Inspiration, execution and monetization makes the online millionaire

The trick in becoming an Online Millionaire is in following your Inspiration, Execution of your plan, and Monetization of everything.

This is a review of a product I just purchased which is a very good example of how to use the Internet and locally-delivered CD's to monetize information products.

Now, as you've been following these blogs of mine, you'll know that I've been researching eBay as a selling platform and reverse-funnel - meaning, it allows buyers to find you.

I found through Deep Analysis/Hammer Tap a certain product was selling over 60% with several auctions each week and multiple items. So this thing and its marketing was bringing home over $2-300 a week, not bad for a single item. Approximately $12-15K per year.

The reason I bought it was because of the marketing, because it had resell rights, and because shipping was free.

Then - I got the package.

Did I get what I bought? Yes.

The kicker: it was printed and burned on a home pc and mailed in a little blank cardboard mailer with a - get this - 58-cent stamp.

If I had this drop-shipped by an online company, it would cost $1.75, plus about $7.00 shipping. To deliver something like this, I'd put a $2.00 handling charge - so that I'd have straight profit on it. But then the price would be a lot higher.

For their $14.00 price, they have a near-nothing fulfillment line and able to print these off at home in bulk, labels and all, then simply drop them in the mailbox daily for each sale.

Let's examine what they had on the disc:

It was really nothing but an autorun program and an executable which pulled up a web page - which then linked to other web pages. That's it - nothing much more than 4 megs of data on there.

Everything else was on external websites:

• One website was a membership-only site, meaning they got your email address - and gave you a membership with lots of downloads in it, while still being built.
• One website was a collection of eBay articles, compete with adsense - another money-maker.
• One website was a collection of wholesale lists for the US, Canada, and International markets.

Now, the reseller gimmick - you couldn't modify the product. Meaning you were sending them new customers. So the whole thing is viral just because it gives you money.

So the thing is beautifully developed to not just sell, not just be viral, not just get subscribers - but all at the same time. And the great part is that they get people to pay to be part of this system.

A critique -
a little on the cheap side. Depends on Windows to run - so the effect varies widely, depending on how your individual computer is configured. (And depending on Windows to do anything dependably is a bit like predicting the economy or the weather - good luck with that.) If they wanted to really take it to the next level, they'd get an affiliate sales system going - which is missing.

Now, how to improve it even more:
Without modifying the program - you can give additional value, which will then possibly bring your customers to your site. Just add in additional PDF's and or another executable file - which would drive people to your site. Then you can include that original product as part of the purchase price.

Your marketing could sell the product, but your packaging would start up yours first - and then they'd find the original resell product. You get first take at the buyers.

Your alternative is to simply take the affiliate commissions directly, minus your sales fees - and give away further sales unless you contact them directly.

But -- take their design and improve on it, plus the economy of their production line - and you've got a real winner.

Because creativity is the heart and soul of becoming an Online Millionaire.

My education in eBay continues - through the world of hard online millionaire knocks

If you thought an online millionaire course in training people on eBay was going to be easy, guess again.

Ah, the hard slogging work of getting eBay feedback up through buying things...

I was up late doing the convoluted dance of buying the remaining cheap digital downloads through eBay - did you know it takes about 6 different screens to buy each item? And even then, you have to wait until that buyer contact you some how with the download link.

Increased my feedback by 6 overnight, just in the buying process. I'll now finish off buying from the rest of the non-duplicative sellers (and non-duplicative products - hopefully), then pile in on leaving them all positive feedback. You know, karma and Golden Rule and all that.

Now, a tip: when/if you do this, keep track of three things on a sheet of paper (or notepad if you like to type) - seller ID, product name, eBay item number. Reason being is that people's email doesn't align to their eBay seller name - but they'll often refer to the product you bought or the item number (eBay always has the item number in every email they send you). This way you can avoid losing track of what you've bought and who you bought from.

Because they can only give you feedback once. You need to buy one extremely low-cost item each from many, many different sellers.

Just bought a chicken wings recipe book with complete resell rights - and the sales page said it was in the public domain... Gotta love eBay.

Was listening to an interview with Socrates Socratous - who has made his living selling digital books and information products. He advises not selling these to other resellers, but selling them to people who really want and need the data. Makes sense - do some research on eBay information products as to average price and you'll see that this market is really polluted with nonsense.

Another approach is to sell the actual item (CD/book/combo) as these actually tend to sell better than the downloads. Also, you can give away the download as a bonus (after you've listed it on Lulu.com and can tell people what it's value is) when they buy your product - just send the link to them.

But your ebook sales depends on what keywords you use in the title. Nobody searches for "WOW!!!", for instance. Buyers search and buy, shoppers look and look. Keywords that attract shoppers' attention will turn off buyers. The great thing about eBay is that it makes it much easier for buyers to buy.

Well, I've now bought the prescribed number of things to get my feedback up above 50. Now, I have to send all this feedback and get it all in (plus drop all these downloads with resell-rights into my hard-drive). And I managed to stay below $5 for each purchase. Let's see - started off with about 19 and needed 31 - so I've spent maybe $50 or so getting these. Maybe you can't buy happiness, but you can buy feedback -- cheap!

If any of these don't come through, I'll look for a few more I can buy cheap and wrap it up.

Notes from Tim Knox webinar: eBay Multiple Streams of Internet Income (Mar. 26, 2008)

(my comments in italics)

(this webinar problematic unless you have very dependable broadband - I'm trying to watch this over satellite in a rainstorm. It's about an hour long - unless you have to restart it often...)

(Tim) started with a $7 ebook and built into multi-million income in about 3 years.

After 11 years, laid off with no severance package - wife, new baby, new house, new car. Went to flat broke, sleeping on his mother's couch.

These days - no such thing as job security. Single stream of income is like keeping all your eggs in basket - wind up with a basket full of broken eggs.

Diversification, automation. Multiple streams of income on a semi-automated basis.

Best time to start a business is now - due to Internet.

Work once - get paid many times.

Roadmap:

1st income stream - ebay
- easy to start, up in an hour
- open eBay store quickly as a web presence
- promote yourself with About Me page: funnel traffic from eBay to other websites
- Internet is in runaway expansion mode; lots of buyers online, Billons of goods sold yearly.
- eBay ready-made pool of potential clients

Sell what sells
- don't follow the herd
- don't sell "hot items" people who made money on iPods sold accessories
- don't invest big money until you know you have a product that will sell (test market first and drop ship)

(When you are selling for a drop-shipper, you are actually being an affiliate - you name the margin you want to sell it for. Consignments are the same arrangements. You are a independent/freelance salesperson. When you buy lots of wholesale goods and ship them yourself, this is still the same framework. When you rent your own warehouse, then you are doing the same functions, just with a different title. Manufacturing the stuff yourself is only slightly different - but you still have to sell that product, or attract affiliates/freelance salespeople to do so.)

Start off with selling everything you don't need or use around the house. This gives you experience in writing titles, copy, photos, etc.
- you can also go to storage unit auctions/sales
- flea markets, thrift stores, consignment sales (even RV's), closeouts, bargain basement...

2nd income stream - start your own Ebay store (doesn't cover this much - diverges into info products, which he later elevates to its own income stream)

Informational products (see yesterday's post)
- can be about mostly anything.
- charge more for the hardcopy (these also sell better).
- add audio/video with it, and you can get over $200 for it. (Link to your About Me page and they go right to your download site. Meanwhile, sell dropship CD's/DVD's on ebay.)
- can be easily automated, just send the emails over to the fulfillment company. (And meanwhile, get them to subscribe to your mail-list for additional bonuses...)
- high profit margins (don't get stuck in selling resell rights to resellers for .99 each - go upscale with CDs/books/packages, and then bring them back to your website to buy downloads for much higher - $47, $67, etc. Your overhead is the same, essentially zip.)

You can hire writers to write for you.
- elance.com, etc. (caveat - get writers who know what they're doing, some have good credentials and good feedback, but no clue whether what they write is correct.)
- when you become an author, your credibility goes up, more people are likely to buy from you
- use ebooks to supplement your regular product line (example: "teaching dogs tricks" book for a pet-toy store)

3rd income stream - Joint Ventures
- partnership between two parties to promote a product and share in profit.
- fastest way to build your list
- turning point to his business was JV
sequence:

1. find successful sellers
2. approach them with your idea, and send them a free copy
3. should be complementary to what they are selling already
   
4. seal the deal (do your homework in this area)
   

4th income stream - Affiliate Marketing
- sign up to sell others products, or sign others up to sell your product
- register as an affiliate, sell the product, collect a commission (see above)
- you don't need your own product or your own website to sell as an affiliate
- you can sign up others to see for you, paying commissions as high as 75% (sales you wouldn't have otherwise - money in both your pockets, but you keep the new clients on your list)

5th income stream - Build your own website
- funnel buyers/shoppers from eBay to your site
- can build simply with templates, etc.
- add on ecommerce, etc.
- (caveat - don't use a free site. Best I've found is getting a cpanel-powered web-provider)

6th income stream - Turnkey website
- get these already set up with products, etc.
- don't get a middleman from the dropshipper

Variations on this - he mentions briefly a membership website. This would be another income stream all on its own, but you'd have to have a web-provider, etc.

Income streams:
- eBay: direct sales
- eBay store
- Info products (auctioned or through store or both)
- Joint Ventures
- Affiliate Marketing (for someone else or others for you)
- Own website
-Turnkey website

- - - -

Let's reconstruct this:
First - start on eBay and get your grounding in online sales, delivery, customer relations. Study everything you can, including peoples' websites. Take some courses in this if you can - where they actually give assignments, not just send you emails.
Second - Set up an eBay store and run your business from there. eBay will actually send customers your way, again this is a gradient approach
- you can use joint ventures here
Third - Write or commission some info products and put them on your eBay store and auction them. Goes on your eBay store.
Fourth - Expand your sales expertise by becoming an affiliate. Study up on online promotion, SEO, and social media promotion.
Fifth - Get your own website
- Can be turnkey from someone else
- Or build your own with ecommerce engine, etc.
- Add in affiliate sales (others selling for you)
- Joint Ventures
- Subscription site - sell memberships

My review of Tim Knox:

All of this stuff works. He speaks sooth. Only really misses one point, that he actually refers to through out but never specifically takes up - which I include below.

This webinar is good data, and he gives tons of his products you can buy at the end. (Which is what webinars are for - they are online infomercials, afterall.)

The overall theme is that you have several different income sources so that if one tanks, you aren't left holding an empty bag (as most jobs are).

The approach to start off with eBay is a good one, since your success here will lay the foundation for your later success. If you don't do well, then you aren't out a great deal.

If you already know a bit about website-building, then just get your own site up and running, then start funneling traffic from eBay over there. Get a good hosting provider which can handle the high demands or can scale.

Once you have your website with a good e-commerce engine, set it up for affiliate sales. Add in joint ventures. (Note: you can actually set up affiliate sales with nothing more than a few sales pages and thank-you pages where affiliates can send you buyers.)

Tim's missing point: at some juncture, you are going to have to get an autoresponder service. This is how you upsell, cross-sell, and continue to sell earlier buyers/clients you have had. You really want every person you sell to to opt-in to your mail list. Every auction you get has emails coming to you. Give them the option of becoming part of your mail list (give them a bonus ebook or other ethical bribe). Then you can sell them over and over. Build a big list and then you have the capability to announce new products to that list. And is how you can have an "instant" bestseller on Amazon - tell everyone you know and JV that product with other people to their mail-lists. (That bestseller then generates more traffic for your other products.)

Summary advice - what I've learned over the past few years

To someone just starting out: find people who have actually made their own success at what they are writing or talking about. I recently heard of a person who had actually gone bankrupt as a PowerSeller on eBay and was now pitching an expensive course on how to become a PowerSeller (!). Look up their track record, not just the "glowing testimonials" and the sales spiel.

Get a coaching program that makes you actually work at this. Maybe you could do two or three - if they each increase your income, and more than pay for themselves, you can take as many as you have time for. Pick out programs which provide the structure you need. If you need to attend someone's intensive boot-camp, then so be it.

Study up on everything you need, ask questions, look for real-world examples.

Learn to look beyond the hype. Once you understand how sales pages are constructed, you can get easily through the silliness that goes for most sales pages. Learn the scams that are going around and how to avoid them. All the free bonuses in the world doesn't mean you need to buy that product. (Even if they all have resell rights - not so good if you can't resell them for more than $.99).

Change your world-view to become an entrepreneur - not an employee. Those are the people earning the big bucks these days - self starters. Surround yourself with effective examples and inspirational books, MP3's, videos, etc. Read biographies of people who have started out with less than you have now - keep their examples in mind as you go through life. Quit watching TV and listening to radio, reading newspapers. Get your news through the Internet, and keep it brief. Use an RSS reader to give you synopses. You can't waste time, since it doesn't come back to you.

Do tons of research, constantly. Know before you go. Look before you leap. The only constant that stays the same is change. Check your results as next week, they might not be the same.

When you sell - sell only to niches. Find the demand not being serviced. Expand your niches and take on more niches and/or broaden the ones you're already in.

Convert every first buyer into a lifetime buyer.

Automate every part of your business you can. Hire people to save you time as you need them.

Shoppers look for bargains - buyers are willing to pay any "reasonable" price (reasonable to their own idea of its value to them.)

- - - -

More applications in marketing into/through social media

I've covered earlier (and these posts started this current eBay research) about how you can promote through social media, but can't market there.

The point, as many have discussed, is to start or take over a conversation. You really can make a big mistake here with ClueTrain when you say that marketing is a conversation, so just start conversations and then you've marketed. No. Marketing conversations include the exchange of goods. Social conversations establish you as an authority, and then people want to hear more about your view of things and so will look you up. So all your social promotions need to have active links which come back to you and your products.

But the site itself carries the heavy lifting. It has to convert visitors to shoppers to buyers. And social media fails as marketing as the majority of the traffic is visitors - they aren't even up to shopping. They mostly are even below taking the bait of free downloads/bonuses. They are there for the experience.

And here's where eBay as a social community comes in. It's full of buyers more than shoppers. It's built to do the heavy lifting, since every single item has a built in urgency to buy now.

Most web sites (and I'd include most item descriptions on eBay) couldn't lift a feather with a strong wind under it. Those people never learned the basics of copywriting, headlines, keywords, titles, images - nearly anything connected to a web page. When you get into marketing, your result has to be intended from the outset - you are going to wind up exchanging your valuable good for something of theirs, usually money in some denomination.

Social media has conversations which are intensely enjoyable - but that is the end product for most of these: an enjoyable experience. So these conversations are not marketing, at best they are promotion, but mostly they are either educational or entertainment. Education always has some sort of agenda - and so is a form of promotion. The best entertainment has a story behind it, and people use these to evaluate and improve their lives - so entertainment is promotion.

Social media promotions don't equal marketing. Marketing can promote through social media to get traffic, but the result is traffic, not sales or subscriptions (potential leads).

eBay is a premier social network for marketing, since every sale is a classic reverse-funnel - you only get their email after they buy something from you. And so, this is reasonably the best introduction to online marketing, online sales, and the springboard to financial independence.

And all social media isn't equal. eBay could "almost" be considered social media, except for the common ideas (and reputation) surrounding it. It rather falls into the more formal "community" aspect instead of the wide-open cowboy-scene we have in MySpace and some of the others. Just talking about structure as the chief difference between earlier social communities and today's social media.

Creating your "aura" of authentic credibility through social media and comment marketing

Social media promotion is almost too easy. It follows fads even more closely than Google could ever (which explains why Google follows social media so much).

1. Go to popurls and find out what is going up on the world. Digg is another relatively painless way to find out what is considered "hot". Google trends and Yahoo's version of this - not so much. (They're simply too dinosaurian - can't move that fast.)
2. Pick a subject area you are interested in (preferably something you know about or are interested in enough to research).
   
3. Find blogs talking about this and start leaving comments which forward that conversation. Make darned sure that your web address (or several) is hotlinked (and not your email address). Preferably use Search Status plug-in to find blogs which don't use no-follow links. (Get your link love where you can - but this isn't essential.)
4. Make sure whatever is at your web address is representative of what you represent and every single link is monetized, either through affiliate sales or direct sales through your own ecommerce efforts.

If you do this well, people think you know what you are talking about and will want more from you. They come to your web address and you convert them to buyers.

Yes, this is simply comment marketing. Something that's been done on forums for years and before that the BBSes (yes, I'm that old).

Social media just adds a great deal wider variety of formats - such as pictures, slideshows, video, podcasts, etc. So you want to link to and use a great deal of these-type media in your posts.

This is marketing, because you are using social media intentionally to bring traffic to your web address which then converts them to buyers. Your intention is to get sales of your products from the get-go. You are creating a market.

Simply participating in the discussion isn't necessarily marketing - or even promotion. Only when that discussion leads to a sale or a future sale (ie - name on a mail list) is it marketing. Marketing has definite metrics - sitting around talking in a coffee shop only results in sales of coffee, muffins, and bathroom supplies. But you aren't selling coffee or any of that - so you're getting no return on the time you just invested.

That's the difference in marketing conversations and social media conversations.

- - - -

And tomorrow I start my 20 hours of day job. Usually too tired to do much after that (slogging heavy boxes and rugs around in someone else's warehouse isn't all that much fun).

Rest of tonight will probably be in listing my old books on Half.com - again, so that I could essentially raise my feedback without having the hassle of setting up auctions.

Most of the research on eBay itself is now done. The Tim Knox interview above really tied everything into a package. My own notes on HammerTap over the past few days show the advanced (and only profitable) way to go with this.

Next Tuesday is my first coaching session. Should be interesting.

Learning to become an eBay Online Millionaire - the training continues

Continue the eBay Online Millionaire training - research and strategies

Today, I'm continuing the basic research, but also keeping some MP3 interviews going in the background.

Notes from these:

Mike Enos - Your profit has to be at least $10 to be worth it to you. It's not how much sales you are doing, it's how much profit your getting. You want to pay as few fees as possible - keeping your overhead low. eBay fees are like taxes - you pay as little as you legally can.

And don't trade one job for another - where you're sweating all over the place to get your shipping done, like thousands of boxes a week. Hire someone for that when it gets profitable (watch that overhead).

Sydney Johnston - eBay is the introduction, not the whole game. Upsell every sale - buys a pair of ear-rings, send them an email: "Thanks for your purchase, did you know we have a matching bracelet for those?" They buy the bracelet, "Thanks for your purchase, did you know we have a matching ring for that?" You want to have a web site and get people over to that web site and sell from there. Means you have to sell on eBay first, but that's just the start. Once you have their email, you can then move them over to the website for off-eBay sales. You want multiple profits from each customer - your first sale doesn't have to be huge, just get that customer.

You don't personally buy on emotion. That will give you losses every time. Do your homework first. Find out if what demand there is for the product first (then find your supplier). You don't personally get involved in this - it's a business, get over it.

She actually likes to stay below everyone's radar and take her sales off-eBay rather than making all her sales through eBay. Then no one is watching what you're doing and what sales you are making, what products you are selling.

Get only reputable mentors to listen to (that includes this blog - compare what you are hearing to other standard business basics.)

You want to find the system that eBay runs on and then work that system. eBay works hard to be a silo and keep their participants right inside their set-up. And so have rules like not putting your own website address on their listing (it's actually their listing, not yours - you are paying them for the privilege of using their website). But they don't control your emails to your bidders and so that is where you can shine.

What started today's post - simple math on making online money.

What got me going today was simple math. Let's start at making $250 a week, which would make you a powerseller ($1000/month). If you are making $10 per sale, then you need to have 25 successful auctions per week - meaning at 50% success rate, you have to have 50 auctions running and ensure your other factors are accurate, like headline and copy, photos, etc.

It's just that simple. If your auctions are completing successfully at 80%, then you are going to need 40 auctions going each week.

Just work it backwards from what you want or need that week. When you find items that produce more profit - or have a higher success rate, then you'll need to run less auctions. Simple.

Playing Follow the Leader Research to start off your eBay career

From Instant Auction Profits Blog:
"Now that you know a little about researching certain items, let’s discuss finding hot markets. I use a technique that I like to call “Follow The Leader”. I call it that because that’s exactly what I do. I let other eBay sellers lead me right to the hot markets!

"As you begin researching items that you are interested in on eBay, you will come across many auctions that are selling for high prices. Many times, these auctions are listed by top notch eBay sellers. When I find an auction that interests me, I like to do a little digging into the seller’s eBay business. eBay allows you to get an insider’s look at their selling activity. This simple research technique has uncovered countless profitable opportunities for me.

"Here is exactly what I do. When I find an auction that interests me, I look at the box on the right side of the auction page that is titled “Meet The Seller”. The first thing that I look at is the number of feedback that the seller has. This is the number in parentheses right next to their seller ID. If they have a large number of feedback, chances are they have found one or more profitable markets that they are selling to. But don’t be fooled by a small number. They could just be getting started in a very good market. It takes a little more digging to uncover the truth.

"The next thing that I do is look at all of the items that the seller is selling. You can do this by clicking the link titled “View Seller’s Other Items”. If the seller has an eBay store, you can also view the items in their store by clicking the link under “View Seller’s Store”. This link will be the name of the seller’s store and will have the red eBay store icon next to it. Once you do this, you will be able to see exactly what the seller is selling.

"Next, you want to look at the seller’s completed items. Once you are on the page that lists the seller’s items that are currently for sale, simply click the box next to “Completed Listings” on the left side of screen. The results will show all of the items that the seller listed over the past 30 days. Look for sold auctions with the bid amount in green. This list will give you a good idea of where this seller’s income is coming from.

"Once you take this sneak peak into other seller’s eBay business, you can see what items they are selling on a consistent basis. If they made a lot of sales over the past 30 days, chances are they are selling to a hot market. This is a market that you want to be in. Don’t worry about competing with them. eBay has over 150 million users and counting. No one can monopolize any market. I have successfully entered many markets by using this exact technique….and I continue to use it successfully."

When you follow their lead, you can then study up on what they are selling, then research those particular items to see what you can sell profitably.

HammerTap (nor does eBay) readily disclose the items that have sold well. You can go to eBay's quarterly summary that tells what the best growing categories were for that quarter. Then, you can use HammerTap to drill down into those categories and find the selling profitable products, based on keywords.

Searching for Power Sellers - not as easy as typing it into Google

That's what I tried to do - since eBay doesn't just cough up a list of these for your research.

One approach - go to http://popular.ebay.com and find what is being searched for. Recall yesterday's eBay Online Millionaire lesson on the difference between trends and fads. I'm purposely not following the advice above, as I'm not going to follow my own "wants" or "what I'm interested in". I'm instead looking for what people are looking for.

Let's stay away from collectibles and one-of items, and look for stuff that is being routinely manufactured and should be a rising trend. Like satellite radio. Look this up on HammerTap (my version is Deep Analysis and not as full-featured as the latest HT version). Comes in at 63% completed auctions, with one seller doing 21 sales through Buy-It-Now (BIN) of $159. She's been selling a lot of Garmin products. Look her number up through HammerTap. She's got a 77.44% success rate. Did over $73K in sales during last 30 days. 375 items sold. She does this mostly through BIN. Ideal. Check out her sales page for the top item - she selling it way below list and says she ships immediately.

See, this is how it goes. Next, I'd check for competition for that exact item. See how many are being sold - Oh, this item has a 74% success rate and averages at $299. Now we're getting somewhere. A little more research and then I'd start looking for sources.

But you can see how it goes, eh?

Digital Products Kerfluffel - solutions you can use.

Interesting stuff here. eBay recently dropped digital downloads off their cliff. Now you can only sell CD's and DVD's right there on eBay. However, you can post classified ads for people to buy your product. Socrates Socratus, long a leader in digital downloads, is working up software which will burn and dropship your digital product to that customer. So the calvary is on the hill, ready to charge.

He gives two free reports (for your email), which give a lot of good ideas for this. He says that your classified ad last for 30 days and can have an opt-in form on it - means this ad can give you plenty of leads. Sure these are more expensive than auctions, but can potentially reach far more potential leads (buyers) than their auctions ever could.

And one of these PDF's (by John Thornhill) gives you a link to SwiftCD, who will burn your CD and drop ship it to anyone you want. Prices start at $3.69 - and drop after 2,000 (sell that many...)

Another link is Kunaki, which will manufacture and dropship - gives you a breakdown of shipping costs, as well as options - $6.75 from New York to my house in Missouri, 1.75 for that CD.

Your other option is to have these bulk produced and shipped to your house, then you can do what you want to move these items. Why this route? Your time is worth more than money. If you have several CD burners and professional labeling printer, plus printed mailers - then you're in business. But don't expect to send something out with some scribbling on it and expect to up-sell or cross-sell that customer on future products.

Kunaki looks good on this, but if you want to ship them yourself, try out Discmakers, who have a wide range of services - including automated disc burner/printers. (Plus, they routinely send you some very snazzy catalogues. You can get some great deals on bulk printing with beautiful packaging (lots of options) - but then you will have stacks of these that you need to sell on eBay.

Strategy here would then be to sell a few via Kunaki and then once you prove the market, get them produced in bulk (light bulk to start with) and start listing them regularly. (Of course your price would include their cost for shipping and your "handling cost" which would be the price Kunaki charges you for manufacturing ($1.75). What you get in the auction (minus ebay's fees) is all profit.

At this point, all your techniques for marketing (keywords, product research, etc.) come into play - since now you can create any sort of ebook from all that PLR material being given away regularly.

* Wild idea here * Create and format your book and publish it via Lulu. Set a comparative price to otehr similar books on Amazon (you can actually arrange Lulu to put it on Amazon for you as a printed book). Now, take that same digital file and create a download version - which you then offer as a CD through Kunaki. Of course, you state the price is $24.95 in print, but they can have the CD version (with all these listed bonus books) delivered right to their door.

Got another MP3 from Mike Enos

Here's the notes (I'll make the key points and then analysis in italics):

• Basics of eBay - easiest way to get started on the Internet: limited investment, short learning curve, no worries about getting traffic

• Advantages of eBay business - start and stop it when ever you want.

• Grow it at your own pace.

Getting started:

1. Learn how eBay works at eBay site - sign up and learn.
2. Sign up for PayPal - this is 80% of your payments.
3. Get your feedback up beyond 50. Do this by buying ebooks from different buyers until you have the feedback total you want. (this is still possible at this writing - but track your sellers as you go, to ensure you don't buy from the same guy twice. Another idea - get products with resale rights.)
   Reason for increasing your feedback is to build trust. People won't buy from you with a feedback score of 0.

Establish Your Goals (business goals):

1. How much time dedicate to building the business?
   How much money do you need/want to make?
   What kind of lifestyle do you want?
   Do you want employees?
   Money isn't an end in itself - what are you going to do because you've earned that money - it's only a tool.
2. Set goals - short, medium, and long-term.
3. Figure out how much your time is worth. How much do you want to make this month - means you have to make so much per week, per day, per hour you work at it. (note: a 40-hour work-week will need $200,000 per hour, 50 weeks a year.)
   
4. Start figuring your overhead - opting for high-speed over dial-up, you save time - but that investment has to pay for itself on a monthly basis.
   
5. You can grow your eBay business at your own pace. Start part time while you pay your bills with day job. Little pressure on you this way.

What do you want to sell? Sources

a. Drop Shipping - Don't get the most-used drop-shipper with the most demanded product. (See comments about trends vs. fads.) You don't want competition - if you can find it at Wal-Mart of a big-box store, don't list it. Don't copycat or sell what everyone else is selling - sell less competitive items. (But you might have to start by mimicking high sellers - great training.) Drop shippers might have backlogs when they run out.
b. Wholesale - Make sure they aren't selling on eBay themselves. Buy and stock the minimal possible. Don't use the largest wholesaler in the nation, use a smaller wholesaler and get as close to the manufacturer as possible.
c. Importing - low, low price. expensive to ship, language barrier, money tied up for months (containers at a time is thousand$).
globalsources.com
alibaba.com - PLR manufacturers
d. Refurbished goods - low competition, awesome margins; go to manufacturer's website and type "refurbished" in the website, then look if resell on ebay
e. Liquidated goods - surplus or auctioned off; no competition. search for "liquidated goods" liquidation.com (check your prices) ubid.com
f. Local auctions - have someone check these items on the computer
g. Knowledge product (information product) - limits competition if you develop it yourself. (Nowadays has to have a CD or book - see drop-shipping solutions above, unless you sell it as a classified ad.) Make sure it's a quality product and deliver more than expected.
h. Consignment selling - selling other people's products. Concentrate on higher-priced items.
i. One-off's (one-sies) - only if high priced (high margin)
j. No low-cost items unless you can make it up in volume (or are using this as a loss-leader to get qualified leads/mail-list subcriptions)

How to get more bids and higher closing prices -

• Get your feed back up.
• Add testimonials.
• Compress your pictures.
• Add audio - brief.
• Add video to show people what to do.
• Make your ad attractive and easy to read.
• Use high-quality templates.

You see that Mike covers some new stuff I'd not told you about before, but the essentials are the same. Mike got into this because he was earlier a computer consultant - and was spending 12-hour days away from his new son. Discovering eBay helped him get his life back.

Another key point is the section on business goals. He emphasized - as do every mentor I find in this research - that you need to apply real-life business basics to this and run it as a business. This includes setting and achieving goals. If you run this as a hobby, you wind up with the results of a hobby - just a drain on your bank account and time.

Getting your high feedback scores

Just as a note here - something that I've been doing as I listened to that MP3 above. For right now, there are still a few of these informational products left on eBay. They are mostly .99 each, with no shipping. So getting your feedback score up past 50 will cost you just under than. My idea is to ensure that your products also have resale rights and are worth reselling. (If you're worried about your wife or some family member discovering that you're selling "Karma-Sutra Sex: How to Make Incredible Love", then stick to eBay How To guides. (And you can bundle all these eBay how-to guides under a single package and re-sell them for a lot more over and over and over - because you have resell rights...)

At I write this, there are even .01 auctions still going on. I did buy at some stores, where I don't know that I'll get feedback, but that's 3 cents before I discovered that fluke. Just re-did the search to have auction only, with BIN and free shipping.

(An interesting one was that one seller gave me the option of paying for "insurance" for that digital download... made her look shifty, didn't it?)

Another interesting point is that I signed up for a mail list in order to get one mega offer (200-some ebooks).

Five Minute Research Recipe

(From HammerTap's forum:)

"Now, you can see that in five minutes, I could look through the Findings window and cook up answers to the following questions:

• What are my chances of selling? (LSR)
• How much can I expect to make? (ASP)
• Which Listing Type will increase my ASP and LSR?
• Which Start Day and End Day will increase my ASP and LSR?
• Which End Hour will increase my ASP and LSR?
• Which Listing Duration will increase my ASP and LSR?
• What Start Price will increase my ASP and LSR?
• What key Title Words will increase my ASP and LSR?
• What Listing Features will increase my ASP and LSR?

"Now the recipe is this—create a smooth combination of these options and your success will be higher than the average and your sales price will also be higher than average."

- - - -

Well, run out of steam for this evening. Still have about 15 more cheap items to buy in order to have my 50 feedback above. Already getting some of this feedback in, but these guys don't agree on how to ship products or deliver feedback at all - so it's all over the place. And some of their emails don't say what their ebay user name is, so leaving feedback could be problematic if not for the records I'm keeping.

But I'm certainly getting an idea of what good sales pages look like. And why you should spend just so much time on them... Buyers are already pre-sold, you are just pushing them over the edge - so your copy should reflect that. Have to remind myself to tell you about this beautiful sales page which must have taken days to build - and only got some 19 sales out. Good money, but not efficient (as far as that $200,000 per hour above).

Tomorrow will show more product research, as I check out those links we got from the MP3 above. See you then...

Using eBay to create an Online Millionaire - a course on the fly

Creating an eBay Online Millionaire - and writing a new online course meanwhile

Of course, all this eBay research is going to mean what I extensively revise my approach to making online millions. Because as I try all these things, I find out new things. While I've researched and written all the different ways to get something going, that hasn't happened for me - mainly due to my own lack of back end. And so the structure which I'm getting through this coaching is where it all comes to play.

The other reason for my slow start was the lack of a Napoleon Hill "BURNING DESIRE" (his emphasis). I've another post to write about this subject, over at my Modern View blog, but suffice to say that until you really get a fire under your own butt, you won't quit sitting on the smoldering logs. People, even me, don't want to move out of their comfort zone.

Means that my mental notes for An Online Millionaire Plan Course (when I get around to it) are changing pretty radically. When you get down to the bottom of this post, you'll see why. But it doesn't change the basics - just puts new light on them, as well as a different emphasis. eBay is just another route to your millions.

Keywords and building your website

Thought I'd pretty much figured all this out, but then I got this nice summary in a recent email I got from Bright Builders (which I've reformatted):

• Keep your title tag short (8 words or less) and ensure it is compelling.
• Use the keyword that you are targeting only once in the title.
• Use a compelling meta description tag. Keep it 10-20 words in length (this text will appear below the title in a search result).
• Use the keyword phrase just once in the meta description.
• Use the keyword meta tag, but keep the keywords generic.
• List five or fewer keyword phrases in the keyword meta tag.
• Avoid unnecessary meta tags.
• Build up your viewable content to at least 450 words per page.
• Use the keywords in the content naturally, so the text flows.
• Do not keyword-stuff your content, or you may turn off your visitor.
• Launch a campaign to get links to your site and be consistent with it.

Matt Cutts, senior engineer at Google: "If you create a web page that is well designed, and the content is informative and is exactly what the searcher is looking for, we will do our best to make sure that your page comes up in the top ten. However, don't think that you can just throw up any page or copy content - the text must be original."

It's always the Buyers' Market - Attracting buyers versus shoppers

Peculiar to HammerTap and eBay is that you can see what keywords actually brought buyers to your site - versus shoppers who are "just looking." Buyers are what you want. And buyers already know exactly (or pretty exactly) what they want.

Which brings us to how viewers have evolved along with search engines. Keywords are hot, but keyword phrases tuned to your product are the hottest way you can have to get people right to your auction in eBay. Viewers (especially buyers) are now search engine savvy. They don't just type in "motorcycles", but will enter "Honda 350 All-Terrain". So your long-tail keyword (as if you could still find such a motorcycle) would actually get your buyers. Being tops in "motorcycles" will get you shoppers. Doesn't mean you don't use "Honda 350 All-Terrain motorcycles" if you routinely wind up top in rankings - but realize that bringing more shoppers to your site will increase your traffic, but drop your conversion rate. So shoppers actually just suck your bandwidth and don't pay for it. You want buyers.

HammerTap helps you find buyers because it shows how the keywords are related to sales (and/or lack of them). You can actually research down and find which keywords were associated for top completed auctions for that particular item. And then build your title from those keywords - only.

A point here. Each and every successful auction in eBay (barring a handful of exceptions) only sells long-tail niche items. Buyers buy, shoppers just keep shopping. Buyers are pre-sold. Shoppers are impulse-based. Buyers pay for bandwidth (and hosting fees). Shoppers suck - bandwidth. True, shoppers can be converted to buyers - but let's take the easy route: invest in buyers and shoppers might also show up. (If you invest in shoppers, the inverse isn't necessarily true.)

So your title is simply long-tail niche keywords.

Now this rolls right into everything we've already been covering in An Online Millionaire Plan. The money is in the niches, not in the mega-marts. You can take over search engine real estate for niches, but ignore trying to take over the big (shopper) keywords.

There are apparent exceptions. I was pointed to the term "gavel". And a website owner has that keyword for his site - and was trained though Bright Builders. But look at that keyword. It's a one-word niche. It won't be found under "hammers" or "judges". The guy has a site completely devoted to selling gavels - straight up and deluxe presentation kits.

But when you make a long-tail niche keyword phrase and optimize your landing page around it, then you have buyers only coming to find that item there (or accessories for it).

The strategy with eBay (and how you become an Online Millionaire through this) is to then sell on eBay as a lead generator - and then get reverse funnel buyers to subscribe to your site. You make clients of them (plus the other bidders to your auction).

Build your big site - but do it one product at a time. You don't make money selling only sizzle - people ultimately pay for steaks.

This gives us a sequence. Set your site up with a handy shopping cart - but have single, individual landing pages for each site - which are keyword optimized (including theming) for that long-tail keyword. Every single link on that page is optimized, including all affiliate links to similar products. But unless they are going off your mini-web to an affiliate, don't give them an option to go somewhere else.

(One strategy is to give them a link off site - but have this with a giveaway that they can subscribe to a mailing list to get... before you let them leave - and then send them to a search engine page with your links on it. Idea behind this (not mine, but still clever) is to give them a back button right on your site - but then expose them to more offers, so you are servicing your customer, but it's on your own terms. I suppose you could send them to your list of auctions, which would put them back on eBay...)

Mastering Trends - versus "following the buzz"

"What's hot" is a misnomer. The flame isn't the hot part of a fire - the heat is actually given off by the coals. Following the "hottest trends" is a sure route to ruin. Because this is where everyone is heading with their own marketing.

Recall the datum of Product Life Cycle. At the beginning there isn't a lot of supply, but the demand is increasing. Getting into the market right now will cost you a bit, but there is a lot of money to be made because demand is outstripping supply. At the peak (when it's finally noticed as "hot"), the supply is wide open with lots of distribution points - and profits are thin, mostly in the Big Box stores who already have customers (creatures of habit, remember) who shop there - and buy other stuff while they are "shopping". The third section is where it goes into a niche product. Most people probably already have that product, but will be looking for accessories or spare/replacement parts. (Late adopters are another subject entirely - but another reason to sell after it's "cooled off" a bit. Take advantage of others creating the market for you - it's their advertising dollars, not yours.)

You always, always, always want to find high demand, low supply. These only exist on the two sides of that peak. You don't follow fads and make any money at it.

But trends are not just "what's hot".

Trends have human social reasons for existing. They do not burn out like fads and "hot" items. Trends can be tracked. Fads are a blip on the screen - straight up and straight down.

Christmas sales patterns are repeating trends - as are most holiday-shopping "seasons." These are recurring waves of sales with peaks and valleys. On the Internet, these waves have been getting bigger every year since the Internet started - which can be said for brick-and-mortar sales during the same periods.

[Pure controversial statement: Global temperatures are natural trends, they shift every thirty years or so from hot to colder and back - within the realm of a few degrees. Al Gore and his "prestigious" awards are a fad - and he got those awards after the hottest year on record (1998, per NASA) in the last few decades. ]

Trends drive product sales. You look for trends first and then the products which are part of that trend. Only then can you source for profitable individual items to sell.

Now, environmental awareness is a human trend. And "green" products are becoming more and more common. Stuff made with recycled materials, or use less energy. Or converting to biofuel (like diesels which can run on vegetable oil - not expensive ethanol).

Boomers are a trend. And Europe has a worse boomer problem than the U.S. - their immigration problem is also much worse than ours. Boomers want to retain their health as long as possible with a high disposable income to buy it with. Gen "Y", Gen "X", etc. have differing wants and needs - but they aren't as big a demographic and won't be.

There are eight drives (mostly) for trends:

• consumer/customer/client wants
• consumer/customer/client needs
• lifestyle changes
• (shifting) demographics
• new technologies
• innovations
• long tail niches
• economics

Notes on these: Wants are different from actual needs. The old saw is that "we buy what we want and then justify it to be what we needed." Food is a need - "fast food" is a want. New technologies are bringing tons of new products to view - and new versions of old products combined with newer technologies. Any niche you have is splitting as it grows into long-tail niches.

Now you don't have to be trendy or a trendsetter to study and research trends. It doesn't take more than HammerTap and the media you already use to study trends and know what is going on (although once you get the gist of how this is done, you'll start seeing trends in every thing that comes across your lines). And this should be part of your regular research habits.

Here's three trend-spotting websites:
http://www.trendwatching.com
http://www.influxinsights.com
http://www.trendhunter.com
Some of these are "interesting" to say the least - themselves verging toward fads, but these should get your head out of any rut about what you think acceptable trends are.

What you are doing is to set aside your own personal biases and just observer buyers buying. You have to get around whether you think that trend makes sense or not, or whether you'd personally buy it. Forget "what's hot" and look for "what's selling". Just look down your magazine racks and you'll see what is being pushed by advertisers, based on their market research. Also, look for trade publications - find the trade publication for your product by typing in your product (in quotes) and then "+ trade publications".

Once you find how trends are moving, get some sample products (especially as you check through HammerTap) test-market them, and then sell them if they are profitable. Thinking creatively will give you so many more ideas about what could be sold. Checking your percent completed will give you an idea of these. However, note that you might be ahead of the curve and you will have few auctions - so the studies may not support it.

But this is where last year's auctions come in. Look for similar products that have sold in the past and this will give you some idea of how it will perform.

By studying and taking action on the trends you notice, you will actually put yourself a bit ahead of the curve - a very profitable area if you predict it right. What you will notice that these 8 points above will cross-connect to give very long-lasting trends. (New technologies for boomers...) Getting into a product line first will give you great products until that line gets saturated. You can continue selling it as a regular item on your website, but by then your auctions will have new items you are testing and buying by bulk when they do prove out.

Idea here is a simple set of basics:

• Start trend-watching as a back-of-the-mind habit.
• Look for products within that trend.
  
• Test-market and sell new products for a rising trend. (Or look for accessories or updates to supplement a declining trend.)
  
• Trends morph and change - so your trend research and product testing need to be constant in order to maintain maximal profits.
• Keep an eye out for repeating social trends such as buying seasons. Keep up with the advertising schedules of the Big Box stores. Remember, individuals move faster than the big stores. Be aware, be prepared, and be insanely profitable.
  

Holiday selling doesn't mean redecorating the trees in the front yard.

Christmas and other holidays repeat their trends (above) and are insanely profitable if you plan for them. By researching last year's shopping statistics, you can expect to improve your preparations for this year's sales. Per report, more and more people are venturing online to shop. One report has it that over 40% of buyers intend to buy something online this year.

Biggest sales days: (in order)

• Dec 13th, Dec 4th, Dec 11th

Biggest traffic days:

• Dec 13th, Dec 12th, Dec 11th

Biggest conversion days:

• Dec 12th, Dec 11th, Dec 13th

Biggest week:

• Dec 4th - 10th

This doesn't mean you only sell and prepare for Christmas - but you can and should research for sales days (Mother's Day, Father's Day, Memorial Day, etc.) which are global or American peak sales points - and then figure out what you can sell.

Once you have a holiday shopping period nailed, you can then look through top categories for 90 days worth of sales through that period. Look for maximal success rates and prices.

You're looking through your analysis to find a few key things:

• what auction type to use
• what ending day (and hour) will be best for you
• how long a listing duration should you use
• is there a starting price that creates a bidding frenzy
• keywords which produce the best hooks
• listing features which work (and ones to avoid)
• what's the most effective category to put your auction under

All these are answered in the HammerTap program - and I really recommend you study their tutorials from their forum. That's the homework I've been doing for these eBay posts - in addition to everything BrightBuilders has and my own collection of ebooks.

What you do in searching past sales is to take snapshots of three-month and then weekly periods to see how these change over time. Look at the dates above. Now people start shopping for Christmas in October - and don't forget about Black Friday, as well as the shopping after Christmas when there are probably less competitors (who buy the idea that no body sells after Christmas). In short, don't neglect to turn over every rock in your search for the best time to sell.

Your mileage will vary depends on your own research. (And every single item performs differently.) But ny getting these snapshots (and HammerTap saves each report so you can jump between each one), you can see trends. As you keep up such research, you can then find other peak selling periods for your particular item. Again, look for completed sales versus average price. Where there is a high competition, these will change. But through your own analysis, you can find where the peaks and valleys are.

This post shorthands the subject quite a bit. And if you've not seen these forum presentations, then I've got you completely mystified. Once you see the power of this program, you'll be hooked like me. (But I, on the other hand, have already invested in this and have to recoup that investment - so you can see my own necessary excitement in this.)

Another approach is to search through categories to find best-selling categories - then pile through these to find what items in those sold the best last year. Chances are, if they have new items this year, they'll have similar sales potential. (But don't go out and buy a container of these things without doing very thorough research first.


And what does this say for your SEO efforts and your social media promotions?

Frankly, a lot. Ok, so I don't know at this time that when you optimize a sales page using your keywords for eBay that this translates right across to top search engine real estate. But figure this - maybe you don't particularly have to depend on search engines to have people find your site. Get the top for that keyword in StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit - and then have these social networks send you traffic. Maybe you only get shoppers - but on the other hand, if you are consistently setting yourself up as an expert in this area (particularly if you are posting articles and making Squidoo lenses, as well as comment marketing), people will be following you in Twitter and these others in order to see what you are talking about these days.

But you go ahead and social promote every single product sales page you create. Again, your sales page will probably be written as a product review page - and then have a link to your "buy this product now" page. (And wouldn't it be great if you did a comparison page and sold either all of these products or were an affiliate for each one/some of them...)

Why I tell you constantly about social media promotion is that either social media are replacing search engines, or search engines are going to expand their use of social media to find better content to display. Either way, if you aren't on the social media bandwagon, you won't be able to keep up in the profit parade.

But if these eBay keywords are the same - and remember, they are long-tail niche keywords - you are going to get buyers coming to your specific pages to find what they are looking for. And while they are there - they can bookmark your page and sign up for your mail list and become your client.

That's the underlying basic to everything we are covering here. You want to attract buyers who come and spend money on your services (or a company you are an affiliate for).

Again, eBay or not, you'd build your main page first (an ecommerce engine of some sort) and ensure it has a mail list subscription opt-in (and all the necessary analytics connected to it) and then start building individual product pages, which all link in and give link-love to your main page. You are building a mini-net, one product at a time. Now your eBay sales drive business over to your product info page - which sends it to your ecommerce page. As you continue to add products, they build up your page rank and bring you more attention from the search engines. Videos and slidecasts and blog posts and Squidoo lenses will also bring traffic to your product pages. Hopefully, you are attracting buyers in all this traffic.

eBay, then, is a simple reverse-funnel lead generator for mail-list subscribers - which you can then up-sell and cross-sell over and over and over. When you plug this into your existing online marketing structure, you build a devoted and profitable client-base. And that is how you become an Online Millionaire. And any millionaire will tell you that you diversify your income sources - so eBay is only one way to get buyers and subscribers. (Boy, that paragraph would make a nice ebook, wouldn't it...)

Getting your feedback rating up quickly - an investment.

I've run across a simple feedback method - essentially, find low-cost items that are ending soon with no bidders. Search eBay and find:

• Items with no bids on them.
• Items that you want!
• Or, items that NOBODY would likely want (better chance of being the winning bidder!)
• Dutch Auctions (will usually guarantee you a winning bid)
• Auctions that are ending soon.
• Auctions that allow payment via credit card (quick transaction)
• Sellers with a high rating!

Then, when you buy the item pay immediately - and ask for feedback with your email.

But watch out for high shipping. Don't even bother bidding if they have something far over the normal shipping costs. (Oh - and if you are smart, you can re-auction that item, or give it away as a bonus...)

You do want to get your feedback rating over 50 as fast as you can, which can come from sales or buying - so invest in your feedback and it will do you well.

Note: a little product research can net you some tidy profits by buying cheap on eBay and then turning around to sell it high - based on what you already know in this area. Lots of people buy right on eBay and turn around to sell it. So your investment in feedback can double up when you sell it for a profit.

FAQ - Frequently Asked Question Pages

Here's another tip. If you're selling a lot of something, have a FAQ page which answers all the routine questions. Now you can always tack this onto the bottom of your Review page as well, with in on-page link to that section (and another one there back to the top). If you do a standalone FAQ page, it should be worth your social media promotion - and grab its own search engine real estate, sending its link-love to your main page with a no-follow link back to your sales page for that item.

The efficiency of a FAQ page is to save you time in answering questions. You answer the first question and tell them that there is far more information on the FAQ page. However, by including the FAQ at the bottom of the sales page, you can save yourself the emails.

On the other hand, being able to communicate with your bidders will actually give you a personal contact, the chance you need to build the relationship. And your email signature will give them a chance to see your other sites - as well, sending them to your FAQ page (or back to your "more information page" about that product on your own site, you have a chance to make a direct sale or get them to subscribe to your mail-list (give them a bonus, etc.).

Your credibility and your articles can increase sales

Increasing credibility of your website can be done by hosting your own (or others') articles on your own site. If you can link to articles about this product or related products right on your own site (which then link right back to related sales pages, plus specials) will then tell your customer that they can come to this site for more than just buying a product, but actually how to use that product in their own life. As you do research on this area, you can collect up data and then write 500-700 word articles handling a specific point about that product - with hot links to any product you mention by name.

Oh - and did I tell you that these articles then are social promoted to get you more link-love?

(I wouldn't, however, go so far as to host your own forum, since you have to moderate these to keep out the spammers and riff-raff.)

Other uses for eBay - why become a salesperson.

This gives you an overall experience in selling stuff, becoming a merchandiser. That is all Sam Walton did when he founded Wal-Mart. (His first store was a failure, by the way.) But Wal-Mart is constantly finding the sweet-spot, how many people will buy what at what price. Same as eBay particularly when you use a key research tool like HammerTap.

Our culture currently develops a very low appreciation for salesman in everyone. (Right down there just above lawyers and rocks.) So people simply don't appreciate this very highly-paid tradition and occupation. (See Earl Nightingale's "Strangest Secret".) But as you get over this trained-in aversion, you can then build up your back-end to support this vital, highly-remunerative activity.

That is the essential that I've had to overcome as part of this Online Millionaire Plan. And probably one of the reasons I stuck into my product creation activities instead of building my back end when I started out.

But however you do it, forcing yourself to get in there and sell stuff is good for you. On eBay, it's a bit easier than going door-to-door, since you don't have to meet people face-to-face and can simply do it from a number-crunching aspect through HammerTap.

Now with the proper tools, eBay doesn't have to have a burn-out aspect. Drop shipping and HammerTap take a great deal of the stress out of this area. You want to be efficient with your time and earn the most money from your listings.

• Not selling (50% of most auctions currently complete with no bids right now) isn't an option you want to have.
• Having to package and ship stuff personally can get tedious.
• Spending a great deal of time finding salable items at yard sales and auctions - hoping you can get a good return from them - is a bit stressful and can load up your garage with some very interesting non-moving items.

If you organize and get the proper tools, none of these common aspects of eBay auction work should bring you down.

My key point in this is to get a coaching program to get you over the hump of selling on eBay and helping you build your backend to make it all happen. The program I dropped into, Bright Builders, has a top track record in this area and a website with so many different resources it can fill several CD's with that data.

But it's pricey - which makes you commit to making yourself a success with it. Sure, they guarantee you'll make it all back. Know at the outset, though, that YOU are the one who is going to getting that work done.

Once you've swallowed that pill of getting yourself to sell to make back the money you just loaded up your credit card with - then you can make some forward progress.

And that's why I recommend it.

Is all eBay sales this number-crunching effort?

No. And you don't have to be an accountant to succeed in what you're doing. But my enthusiasm for HammerTap is that anyone can now find exactly what sales, what time to sell it, what keywords to use, what hour to sell it, how long to sell it for, what special mark-ups work and which don't, etc. etc. etc. You just can't get this data to this degree and quality by looking up completed sales on Ebay and then guessing.

So get a bit twisty in this and get some real analysis going. Sure HammerTap costs by the month. But then - if you're making monthly income, it tends to pay far beyond your monthly investment, doesn't it?

It's the road to power selling - and their own studies show that existing power sellers have improved their own sales by 40%, while cutting their listings by 50% - making more money with less time. Neat.

- - - -

What's next?

I've basically exhausted all the stuff in my library and the forums at this point. Now I need to practice and put all this stuff to use. I'll also be getting into my own website and posting some stuff shortly (today) in order to have a rudimentary site ready to send my clients to.

That's what you can look forward to in my next post...

Online Millionaire eBay Training - product strategies and sources

The trick to online millionaire ebay training is in your product sourcing strategy.

There are essentially two types of sources you can find your products on ebay

1. One-time wonders/blunders
2. Repeatable supplies

One-time includes garage sales, your attic, cute rocks you find at the sea shore or creek. You will probably never see another one like them. They can be wonders or blunders as sales items based on a wide variety of possible variables, your headline, your copy, your photo (or lack of them), your presentation overall - and whether anyone is online when you try to sell it who wants to buy one of those things.

Repeatable supplies are from having access to the manufacturing source - or wholesaler who will work with you. But just because you have a lot of widgets doesn't mean you are going to sell a lot of widgets or that they are even worth what you paid for them.

In both cases, you have to do market research - which is not so scary or intimidating as it sounds (we don't have to be MBA's to do this sort of stuff - and practically, it wouldn't help anyway: just too simple and easy.)

Market Research - simply finding what people want to buy

Market research is finding both supply and demand, then what information you need to know, need to give - and how to supply the best service to your potential clients.

Marketing is both finding a market and building a market for your goods.

On eBay, the best tool I've seen so far was formerly "Deep Analysis" and is now called "HammerTap", after the company which made it.

This anecdote from Earl Nightingale (among others) tells the story:

One of these huge machines in a factory went down and no one could get it going again. So they called a engineer from the manufacturer to fix it.

The engineer came in, listened to all their descriptions, and to all the various attempts they had made to re-start it, as well as all the ideas they had as to what was going on with it.

The plant manager was there, very eager to have this machine running again, as anything not producing something in that plant was costing him and his shareholders money.

The engineer, after digesting all this data, went over and examined the machine carefully. He ultimately went over to one side of the machine and stopped. He put down the tool bag he was carrying and pulled out a small hammer from it. Reaching over to the side of this massive machine, he gave it a simple tap.

Nodding to the operator at the control, the starter button was pushed. And the machine roared to life.

The engineer then got out a pad and wrote out the bill, handing it to the manager.

"5,000 dollars!" the manager exclaimed. "You've only been here 15 minutes and only tapped with with a hammer! I demand a full accounting and detailed invoice on my desk in the morning!" And with that the manager stormed off into the plant.

The next day, that manager found the following invoice on his desk:

"Visiting your plant and tapping with a hammer - $1.00

"Knowing where to tap - $4,999.00"

It is that precision of knowledge which drives sales on eBay.

What threw me off of this subject was the vast amount of auctions which have no one bidding, or only a single bidder. Needless to say, this is a way to rack and ruin if you are trying to make a living from it.

The very smart power sellers make extreme use of this HammerTap tool in order to make their outrageous profits. And it's such a powerful tool that there are many, many ways to use it - but only a few which give you the data needed to create really successful and profitable auctions time and time again. The folks at HammerTap have created multiple tutorials to help people get the data they need to utilize their tool: http://www.hammertap.com/webinars_and_workshops/

I'm going through these and will tell you all the new ideas I find. Just using the tool, or using eBay is worth your own education in this area - I won't be reporting on the common data we both already know, or the specifics of using eBay and setting up auctions. There are too many great books out there (as well as cheesy also-rans) which give you all this data.

Now for the new stuff ...

In this workshop, Long-Term Profits with Market Research and Product Sourcing, Jen Cano discusses some basics from her book "eBay Performance: Selling Success with Market Research and Product Sourcing". These are found in forums hosted by eBay for their community.

She talks here about a Turnover Principle, meaning that your market is constantly changing, and you need to be able to change with it. With few exceptions, you can't continue to just sell one or a few items and not eventually exhaust your market. Unless you sell food and have no competitors, you will have to be researching new products continually as part of your regular routine.

The turnover principle consists of three parts:

1. Research
2. Source
3. Sell

Three benefits she mentions for keeping these three points constantly in play:

• You focus on profit by being pro-actively seeking out new products (or revamping old ones) instead of reacting to unanticipated challenges.
• You have in-demand products in the market weekly, because you're phasing in new products as you phase out the old.
• Changes in demand don't surprise you - you'll know how to predict change and produce your buyers' needs and wants, having it ready for them.

Let's take these three turnover principle points one at a time:

1. Research - use HammerTap/Deep Analysis to find what sells, when, and how. This program can do some incredible things - right down to which keywords are in what high-selling items. And also will tell you if enhanced options (you pay for) have been associated with that item. Using an analysis program like this makes sure that you are always on top of changes and can review your existing items and phase out items where competition has become too extreme, or demand has slowed (snowboots in summer?). Research should be daily or weekly in your schedule.

2. Sourcing should be a regular part of your schedule. Finding new, lower priced, or improved service in your suppliers is a constant. When items get to be more common, your prices should drop from your supplier. Also, suppliers are in the same game of constantly finding new items or better rates from the manufacturers - so that they in turn can sell more, or phase them out when they don't sell as well anymore. So your sources should be improving and helping you with more discounts, or better rates on your dropshipping - or simply telling you that they have a hot new item which should be selling well for you. Always look to improve your sources.

3. Selling is something that you constantly work to improve - usually through bettering your copy or headlines - or simply by using different strategies for selling. Jen's recipe for this:

"Start out simple, by selling smaller, lower margin items.
Earn your customers quickly through loss leaders.
Once you have customers, please them beyond their wildest dreams!
Broaden your product mix.
Get into trends early and monitor their progress.
Up-sell, cross-sell, and add value."

In this, she has three selling strategies - which are time worn:

1. High Volume in listing success rates - high volume sales yield greater profit in the long run, even though profit per listing is less.
2. High Profit in average selling price - greater profits per sale will give you long run profits, even if your conversion rate is lower (fewer completed sales per number listed).
3. Balancing Profits versus Volume - going for the balance between lots of listings completing and the highest possible profit for each one.

Obviously, you can see how these work in various examples.
Wal-Mart and Dollar General are under the first. Stores on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills are in the second. Mid-range store chains like Target, JCPenney's, Walgreen's - these are in the middle tier of these. Even bookstores like Barnes & Noble, Border's and Amazon are in that middle tier.

Your own auctions might have these different strategies for each type of item.

• One-up items might be for best profit per sale. Especially collectibles. List these several times, even with reserves if needed.
• When you have bulk in something that a lot of people want, you might go for more repeating sales and have a higher percentage of completed auctions - and get a lot of subscribers for your list (who you can tell what new items are going up for auction...)
• If you can get a bulk (or small-bulk) amount of a generally higher-priced item that is selling good right now, you could use the best of both worlds and get the maximal profit that way.

Your strategy depends on what you're selling. And HammerTap allows you to simply determine which strategy to apply, based on the records they pull from eBay for you. But check out their tutorials (like the one this is based on, linked above) for the details on how to do this. Being able to quickly digest all this eBay data from a single database screne is much easier (and faster) than trying to study eBay data across their thousands of categories and millions of auctions.

Our use of this is to point out the three strategies which can be used on your own online marketing, regardless of what your niche is. I don't know that eBay data can or can't be used reliably outside of eBay itself. Certainly eBay buyers follow the trends and fads. But you can see how this principle above explains how regular brick-and-mortar sales work - which is the same basis for all online marketing.

Jen next tempts us with other interesting uses for HammerTap:

• Day and hour to begin and end your listing
• Type of listing to choose
• Starting prices which cause a bidding frenzy
• Listing length to capture interest and sales
• Successful title words
• Seasonal trends (you can even check last years trends)
• Size of market for the product
• Whether demand is rising or falling

But again - check out that forum linked above, plus the other links available on the HammerTap site.

Mimicking and Follow-The-Leader

You can learn a lot by doing what other leaders selling your products are doing. Check out their patterns of sales, in all characteristics: copy, start times, end times, pricing, features. By doing what they are doing (don't plagiarize) you can get similar results to theirs.

One caveat - they'll leave the market faster than you and start new products sooner. So you won't make their profits, that is until you learn how they do their stuff and start becoming a market leader yourself.

That requires homework. HammerTap will show you who the market leaders are - and then you can find out what they are selling, selling routinely, and what their completion rates are - how many auctions they post and how many actually finish. That homework will tell you whether you should get into that market at all.

Jen says in her next HammerTap forum that if over 50% of a market is occupied by newby, casual sellers, that market can be occupied profitably.

You want to perform better than average, which means you have to offer specific products and promote them with good headlines and copy.

To determine change in your market, you want to track how that market has been doing. While you could simply track this from week to week, you can also generate weekly reports from within HammerTap's database to see if the sales have been improving or declining. You aren't working with a month's average, but looking at each week by themselves. (And don't forget to check last year's sales trends of this type item to see what the seasonal sales are - but note that new items last year might not sell as well once they reach distribution peak and there is lots of competition for them.

The Product Life Cycle is briefly described as:

• Ascendant - new product, expensive to manufacture, bugs are being worked out, few people know about it.
• Peak - Lots of sales, cheaply produced, lots of distributors - this is where the bulk of sales are done.
• Declining - becomes a niche market instead of widespread. You can get stuck with pallets of goods which no one wants to buy. (Picture a lifetime supply of laundry detergent sitting in your garage.)

Notes on this description:

1. Products can go through this more than once. Especially some 20 years later when someone finds the "retro" look. Collectibles are examples of this - as well as Disney "re-releasing" their "classic" movies as a "limited-time offer".
2. The declining side is also a time to sell accessories or their particular battery. People have the product and now want the stuff to go with it - or can't find replacement parts anymore. There is a local tractor supply business who makes their money buying up old tractors, and then selling their parts all over the planet.
3. With marketing, especially to niches, you can revive the market product cycle - and maybe create a fad while you're at it.
4. A saturated market isn't the place to be. Low profit margins and it easily tips over into a declining market. The two profitable places to be are when the demand is ramping up (few competitors, even though the items are pricey) and the declining side (where you sell accessories and replacement parts - or replacement items).

Time you spend on Auctions - versus the rest of your life

I got a freebie "Interviews with Power Sellers" in the mail, on a CD. (Nice packaging.) When I started going through most of these, I found that they spend varying time on their production. Most over a 40 hour week, one at 60 hours.

Their problem, for the most part (I did find one who only spent 20 hours a week) was that they weren't working efficiently. Sourcing for most of these were through the time-consuming work of attending auctions, garage sales, and clearances. They did no real research through a program like HammerTap and so couldn't work efficiently. Consequently, most were running at about 50% sales ratio. Now, as I noted above, you can definately be profitable at this.

BUT - you can't get time spent back.

My ideal is to replace my part-time day job with my part-time (20 hour's) eBay sales job. And make 2 or 3 times as much or more. The idea here is to enjoy what I'm doing and then get onto something else I enjoy doing. Compartment my week so that I never get "burnt out" on anything, but can move from one to another during the week, or during specific times during the day.

I farm in the morning currently, spend the afternoon and evening on research and studies, then do a couple of 10-hour days on my day job (which just pays my bills). My current research is moving me over into understanding how auction sales works, which will build up my back end (of necessity) and move me over into making profits from all my research and writing.

While I do 60-70 hour weeks, I like everything except the day job. And that's changing.

Here is the reason for the Online Millionaire Plan - move yourself over into control over your own life, making the money you want to buy the things and help the people around you - just the way you want to. The underlying foundation of this is to return choice to your life, over your life. Quit enabling people to control and chose for you, over you. Start living for yourself.

You see, giving up control completely is slavery. Giving up control partially runs the gamut of Communism, Fascism, Socialism, Totalitarianism, and a whole lot of other -ism's. Regaining maximum control doesn't mean complete capitalism either - but it will mean that you are deciding for yourself within the data and choices you have about what you are going to do with your life and what world you are going to create around you.

- - - -

And so this blog post ends for today.

I'm starting to see the end of my theoretical studies and will probably post some items for sale this week, with auctions that end sometime next week or this coming weekend (depending on what the best days are for these items). Once I get my feet really wet with what I have around the house, I'll probably jump in with Wholesale Brands and start drop-shipping away - small at first and then build up my profit (reinvesting this) to buy larger items with bigger profit margins.

But a few more tutorials to finish tonight and we'll see what tomorrow brings...

Why Market on Ebay - key concepts and how to's

Market on eBay - because it's the closest to perfect market we have right now.

A market consists of buyers and sellers.

Any price is set by an agreement between buyers and sellers. This may be tacit or negotiated.

The best market has a conversation between the buyer and the seller. Open-air markets are the best at this, since you can see both what is being offered and its quality, as well as play the horse-trading game with the seller. Both of you end up satisfied that you got the best deal for the circumstances. But the buyer who went before and the one that comes after gets a different deal - your price is custom-made for you.

Online auctions are near perfect (especially eBay) as you can see the product info. (As well, you can link product pages to your eBay item, which could contain videos and product manual PDF's, etc.) The seller has to start off the auction at an attractive point, otherwise people go to competitive sellers or suppliers. So the buyer more than likely can get that item cheaper than through brick-and-mortar sources (though in many cases, the ease of buying through eBay and home delivery is worth paying slightly more than driving and paying local sales taxes).

The 4 points of economics at play

Besides supply and demand there is also information and service. All four factors inter-relate with each other simultaneously. You are selling a widget. If you just put up, "Widget. Starting Bid $.99". Not many takers. Add pictures - you get more interest. Add an interesting headline and copy - more takers. This is information at work improving demand.

Now, if you have a poor record - lots of negative feedback - your supplier may not want to sell the product to you. I've heard of several sellers who block problem buyers from bidding on their items. One problem purchase (go ahead and be snide, rude, or nasty) and they don't want to do business with you ever again. This is information decreasing supply. Get on their bad side and now you have fewer suppliers for that product.

More information, or having multiple copies of an item might drop prices. On the other hand, I've heard a local scheme where three Angus breeders in different states are partners. Each has a major sale every year for their "particular" genetic line of beef. Each partner attends each sale and "bids" high on aution items - taking the top line item (usually a prize-winning bull) into the 10's or 100's of thousands. Of course, the bull never actually changes farms, just ownership on paper. (They ship the semen to the partner instead.) But you see, it's a paper deal - not actual. These partners are already sharing resources in this line of work - they're partners. But that top bid drives up all the lower bids into the thousands. And those bulls are delivered. Lots of supply, but the overall value is driven higher based on an inside marketing campaign. Profits are higher.

Service also figures. There is an auto-repair business locally who does nearly no advertising other than the yellow pages - so people can find their phone number. But he is flooded with business. Because he services each person as fast and professionally as he can - because he knows that all of his business is local and depends on repeat and referral business.

Another version of this is adding bonuses - providing better service with every purchase.

Inverses of these also work - like telling them that the offer expires (like auctions). You have a limited time for this offer, and it may never be repeated at this (low) price. That information increases demand and by limiting supply. But the product didn't change, just the artificial time-window. That product might exist in massive volumes at the warehouse, and many versions at the seller's website - but this exact particular offer is going to expire "if you don't act quickly..."

Similarly - "I'm only going to sell 500 of these and then destroy the mold." Disney pulls a great one with their DVD's and videos: "...for the first time this decade, and available only until sold out, we've reproduced this classic movie..." Of course, then they bring it out again in 5 years in a slightly different format - they can do this as many times as they want, since they have the masters locked up in their digital vaults.

And, finally, the common and ordinary can be arbitrarily distinguished from other (identical) products. "I've personally re-edited this from the online versions to ensure that you have complete ease of reading both online and in print." But the text was scraped or downloaded from a public domain site. It's better service, which also increased demand. It also lowers supply, since no one else has this particular version.

7 Types of Headlines - 7 Common Benefits for any product

There are at least 7 types of headlines you can use to attract interest and state/imply a benefit:

1. Promise a Major Benefit
2. Ask a Question
3. Offer a Solution to a Problem
4. Give a Warning
   
5. Flag Your Target Customer
6. Use a Testimonial
7. News Announcement

These are pretty self explanatory. Each draws in the customer in some manner, either saying why this is good, or what you should look for, or who says its great, or "Hey Baseball Lovers...", etc.

But you can see that these apply to every product you've ever used or looked at. Take apples and you can think up an example of each of these.

This is an interesting list I ran across in this research and included it as it updates all I've told you (here or in the book) about headlines. Basically, you are providing beneficial information in each category, but they are also a way you can quickly re-write an eBay auction entry without having to re-write all the details and re-do your keyword research, etc.

Otherwise, what I've covered before on copywriting holds. Tell a story, engage the audience on an emotional level, be personal in your writing style, etc.

Essence of eBay marketing is learning to walk before you try to fly.

You want to

1. first, sign up on ebay
2. second, buy something on ebay
3. third, find something to sell on ebay
4. sell it
5. fourth, find something profitable to sell on ebay and sell it
6. find repeating, profitable items to sell on ebay
7. cut your overhead
8. improve your profits.

First, get registered. Simple. Any name will do, but you can also use keyword research if you know how you want to brand yourself. The thing is to get started - and you have to sign up with eBay.

Next, go buy something - so you have the buyer's experience. Doesn't have to be something big, just get the data.

After that, look around your house and find something to sell. You have to be able to ship it (cheaply) and something you don't have to explain why it's missing...

Now - sell it. Go through posting on eBay and endure the wait. Ship it promptly, get the feedback (and payment). Review what you just learned from it. (Of course, you are doing all sorts of homework by reading all the PDF's you can find, taking courses, etc.) But get your feet wet - really wet. The more the better.

Next - find something profitable. Means you buy something and sell it for more than you paid, plus fees and shipping costs (not necessarily your time at doing it). But you get a tidy return after you've covered all your overhead (and taxes are overhead).

Here's the next step upward - find products you can buy and sell on a regular basis at a profit. Means you either make the product cheaply, or buy someone else's manufactured product cheaply - then you post it on eBay and sell it on a consistent basis for a profit. The more profits you make, the more you can invest in other products to sell - plus you can set it up to work less at your day job (or quit it entirely) if you can cover your other life-bills.

And now you can start figuring out where your costs are. If you produce the product, can you do this more cheaply? If you buy the product from someone else, would it cost less if you buy more at one time (volume discount). Can you use cheaper packaging?

A hidden cost is your own time. I've seen some people spending 60 hours a week at their auction business. Time is something you don't get back, no matter how you invest it. Being rich is great, but can you enjoy it? If you enjoy everything about auctions and it's improving your health - fine. Otherwise, look to see if having someone else drop-ship your goods will pay you back. The idea that you can leverage your time off into new business opportunities. Or you can work as long as you can everyday and peak out - you can't increase your income because you'd have to hire someone and you can't afford it. So look over your operation and look for time savings as well as money savings.

Improving your profits goes along with the savings. But if you improve your description copy and headlines, this might make more sales for you - at higher prices. Less work, more money for what you're doing. As well, look over what you're selling and see if you can find more profitable items to sell. Keep those proven items, but as you find more profitable ones, keep these relegated to your web-site and sell them for a fixed price. Same goes for loss-leaders, selling something below cost in order to get their email so you can offer them other products. Or just invite them all to your website for fixed (low-price) items they can buy direct without having to wait out an auction.

In all these, you want to offer someone something they can use to improve their lives - at the least work and cost to you, as well as the most income for each item. Play these all back and forth and you'll wind up with a great lifestyle and just as much work as you want to put into it.

Get more prospects through your auction listings

An interesting thing I ran into was the point that you can link to a "more info" page on your own site (while you can't send someone blindly to your site). Now on that page, you can (subtly) offer other offers on that page, such as sign up for special offers, etc. as well as providing links to your online catalogue of products.

To avoid violating eBay's limits - these should really be no more than links at the bottom, although it's arguable that a sign-up box on the right side would be permissable, as well as a list of product categoriess and/or PPC ads there.

But that's a hot, new cross-over business idea for your marketing. Leverage your auctions to get leads to your site - without violating eBay's silo rules.

And if you are personally shipping the product, make sure you include a flier or catalog - at least a single page with this month's offer and your website. Info products on CD - simple, give a PDF catalogue with all your links included, plus a form that sends data to you. Bonus for them, pre-sold lead for you. Don't forget offering the up-sell version to that product, while you are cross-selling them.

Now you can also harvest the emails of all bidders - offer them all a free bonus on the web site for visiting, another for signing up. And of course, there are always sending them to a thank you page with these offers on them.

- - - -

That's about all for today. Studies continue. I'm getting into the hands-on stuff tomorrow and will tell you about my test-cases as I go.