bubbajay.com

In one of my last few posts I talked a bit about affiliate marketing, and tody was reminded how simple and powerful it can be. 

I got an email from www.cafepress.com a site that prints t-shirts, hats, jackets, underwear, mugs…pretty much anything with artwork you provide or choose from their database.  All you do is promote it and if someone makes a purchase you get a small percentage.  Here’s the email I got today:

Now wether or not you’re an Obama fan, the fact is it’s creative marketing.  Someone is thinking ahead and setting up revenue streams.   I immediately went to my GoDaddy accout to search URL’s I could maybe make a site for.  I could register a domain like www.ChangeWonOnline.com and www.HopeWonOnline.com – which are available by the way, but a bunch of Obama affiliate links and promote them around the inauguration that’s coming up and probably make some money. 

Here’s another idea I had that I did act on…now I won’t give you all the details, but I used eBay’s Classified ads to direct traffic out of eBay legally, to a landing page I created.  Then via links on that page, I send them back to eBay but with my affiliate cookie tagging along.  If they make a purchase I get a cut.  Does it work – absolutely.  In fact in December I made $187 and only spent $10 on the eBay classified format ad.  I even made a one day commission of $47!  Not bad for doing nothing.

This particular campaign had over 615 page views in the month of December and over 500 in November.  And remember – I’m not selling anything!  No packing, shipping or inventory – the power of the affiliate program!

Whoa – I’m outta’ control – 2 eBay posts in a row?

Summer may seem a long way off since we just celebrated New Year’s, but it’ll be here before you know it. And what comes with Summer? Ebay Live of course!

If you haven’t attended an eBay Live conference, I suggest you do.

What is eBay Live? Ebay Live is a once a year convention, held by eBay. The eBay community gets together to network, celebrate, learn and teach. They’re beneficial to those new to eBay as well as an experienced PowerSeller. There are hundreds of vendors offering tools to make your work easier as well as sourcing for merchandise. But one of the most popular attractions at the Live conferences are the classes. There are dozens and dozens of free classes on just about every topic from How To List to Advanced Tax Strategies for PowerSellers.

Of course there’s the ever-popular closing ceremonies dinner where all of eBay’s employees line up to applaud ‘us’ and there’s a great buffet dinner and live entertainment. The two years I’ve attended I saw the B-52’s and Davey Jones (The Monkey’s…yes The Monkey’s).
There is always a presentation given by CEO Megg Whitman and eBay President Bill Cobb. These are usually a ’sign of things to come’ type presentations and are always entertaining if not enlightening.

This year it’s being held in Chicago from June 19th – 21st at McCormick Place West. McCormick Place West is a new facility opening this year.

How can you register? Usually registration opens around April of the year. I’ll let you know for sure when it’s live and give you a link too!

Sunday night… it was a long day. I got up at 5am to go the the Swap Meet to try and sell some of the things filling my garage. Our house is on the market and I’m trying to get lean…as far as clutter that is. In general, I’m the anti-packrat. I throw stuff away almost too quickly and then wish I’d kept it. But, I still manage to collect enough stuff overtime to fill my Trooper from front to back floor to ceiling.

Anyway, after a 6-hour stint at the lovely Oceanside Swap Meet, I was $500 the wealthier and 24 boxes of stuff lighter! WhooHooo

I grabbed some Chipotle for lunch and headed over the the Boy Scout Space Derby event. This is a fun tradition held anually by my youngest son’s Scout Pack. They’re balsa wood rockets that fly down a fishing line race track propelled by ….rubber band powered propellers.

My son, being the knucklehead he is, decided he intentionally didn’t want to make it aerodynamic. He wanted it completely square, like block of wood it is when you get it out of the box. He also insisted we not paint it, or finish off nicely. He wanted to win the “Procrastinator” award (which is a real category), even though he planned well ahead to not finish the darn thing.

Amazingly he finished 4th overall out of some 60 rockets – beating many of the wafe like aero shaped rockets that obviously hours were spent on. It almost irritated people and only made our family chuckle. We spent literally 5 minutes on the entire project and he flew through 5 rounds with only 1 loss on the track before his final round for third place – which he lost. Anyway, it was fun.

I then hurried home for an online conference I was hosting for AuctionSelling101.com – our eBay education website. We coveed eBay stores today, where I instructed the attending students on how search is different for eBay stores than it is for fixed price and auction format listings.

Then we spent another hour where I literally opened up a store, and built it before them online in the conference room where I can share my desktop while talking to them in my headphones. Very cool stuff.

We had some dinner, and went over to Starbucks for an hour or so to play some Monopoly with the family. Then hit the grocery store and then home for the night.

Turns out we had a stellar day on eBay with the bicycle clothing! We sold 5 of our new cycling jackets and vests, several pairs of arm and leg warmers, toe covers and shoe covers and several pairs of shorts. Gross sales of over $350 for the day in just my bicycle clothing. Very good news!

We have an order already in that should be arriving in another week, and I have an order put together to submit next week. I sent out an email to my 400 plus past customers of cyling products directing them to my eBay store letting them know we had full inventory and lots of new items in stock. I guess it worked! )

Selling on eBay is so easy. On our new site AuctionSelling101.com people are always asking, “what should I sell?”, or “what’s a good product to try and sell?”. I’ve given a list of basics to ask yourself to evaluate product ideas, but people always ask the same question.

They make it so much harder than they need to. I know I’ve been selling on eBay for years…7 or 8 now. But it’s just not that hard.

Example: The other day I was looking for things to sell. I am doing a lot of triathlons lately, and I already sell bicycle shorts, jerseys and other cycling related items. So I did a search for triathlon to see what I’d find.

I found several things under that heading that I could sell. One was a very simple small item. Cord locks. You know the kind you push the little button and stick a string through it. Check out the pictures below. Someone was already selling them, but for $4.00 I think, plus shipping. I know that’s highway robbery, so there’s a potential item.

So that’s what they are and from the image you probably get the idea.

Runners and triathletes use them to avoid tying their shoes when they’re in a hurry, or simply for the convenience of not having to tie them. I actually used these for one of my young boys for a year or so before he was able to tie his shoes…they worked great.

Anyway, I figured heck, it’s a small piece of plastic. How much could it possibly cost? So I did a Google search. The search returned hundreds of items. I also went to an International Trade site I’ve used before called Alibaba.com. It’s a free site and you can import things from overseas.

But the bottom line was I found them in lots of 100 from a place 100 miles from my house for about .30 cents per pair. I ordered them online, and had them in two days. I took a few photos – made a listing and put them up on eBay.

I made a fixed price listing for a pair of them for $2.99 and FREE SHIPPING. They were up for about 1 hour before they sold. Ok, .30 cents my cost, two stamps and an envelope to mail them – that’s another $75 cents and I’m into them for just barely over a dolloar and I sold them for three. I net $2.00. Not a killing – I get it. But a few hours later I sold two pairs to another person. So I made $6.00 that first day. I figure if I only make $10 a week, that’s $40/month. Again – not making a killing here, but it’s just one little simple item.

You get a dozen of these type of little things that you source yourself and then you’re making $500/month. Now that may not make a difference in your life, but for some it could be life changing… a car payment or the rent!

Oh yeh, if I import them myself from China I have to buy 5000 or 10000 at a pop, but they end up costing me around 5 cents a pair instead of 30 cents a pair. Of course it takes longer and I have to assume that I’ll actually sell that many, but I could put them up on eBay in lots of 100 for $100 making them only $1.00 each and I’d make an even greater profit margin. I’m sure you get the idea.

Let’s recap….

It’s EASY. Just get busy…

 

 

If you own your own website you’ve probably heard of the ‘Google Dance’. If you haven’t, let me explain.

Google updates it’s search engine index periodically. This normally turns the whole ranking of sites on the world’s most popular search engine on end, wreaking havoc with site owners as their rankings are disrupted. This is the ‘Dance’.

Ina Steiner of http://www.auctionbytes.com/ reported that eBay will soon be delivering it’s search results by ‘Best Match’ results by seller quality (PowerSeller status and selling track record) instead of strictly by relevance. eBay did not explain what selling track record meant, but it seems likely to be based on Detailed Seller Ratings that were rolled out recently in Feedback 2.0.

Currently, customers see default search results by “Time Ending Soonest,” so everyone has an equal chance of showing up at the top of results as listings end. But I believe eBay may change the default sort to Best Match in an effort to serve up more relevant, quality listings. (Currently shoppers on eBay may select Best Match from a drop-down menu on results pages.)

This is apparently being tested in a few categories on eBay France.

I think this means, your item will show up, but rather than showing up at the top of results when your listing is about to end, it may be buried on a lower page throughout the entire duration of your listing.

Steiner says “If eBay implements Best Match as the default sort, I think some sellers will be devastated. Shoppers, too, may be annoyed, particularly in some categories, and it will be interesting to see if they change their preferences to “Time: Ending Soonest,” though eBay is not likely to share this information with us.

My advice is to be sure and do your best to optimize your listings for whatever changes eBay plans to roll out in the next few months, and get ready for a rocky ride.”

You can read the entire article here http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y207/m08/abu0196/s01

Preparing ahead of time sounds like the ticket. I’ve already begun myself. Pray for the best and Prepare for the worst.

Yup – it’s live! We launched a few weeks ago and have had a great response to our initial offer. We already have several hundred members and the discussion forums are active. This past weekend we also had our first live conference with around 30 members in attendance.

Very cool stuff. We’re getting ready to add another 8-10 videos in the next week or so. We have more convferences lined up in our virtual classroom, and will be breaking them up into ability levels. Check it out if you get a chance HERE .

So as that little girl in Poltergeist says… “I’m baaaack” or something like that. )

The JN is for Jay and Nicole…awwww sweet isn’t it? ) Anyway, hopefully it’s the start of something great and profitable as we grow the line into triathlon gear, jerseys, arm and leg warmers, tights, gloves…all the cycling specific clothing.

I think that about wraps up the update. Still need to get back to SpaceHogs.net and get it updated, and keep plugging along on the other fronts. Hope to see you online!

So they call it the flying star. You get one when you get 10,000 unique feedbacks on eBay. And I got mine. )

I know it’s a small picture, but if you look closely it says 10,006. I actually have over 14,700 positive feedbacks, so that means over 4700 returning customers. Not bad.

What does it all mean? Not much really. Just a milestone I’d been shooting for, for quite some time. According to eBay it puts me in the top 1% of all members…for feedback that is.

25,000 anyone?

Wow, I’m almost embarrassed as I see I haven’t posted to my blog in 2 months. Of course it was the two busiest months of the year. Not just for me, but for most of you too I’d imagine. We went from Halloween, straight into Thanksgiving, followed by Christmas and then shortly thereafter New Years.

During that time I launched a highly successful website with my partner “Mr. Black”. We’re Black & Blue Marketing Corp., and the site is www.SpaceHogs.net . It’s an entire membership site dedicated to teaching others how to market to the Social Networking crowd – a.k.a. MySpace.

My eBay Education Specialist Certification has been put the test as I’ve been teaching literally 2-3 private lessons a week lately. I have a new Trading Assistant client, a new car dealer to list cars for, another new site of my own I’m working on, developing more tools for magazine sellers … what else. Ah yes – I’ve started importing products from China too. People always ask me how I keep track and I have no good answer. I just do. And sometimes… I just don’t )

If you’ve read my blog before you’ll probably recall a previous post about what I called EADD, or Entrepreneurial Attention Deficit Disorder. Well I was reading an old Forbes magazine today….June of ‘06. That alone should tell you how many directions I’m headed…I’m reading 6 month old magazines ’cause I can’t keep up!

Anyway, in the Forbes there was an article by Rich Karlgaard. He writes a regular article called Digital Rules for Forbes. He also has his own blog at http://blogs.forbes.com/digitalrules or you can check out his homepage at www.karlgaard.com . ANYWAY, he wrote a great article called “Blessed Are the Hypomanic”.

I won’t go into the whole thing, but I wanted to quote a bit of it…that explains so very eloquently what I feel about myself and this whole EADD thing I’ve tried to explain to others, but feel I muddle through.

Rich writes:

Last week our Preacher spoke about Spiritual Gifts. She identified a dozen or so, Leadership, evangelism, empathy and faith were at the top of the list – just what you’d expect in a church sermon. She surprisingly also mentioned entrepreneurial personality. “Some people are gifted at starting things,” she said. “Sadly, we anal-retentive types are too quick to come along and criticize entrepreneurs for not finishing their projects. That’s wrong. The entrepreneurial gift isn’t to manage and administer. It’s to start things.”

Very true. Some entrepreneurs I know are good at managing and administering, but not many. Most are a mix of visionary and hustler, with a dash of attention deficit disorder thrown in. They see opportunities the rest of us overlook. They are driven by a breathless energy to assemble resources in pursuit of those opportunities. Then soon after their baby is toddling, they get bored.”

Rich goes on to explain more about where some people feel that entrepreneurial spirit comes from, but I won’t quote the whole thing. I just really felt like he was talking about me in many ways…and it felt good to not feel like I was the only one who gets things going and moves on to the next…

Anyway, that’s my thought for the day…actually my quote of someone else’s thoughts, but I still recognized the brilliance in his writing, right? :O)

I’ll try to get some more regular posts going here shortly. Have a great week, and try and stick to those dang resolutions you made a week ago!