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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.

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.

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!

As you will quickly discover you really can publish a book and sell a million copies without ever writing a single word yourself!

* 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!

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 repackage, rebundle, and otherwise use resell rights titles to create your own unique packages

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.

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.

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:

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!

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.

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.

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.

* 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.