership sites, and so on.
Some come with ready made sales
materials and you can upload your web page and product in minutes
and begin selling right away. NOT A GOOD IDEA!
By far the very best way to make big
money selling eBooks is to work hard at differentiating your offer
from others selling much the same item. You do this by
creating your own sales materials, by offering bonus gifts, better
still by repackaging your version into something very different,
even unique, from whatever anyone else is selling.
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A Sneaky Way to Pay for
Google AdWords and Get 25% FREE On Top.
AdWords are cost-effective
but they can deplete a person’s advertising budget in very short
time; sadly so because there is an easy way to get the exact same
number of clicks for much lower cost.
There’s nothing secret about this technique, the only reason most
people don’t use it is because they haven’t spotted this easy way to
get about one in very five clicks free from Google.
This tip also focuses on what must surely be a loophole in Google’s
AdWords program, and there is just one line on a typical AdWords
advertisement that causes Google to lose so much money this way.
Before I let you in on the secret, let’s take a look at a typical
Google AdWords promotion:
Be a Mystery Shopper
Get Paid to Shop or Even
Start Your Own Mystery Shopping Business
SITE URL HERE
DESTINATION URL HERE
Very often the destination url and the site url are the same, but
not always, especially where affiliates key the product owner’s url
into ‘SITE URL HERE’ and their own affiliate url into ‘DESTINATION
URL HERE’.
You will hear many pay-per-click experts advising you to use two
different urls in your AdWords promotion, usually the product
owner’s site first followed by the affiliate link in the last line
of the promotion. I’m not an expert but I don’t think two
different urls are always a good idea. Let me explain why.
Basically I use AdWords to lead people directly to my newsletter
sign up page and I have always entered the same url at ‘SITE URL
HERE’ and ‘DESTINATION URL HERE’. I worried if I was correct
in doing so, I wondered what the benefits were to obeying the
experts and using different urls in those two locations.
Just recently I stopped worrying when, over several weeks, I noticed
I had more people sign up to my newsletter than had actually clicked
on my AdWords promotion to visit the sign up page.
I tested my findings over other newsletter sign up pages, using
different Google AdWords and, in time, the same pattern emerged and
again more people signed up to my newsletter than showed up as
clicks inside my AdWords account.
I don’t get people to sign up for my newsletters any other way than
via Google AdWords promotions, so, unless people are finding their
way to my sign up page without clicking on a Google AdWords
promotion, then very definitely the only reason behind so many sign
ups is that some people are keying my url from the ad. into their
browsers without clicking on the ad.
The reason I’m confident this happens quite frequently is that I key
in urls myself rather than click on other people’s AdWords. I
don’t do it just to save those people money. The real reason
is, having searched using my chosen key words and phrases, I like to
visit most of the ads and web pages returned by Google. But
clicking on an AdWords promotion takes me away from the list Google
provides for me and ultimately I might lose that list and forget
what keywords I used to locate it originally. Rather than
risking that loss I open another browser and set it on my desktop
alongside the page of Google AdWords and web sites. I key
AdWords urls into the new browser page, read those site, close them,
then return to checking other web sites and AdWords provided by
Google without ever closing that original listing page.
I’m sure many people do exactly the same, accounting for why many
more people are likely to visit your destination page than are
likely to click on your Google AdWord.
In my own case I reckon this little loophole provides about 25 per
cent more site visits than I actually pay for.
There is just one real problem here, namely that you must feature
your intended destination url in the fourth line of your Google
AdWord, as well as the last one. Some affiliate urls are long
and complicated and don’t fit into whatever space is available in
that fourth line. Because many affiliate urls are long drawn
out and complicated you’ll find many people too lazy to key them
into their browsers; they’ll click on the link instead and spend
more of your hard earned cash. One answer is not to use
affiliate urls in your AdWord promotions, have the clickable link on
your own web page or blog instead, on a Squidoo site or article
online. As long as the destination page isn’t too difficult to
key directly into the browser and as long as it fits space available
in your Google AdWord, you’re likely to enjoy all that freebie
traffic generated by Google’s loophole!
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Why I Think They
Banned Digital Download Products on eBay.
It’s no longer front page news, everyone
knows now that downloadable products are banned from virtually the
entire worldwide eBay marketplace.
Suggested reasons for the ban were several, some saying the
overwhelming majority of digital products were inexpensive,
sometimes shoddy, and as such they gave eBay and its sellers a bad
reputation. eBay itself said eBooks were often used by buyers and
sellers to grow feedback fast and in a minority of cases people used
the glowing feedback typically received this way to build
credibility on which to promote scams later.
I’m not personally convinced either excuse was the main reason for
banning digital goods. I rather think eBay viewed eBooks, often
packed with affiliate links, as a means of helping eBay sellers make
money from products sold outside their site.
Until recently, it has been very easy to sell hundreds or even
thousands of downloadable eBooks every month, priced in pennies and
cents, and to include affiliate links for more expensive products
which effectively meant the bulk of some sellers’ income came
outside of eBay. There was a hidden benefit to all this inexpensive
buying, in that many people dislike buying expensive items from
people they don’t yet know and don’t yet trust, so cheap eBooks were
a perfect way to generate that first sale. So they were perfect for
promoting affiliate products and growing mailings lists which would
be used to promote more expensive products potentially for many
years to come.
eBay has always banned links inside product listings which take
members outside of eBay, potentially to spend money at that other
site, so I’m inclined to think those digital products were also
banned to prevent outside eBay selling.
So does the ban on digital products mean sellers can no longer use
cheap eBooks and other digital products to grow their outside eBay
income? Not at all, in fact eBay has simply cleaned up the sinister,
slightly grubby image of eBooks that prevailed before the ban. They
did genuine sellers a big favour, both reducing competition and also
increasing credibility for honest eBook sellers who can still sell
cheap eBooks on eBay, but only in physical format, on CD, for
example, or other storage device.
eBay has made the process just a little bit harder, and instead of
taking payment and directing buyers seconds later to download their
product, today those items have to be created in physical format,
carefully packed, and quickly posted. eBay eBook selling is a tad
more up market than in pre-ban days.
Sellers can still charge pennies for their eBooks and grow massive
mailing lists and generous profits from affiliate and back end sales
outside of eBay, only today it takes a bit longer and costs slightly
more! The difference is almost negligible! Hence the reason I don’t
believe what eBay says about banning digital items to prevent people
garnering feedback to promote scams later. I’m betting back end
selling prompted the ban and I’m just as certain the new system has
little affected savvy eBay eBook sellers’ back end profits. Except
to reduce competition that is, and that’s a major benefit for
genuine sellers.
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Why ClickBank is a Newbie Affiliate’s Dream
Come True.
So many affiliates consider ClickBank THE world’s
most important affiliate site, mainly because the company keeps a
tight rein on what products are allowed on their site and will
quickly remove any product or vendor that falls short of the
company’s very high standards of quality control and customer care.
But there are other
reasons why big earners turn to ClickBank when seeking new affiliate
products as well as for selling their own digital download items.
The main reason is
that ClickBank has been around for several years, they know how the
digital product business works, they understand what affiliates and
product owners want from a professional affiliate company and they
work very hard to achieve and exceed that standard.
ClickBank is
reliable, user friendly, and boasts never to have missed a scheduled
payment to affiliates or product owners; I know that’s true for at
least seven years of the company’s existence.
Moreover, their
customer service for affiliates, product owners, buyers and
enquirers is second to none; when you need help you ask for it and
you can expect an answer within twenty four hours, sometimes much
less. And it’s this aspect of genuinely caring for
affiliates and vendors that brings the highest accolades for
ClickBank because, unlike many other major companies, this one
actually sends personal answers to whatever questions are asked and
you’ll never be fobbed off with autoresponder messages or referred
to the FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) section because human
beings are not inclined to help.
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Four Ways to Market ClickBank Affiliate
Products Through eBay – Even After the Digital Download Products Ban.
There have been big changes at eBay lately, such
as to feedback, and also to digital products being banned at the
site. A preponderance of cheapie digital downloads, in most
cases, were designed to grow a mailing list for outside eBay sales,
notably of affiliate products. Alongside eBooks, other selling
and non-selling techniques also allowed sellers to grow a mailing
list with intention to sell other products, notably affiliate
products, outside of eBay. By far the best place for most
sellers to promote outside eBay sales was the ‘About Me’ pages.
Until, that is,
changes were made recently to how ‘About Me’ pages work. In
another of their very confusing statements eBay says it is no longer
possible to link to outside sites via ‘About Me’ pages.
Additionally, sign up pages, for newsletters and mailing lists, for
example, are also banned from ‘About Me’ pages.
At face value, that
suggests virtually all avenues for growing an outside mailing list
‘on’ eBay have been effectively closed. But notice I said ‘on’
eBay, not the same as ‘through’ eBay, because there are still ways
to grow a mailing list via the eBay system.
These ideas will
help:
* You can
create a signature file, detailing affiliate products such as
available at ClickBank, and append it to all your outgoing answers
to questions asked by eBay members. WARNING: You must not do
this via the eBay message system; that is totally against the rules.
Instead, bear in mind that all questions sent through the eBay
system are duplicated in sellers’ outside eBay email boxes.
This is the place to answer those questions and where also to add
the signature file containing affiliate offers or invitations to
sign up for your newsletter or mailing list.
* You can
create compliments slips featuring Internet sites selling your own
or affiliate products. The secret to success here is to have
several compliments slips created, and several web sites featuring
lots of different products, following which you personalise
compliments slips to feature products most closely resembling
whatever someone has just purchased from you on eBay.
* You can’t
highlight an outside web site in your listings, ‘About Me’ page, or
elsewhere, overtly that is, directly through the eBay system.
But you can create a banner featuring your outside web site url and
use this as the graphic for your eBay shop. Just be sure the
url doesn’t cover the entire banner, that could look contrived and
might be removed. Instead add a neat graphic, position the url
at the top, bottom or side of the banner. Make the url
readable, not overwhelming, to people visiting your shop.
* You can also
add a copyright notice with outside web site address to
illustrations, somewhere unobtrusive and unlikely to obliterate
essential parts of your graphic. So if you sell pet medicines,
for example, and your outside site is www.mypetmeds.whateversuffix,
you could add ‘Copyright: www.mypetmeds.whateversuffix’ to scanned
images and photographs used in your listings.
Go on give it a try,
all it takes is a little creative thinking, and it could increase
your profits considerably.
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