How do I even start selling on eBay?

First of all, start small. Set up an eBay account and buy a few things to learn the process and get a feel for how eBay works. eBay selling and working at home is not for everyone. And it is ok if it isn’t right for you. Sell some of your own things before you invest any money in other products to sell. Understand that eBay is more than taking pictures and typing on the computer – you need to be familiar with how to edit photos, shipping, customer service, and using Paypal. Take your time and learn about these things before you jump in and go for it full-time.

Many full-time eBayers are known as “professional scavengers.” This is intended to be humorous, of course, but what we do is frequent garage sales, second hand stores, estate sales, flea markets – venues where we can find items that have been tossed aside by someone in a rush to unload them. You’ll need to decide what you want to sell. If you aren’t passionate about your product line, your buyers won’t be either, and you are setting yourself up for failure. Do you collect something? Are you an expert on something? Do you have access to a supply of something?

Once you are comfortable with the whole process, don’t be afraid to take a risk every now and then. I am often asked, “But what if I buy an item and it doesn’t sell?” Well, that’s ok. You can always relist it. You can mark it down and sell it for what you paid for it and move on. You don’t want to buy a truckload of 1,000 items without having tested them out first, but you do want to experiment with different products – you may find something profitable to sell on a regular basis.

Make small investments and try new products to test them out and see what kind of results you’ll get. Don’t be afraid to experiment with new products and try new things. eBay is constantly evolving and no trend will last forever. Experience is the best teacher.

If you are brand new to eBay, or have never sold on eBay before, take the
eBay Selling Audio Tour

Suzanne Wells

eBay Power Seller

eBay Consultant

Actually, since I’ve had such a great experience with this, I would like to extend this call for guest bloggers. If anyone out there has an idea for a post they’d like to write for FreshBlogger, please contact me and we’ll talk about it. I like the idea of mixing in a little bit of guest content with my own articles to keep the fresh in FreshBlogger.

If you missed any of the guest posts, here they are again:

9 Writing Tips for Good Blogging from Pearl of Fresh Perspectives
Another Perspective on Using Sponsored Reviews from Eddy E of Luke 16.10
Blogging: Short Term Pain for Long Term Gain from Adnan of Blogtrepreneur
Challenging Yourself to Comment from SnosKred
Get More Done with the 80/20 Rule from Vince Cordic
How To NOT Make Money on the Internet from Sephy of Sephy’s Platzish

I’ve been blogging on and off for a few years, but by far my current blog, Sephy’s Platzish, is the most consistent effort I’ve made at blogging. More recently, I have discovered social blogging sites such as BUMPzee and have created the US Blogs community there.

How to NOT make money on the Internet, plus tips for keeping safe out there.

It’s a common occurrence. You open your email, and see something similar to this:

COMPANY REPERESENTATIVE NEEDED(URGENT)
From the Desk of
Mr. Wu Ming Cheng
Director of Recruitment
CMEC HUBEI CO.
China.
www.cmec.com

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am Mr. Wu Ming Cheng, Director of Recruitment, Hubei Machinery, Equipment import & export Corporation (CMEC HUBEI CO.) We are a company who deal on Mechanical equipment, Hardware and minerals, Electrical products, Medical & Chemicals, Light industrial products and Office equipment and export into the Canada/America/UK and Europe.

We are searching for representatives who can help us establish a medium of getting to our costumers in the Canada/America and Europe as well as making payments through you to us.

Please if you are interested in serving as a link between our company and our customers in America /Canada we will be glad. Please contact us for more information. Subject to your satisfaction you will be given the opportunity to negotiate the mode of which we will pay for your services as our representative in Canada/America. If you are interested and willing to be of help, kindly acknowledge the receipt of this mail and send your reply to (wu_ming_cheng2000(at)yahoo.com.cn).

I want to assure you that this will be of no cost to you and there will be reward for the assistance you will render.

Thanks in advance

Mr. Wu Ming Cheng

It certainly appears promising, a job where you can work from home, even negotiate your method of payment and, best of all, is of no cost to you. You might even go to the website mentioned in the email. If you did visit the site, you would see that it is in Chinese and appears to be legitimate. Therefore, some of the grammatical and spelling errors in the text might make sense as this is a company in China. What would happen if you replied to this mail?

Within a day or two, you receive a response which says that you just need to give them your address and phone number in order to get things going with regards to working for them. Eventually, you receive notification that there is a customer ready to pay the company through you, and that you will need to confirm your contact information with them. A few days later, you receive a check in the mail from the customer and it contains a check – usually from a completely different company altogether, and for a large amount of money. At this stage, you may be somewhat suspicious of this, but still take the check to the bank as you have been told that you will receive a percentage – generally ten percent – of the check.

This is the point where the problems begin. If you are in the US, Federal law requires banks to make funds from checks available to you within a short period of time – generally two to five days. While you are waiting for the bank to make the funds available, you will be told that it is important that the money (less your “compensation”) is transferred to the company – by Western Union, MoneyGram or bank transfer – as soon as is possible. After some time, your bank will find out that the paying bank that the check was originally written on will not cover the cost of the check. At this point, you will be responsible for covering the entire cost of the check; additionally, you may find yourself facing legal problems relating to passing a fake check.

If you have been on the Internet for a long time, you may have recognized that Wu Ming Cheng’s email quoted above was a scam. You might wonder how someone could become a victim of this kind of scam. However, you need to take into account that not everyone knows the same things that you or I do. Thousands of people go onto the Internet for the first time every day, and many of them are using a computer for the first time as well. Many of the newcomers to the online world are older people who are more trusting than some of us who are younger, which makes them easier targets for scammers to swindle them out of their hard-earned life savings. An example of this comes from a story published in the New Yorker which chronicles how a psychotherapist managed to fall victim to various types of scams, including ones where he received fraudulent checks. In the end, it was his trusting of these scammers which has led him to spending time in a Federal prison after cashing these fake checks.

If you ever receive a mail that you are not certain is a scam, here are some pointers to assist you:

• Where did the mail come from? If it was sent from, or asks you to reply to, a free email provider such as Yahoo or Hotmail, it is most likely a scam.
• What are you being asked to do? Job scam emails, such as the one above, generally will ask you to fill a very generic role such as “Company Representative”, if a job title is mentioned at all.
• Does the language in the message make sense? Although I had mentioned that some language errors in a message from a Chinese company could be deemed acceptable, the reality is that if the actual company were contacting you, they would ensure that the language and especially the spelling would be correct. Note that in the message above, the word “REPERESENTATIVE” is spelled wrong and that the person who had written the email has confused the words “customer” and “costumer” at one point. In general, if the message contains many spelling and grammatical errors, it is likely a scam.
• Is there a sense of urgency in the mail? The one word that should pop out to you in the mail above is “URGENT”. If this were the real company contacting you, they would not tell you that the mail is Urgent. Most likely, there would be a deadline for filing an application or submitting a resume.

If you are still uncertain, you can use the Scam-O-Matic to check the mail. The site is able to tell you almost all the time if a mail is a scam email and is a very useful site. Also, any email addresses that are submitted as part of the scam mail are put onto a blacklist, and puts the content of the email on the internet for others who may have received the same mail to see that it is a scam.

Also, if you do receive an email that you suspect is a scam, treat it like any other spam that you may receive and do not reply to it. If you do, that tells the scammer that they have reached a valid email address and you may soon find yourself receiving many more scams via email. You might also think that sending them a note to unsubscribe or remove yourself from their list is useful, but it only does the same thing as replying to the mail – tells the scammer that your email is valid.

Some tips for keeping yourself safe out there

You may have seen some of these tips, and you may have not. Nevertheless, it never hurts to have a refresher of some simple ways of making sure you don’t find yourself facing Identity Theft or having your e-mail inundated by spam.

• Only give out personal information via email to people you know and trust.
• If you need to provide personal information, especially critical information such as Social Security or Tax ID numbers, through a website, make sure that it is a secure website. The easiest way to do this is to check the address bar. In most browsers, it will change color to indicate a secure connection; additionally, the site’s address will begin with “https://” instead of “http://”. You should also see a padlock in the address bar, status bar, or both.
• Only use your real details when you need to. This will probably seem extreme to many of you, and maybe it is, but this is something that I have been doing for a long time. In general, I never give a website my full name; if I can register without a name, address, etc. I will do it; if that information is required then I will use my initials along with a fake address and a zipcode in a different city to the one that I live in. There is nothing that says you absolutely have to use your real details when signing up for a website, so why should you unless it involves you receiving something tangible?
• Use unique email addresses when signing up for websites. One thing that I love about Gmail is that you can use what is called “plus-addressing”, where you can use one address and transform it into an unlimited number of email addresses simply by using the plus sign. For example, when I signed up at BUMPzee, I signed up using my regular email address and putting “+bz” on it ({username}+bz@gmail.com). This is useful to find out if a site is distributing email addresses to other groups.

This is my first attempt at guest posting, so I hope I don’t disappoint. Thanks Ray for giving me the opportunity to share my thoughts with your readers, you’ve got a great blog here!

It’s a sad fact that most people who have every intention of making money online fail because they don’t take action…

Working online is a constant battle. You’re constantly bombarded with distractions everywhere you look. You’re just about to get some work done – but wait – “I’ll just watch this quick 2 minute video before I start working.” The next thing you know it’s 2 hours later, and you still haven’t done any work.

Work Smarter, Not Harder!

Making money online is not rocket science. In fact, almost anyone with some basic computer and reasoning skills can make money online. So what’s the difference between those who fail to make money online and those who succeed? The successful ones set a goal, and they only work on tasks that bring them closer to achieving their goal. That doesn’t mean they work harder or longer than you, and it doesn’t mean they know more than you either. It simply means they work smarter than you.

How do you work smarter?

We’re all limited by time. There are only so many hours in a day, only so many days in a year, and only so many years in a lifetime. So in order to work smarter, we have to make good use of our time. Making good use of your time means eliminating any unnecessary tasks, and only focusing on the most important tasks that bring you closer to your goal. Is watching that funny video your friend sent you going to help you reach your goal? I doubt it. Neither is reading everything you can about internet marketing without actually following any of the advice.

Introducing the 80/20 rule…

Early in the 20th century, an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto observed that 80% of the income in Italy was received by 20% of the people. This has come to be known as the 80/20 rule or, “The Law of Vital Few and Trivial Many”. The 80/20 rule applies to much more than just income ratios. In fact, it’s been shown to hold true in most scenarios.

Here are some classic examples of the 80/20 rule in action:

20% of your efforts will account for 80% of your results
20% of your marketing efforts will account for 80% of your sales or traffic
20% of your products will account for 80% of your sales
20% of your sales will account for 80% of your profits
80% of your customer support emails will come from 20% of your customers
20% of drivers account for 80% of accidents
20% of a carpeted area will have 80% of the wear and tear
20% of the clothes you own will be worn 80% of the time

Take a stock broker firm for example…

A stock broker intern is assigned to call 100 people. Out of the 100 people he called, he was able to close a deal for 30 of them (he’s a closing machine). Of those 30 people, 10 of them amount to $20,000 in profits. The other 20 people amount to $80,000 in profits, for a total of $100,000 in profits. So, 80% of the profits came from 20% of the people, the classic 80/20 ratio.

How does this apply to getting more done each day?

Remember, you want to work smarter, not harder; the 80/20 rule tells you 20% of your efforts will account for 80% of your results. So the key is to identify the tasks that fall into the upper 20% and focus your efforts on them. Before you can identify your most important tasks, though, you must have a goal in mind. If your goal is to “find and watch funny videos online,” then watching a funny video will be one of the tasks in your upper 20%. On the other hand, if your goal is to “setup and run a successful website that sells pet toys,” then watching a funny video definitely isn’t going to help you, and falls into the bottom 80%.

How can you use the 80/20 rule to get more done?

First, you must set a goal and write it down. Your goal might be something like “Setup an online pet store, and achieve $1000 a month in profits by December 31st, 2007.”

Next, spend a few days analyzing all the tasks you perform online and write them all down. This should include everything from writing an article for your pet store, to watching the latest videos posted on Digg.

After you have a list of activities and tasks, start breaking them down. Make a separate list that only includes the tasks that will bring you closer to your goal. These are known as “the vital few.” If you want, you can even prioritize this list, so that the most important tasks are listed at the top.

Now that you’ve established a list of the most important tasks, you should use this list as your starting point each day. Every morning, review the list and use it to decide what you want to accomplish today.

In summary, you should…

• Set a goal.
• Identify all of the tasks that will bring you closer to your goal.
• Focus on the tasks that will bring closer to your goal.

Does this mean I can’t have any fun?

Of course not. It does however reinforce the age-old paradigm of “Work Before Play.” In fact, I commonly use “fun” as motivation to get my work done. I’ll say to myself, “Just get this done and then you can go outside and have some fun.” That way I have something to look forward to when I finish my work, and I save myself from getting distracted.

Just as important as getting your work done is spending time doing the things you enjoy. It’s important to balance your life and your work. By working smarter you’ll have more time for both.

To practice what I preach, now that I’m done writing this post I’m going to take the boat out on the lake and do some fishing. Adios!

Early in November of 2006, I heard about NaBloPoMo – National Blog Posting Month. Unfortunately it was too late for me to get in on the action as I had already missed one day of blogging. So instead, I decided I would challenge myself to comment on as many of the NaBloPoMo blogs as I could during the month of November. It was a huge challenge to set as there were thousands of blogs on the list and there were days when I commented on over 100 blogs a day. During the month I learnt a lot about commenting on people’s blogs which I’d like to share a bit of here today.

Many people find it difficult to write comments; for some it is like pulling teeth. I have some good news for you – the more you comment, the easier it gets.

First of all, what should you write?

• Compliments are excellent. Take a look around the blog. Do you like what you see? Say so.
• We are all human beings and for the most part we can relate to each other. If you look for things you have in common with the blog writer you’re sure to find some material which will make a good comment.
• Each blog that you read will make you think, so listen to what you are thinking as you’re reading. That might be where you find the good comment.
• Never be scared to say what you are thinking. People write blogs to connect with other people and if you have a different take on something someone has written it is ok to share it – they may not agree but they will appreciate you taking the time to express your views as long as you don’t attack them and theirs.
• Does the blog writer have kids or pets? Do they post photos of their kids or pets? If yes, saying how cute/gorgeous/lovely and other similar words (Challenged for words to use? Want something really different? Try the thesaurus – I find it invaluable) can make an excellent comment.
• Look at the most recent post on the blog. Is there any comment you can make on that topic?
• Never feel like you have to shorten a comment. Long comments are much appreciated by blog owners. However *any* comments are appreciated by blog owners so if short is all you have go with it.

If you have set yourself a blog commenting challenge and that is why you’re at the blog let people know. It’s ok to have this part of the comment as a copy and paste thing. I usually have a text window open (Editpad Lite is my favourite and it is free for personal use; unlike notepad or wordpad it allows you to use tabs with text files) which will contain the “base” for my comments. It could be something like -

Hi, it’s Snoskred here. Iím trying to comment on as many of the NaBloPoMo blogs as I can and I thought I’d say hi.

(now personalize the comment here – using any of the above points you like)

Now we come to the sign off. This has become quite important to me lately. I used to not do it at all but then I read somewhere that putting a link to your blog at the bottom of any comment can be a good thing for several reasons and the most important of all being it makes it easier for people to get to your blog if they want to come and visit – and many people will want to visit people who comment on their blogs. Surprisingly people also like to drop by if you’ve written a good comment – they want to find out more about you and see if they should add your blog to their must read list. Typing your name, email address and URL into comments is fine and dandy and I recommend you do it every time but sometimes people don’t realise they can get to your blog that way. So at the bottom of the comment you can put something like this -

Snoskred

http://snoskred.blogspot.com/

What not to say.

There are times when you read a blog and your thoughts are not positive. I clearly remember one occasion where a blog writer was complaining that people kept giving her child plastic toys and that she would not allow them in the house, she would throw them out as soon as the present giver left. Whether or not you like or dislike plastic toys, I believe my thoughts went along the lines of “How rude to tell someone what kind of gift they can buy for your child and if they don’t obey you bitch about it!” and “At least her child is being given toys” and “how terrible for this child who is given a toy to play with while the present giver is there and the moment they leave it is snatched away and thrown out”.

Of course, I did not say any of those things. I do believe I tried to be tactful and comment on something else but my memory of it is fuzzy because I have to say that one made me pretty mad. I just kept imagining my nephews in that situation and it made me see red. So, there’s probably a lot of things you should not say but here’s a short list of my absolute do nots – and note that this only applies to a blog you’re commenting on for the first time. If you are a regular reader and commenter on a blog sometimes you can do some of these things below.

• Don’t swear. It’s ok in some situations but this is not one of them.
• Never say something negative about the person, their blog, their pets, their kids, etc.
• Some topics were never meant to be commented on. In my opinion these are politics, religion and sex but I’m old school. You’ll have to make your own decision on topics you want to steer clear of.
• Some blogs were never meant to be commented on. I’m sorry to say that if you have a myspace or a livejournal, I found these difficult to comment on and instead would steer well clear.
• If you’re seeing red, get out of there fast – and as politely – as possible.

So, is anyone up for a commenting challenge? How do you set one for yourself? Nablopomo isn’t until November. Technorati has a lot of blogs listed there, you could try commenting on the top 100 blogs. Blog Carnivals might be of interest as well, along with blogging communities like BUMPzee or MyBlogLog. Also, Blogrolling has a top 500 list. These are just a few ideas but it doesn’t even have to be any kind of list, you could just say “I want to comment on of new (to me) blogs a day/week”. My new challenge is the Blogging Chicks blogroll so if you’re a blogging chick you might see me soon.

You simply want to set yourself a goal and then go out there and achieve it. Don’t overwhelm yourself to start off with. Reward yourself as you go. I used to say comment on 25 more blogs then I’ll (make a coffee, watch a dvd, play a game) then another 25 and I’ll (eat lunch, have a snack, go for a walk).

People who blog are people who live all over the world and have many different thoughts and opinions and dreams and loves and hates. The comments section of a blog is a place to be pleasant, friendly and if you can manage it from time to time, witty. That’s because you want to make friends out there in the blogging world. When you make friends out there, people add you to their feed readers, they add you to their sidebars, they become a part of your blogging “family.” Pushing yourself to go out there and comment on blogs can allow you to find a wider audience than you ever thought possible.

Take a search for “Make Money Online“, a popular phrase for many search marketers, and you’ll see that there are literally hundreds and thousands of sites telling you how to make a quick buck from the net, or something along the lines of “Follow these guidelines, and you’ll become stinking rich like me.”

Whilst an extremely small minority of these may be true, the rest are hype and only hype – where the website owners are themselves looking to make quick money through eBook or information product sales. Unfortunately, many people have also seen blogging as an effective way to get a few bucks using Adsense without looking at the real way to create a viable income source using this new medium of information exchange.

So, why the short term pain? Well if you do want to create a truly successful blog, then it’s necessary to invest some time in making your website reader friendly and beneficial to those that arrive at the URL. In effect, each unique visitor is a customer, and your aim as an entrepreneur should be to look after each visitor and make sure that they leave with new found knowledge.

Here are a few things that you could do as a newly established blogger in order to prepare yourself for future benefits:

• Write pillar articles – these will form the spine of your website and will hopefully cause a flurry of links to point to your address if written correctly.
• Write linkbait – appealing to social media sites such as the ever-blossoming Digg and others such as StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us can help drive a large amount of traffic to your blog in a short period of time. This can cause rapid growth but beware, linkbait articles are not necessarily sustainable for the long run.
• Comment ferociously – be up-to-date with other blogs in your industry and make useful comments demonstrating your expertise in the subject field as well. This can help visitors to click-through to your site and hopefully sign-up as RSS subscribers.
• Form relationships – using trackbacks to point back to a relevant article on another site will show that you value other bloggers’ knowledge and will be a surefire way of developing friendships with other owners. Instant messaging can also help to build friendships which can be useful if you need someone to look after your site whilst you’re away or if you need some advice.

Of course, the above list isn’t definitive by any means, instead it should provide you with a starting point as a newbie blogger in order to sustain a good figure of growth.

But what are these long-term gains you mention? These will differ from blogger to blogger, but many of us set monetary goals. The topic of monetization can take up a blog unto itself, but simply put, you need to dedicate the hours of writing material in order to rack up some income. Search engines like Google love new and popular content, so by writing lots of posts, you will increase your chances to get some free organic traffic.

After 3-4 months of blogging, programs such as TextLinkAds can help you to knock-up consistent link sales, and sponsored review programs like PayperPost and ReviewMe love websites which have a decent authority on the net. On top of this, once you have a solid information base, you can expand your monetization with Private Advertising, the notorious Google Adsense and many other programs which are still being released today.

Of course, you may not be after the money. Long-term benefits may also include self-satisfaction as you achieve good Search Engine Placement Positions after months of hard-work, or new relationships formed on a daily basis – it’s up to you, though, to set your own aims so that you can feel happy once you have achieved them.

To conclude, blogging should definitely not be considered as an easy way to make a quick buck. Constant dedication and nurturing of your blog is needed in the present, in order to achieve the benefits in the future.

Fresh-Perspectives blogging for Fresh-Blogger. How cool it can get!! Thank you Ray for letting me talk to your readers for a few minutes.

When I sat down to come up with a topic to write for freshblogger, I had no clear vision how I was going to proceed. After a lot of hard thinking about what I have learned in my short blogging life, the one and only thing that continues to stand out is the diversity of writing styles I have come across.

In the last few weeks, I have read tons of blogs and articles on a myriad of subjects, from announcing the birth of their babies to advice on how to make money on the web. One of things I noticed most is that every single post reveals something different about the author’s personality, something hidden about them that is not written in the post per se. We make a lot of opinions based on what the blogger is trying to convey and how he/she is saying it.

Sometimes when I look at the comments, it becomes even more interesting because everyone who reads the post has a different viewpoint about that same subject. Sometimes the original intent of the post gets dragged in a completely different direction just because we all have different ways of looking at the same thing. So the burden of how the actual meaning of the post is conveyed to the readers lies on the author of the post.

I am going to talk a bit about how to write content that is readable and conveys the right meaning of your post. Since we want the readers to spend some time on our blog and try to understand what we are trying to share with them, it becomes our responsibility as bloggers to give them better content, so they will want to come back to read us again.

If you are writing mainly for your family and friends and writing a personal diary or a journal just to keep them abreast of your daily schedules etc., it is okay to be a bit careless with your style, but if your journal is online, you don’t want to write in a manner that will make you look like an amateur. If you are merely scribbling your thoughts on your site, your readers might also start feeling that you have no regard for them and they will eventually stop reading you.

I never shy away from reading BAD material someone has written, though. You know why? Because it becomes my constant reminder to save myself from getting embarrassed by making the same mistakes they made. I suggest you read the bad writing as well as the good, because you will be able to tell which one made ‘more’ sense and it will motivate you to develop a better style of your own.

So, lets see if we can come up with a few pointers for good writing and put them in a list.

1. Be yourself and write in a conversational style so the readers feel as if you are talking to them.
2. Write in clear, short and simple sentences without making it look like a reading comprehension passage out of Great Expectations.
3. Give an introduction to the reader in a sentence or two at the beginning so the reader is aware of what they will learn from it.
4. Give something new to your readers. The Internet is a hodgepodge of a whole lot of information. Your readers will only want to come back to you if you provide them with something they have not come across somewhere else.
5. Engage your readers. Give them a story or an anecdote in a way that makes them feel they are a part of your world.
6. Short one-liners like “You had to be there” or “I am depressed today” usually do not do much for any audience. Tell them the joke or explain why you are depressed and haven’t showered in week (that’s an exaggeration) but you get the gist. Involve them in whatever it is you are trying to say. You don’t have to over explain yourself, but if you want to have some input on your situation or your story, you will have to give them something.
7. Amuse your readers. Have a sense of humor! Everything in life can be looked at in a light manner. This reminds me of a funny line I read in a novel and it stuck with me, “When the kidnapper called the blind woman, he told her that she’d never see her son again.”
8. If someone leaves a nasty comment, do not take it to heart. The web is open to all sorts and once you are out in public, you will come across negative as well as positive criticism.
9. and finally, never ramble because rambling will make the readers feel you are wasting their time and they will never want to come back to read you.

I am sure we can come up with tens of other points that make for better writing but this is the start. Sharing with your readers as if you know them, engaging them in dialog, asking questions, and telling stories will make your writing enjoyable. This will lead to happy readers who will continue to come back to read you, making you happy bloggers.

Others may be a little outside the realm of what you’re used to seeing here, but I’m sure you’ll enjoy them and find something useful. If you haven’t contacted me yet, but you would still like to submit a guest post, don’t be shy! Contact me and let me know what you have in mind. Thanks to all of those who have already volunteered!