Be realistic when selling on eBay....

Be realistic when selling on eBay....  - As some of you know, I spent many years buying and selling both on and offline and several of my products are based upon my own experience in this area. I know that the vast majority of my customers and subscribers have an interest in trading whether it be on eBay or at the local market but more and more I am seeing people with completely unrealistic expectations of what they will be able to do. Most commonly these unrealistic expectations are in respect of how much it actually costs to purchase specific products and what they can then be sold on for. 

I regularly get emails from people who want to know where they can purchase products such as mobile (cell) phones, new release DVDs, Playstation games and similar at, say, a 50% discount to resell on eBay. The fact is that such a thing is not available - it is a simple case of supply and demand and competition.

Take DVDs for example, most people think that these are excellent products to resell on eBay because they are very popular, not particularly expensive and easy to package and ship. Unfortunately, they could not be more wrong. The DVD market is one of the most competitive that there is - take a look for yourself and see how many auctions there are on eBay for DVDs at any one time. I have just looked and counted almost 300,000! At any one time there will only be a certain number of buyers wanting to purchase a particular DVD and if you take into account the numerous different places there are that each buyer could purchase from, it is likely that in general, there will be more copies of an individual DVD available than there are buyers to purchase them. This situation causes prices to fall. The other factor that forces prices down is the fact that one DVD is the same as another. By this I mean that from a buyers point of view, there is no difference to a new DVD purchased on eBay to one which is purchased from their local DVD store. Often the only way to differentiate is on price and of course, the only way to make the price more attractive to a buyer is to lower it.

The above reasons help to explain why the wholesale discount on a new release DVD is just £1 or £2 at most ($2 or $3 roughly in the US). When you take into account the fact that the large retail chains can purchase thousands of DVDs at a time and receive a bigger discount than individual traders, you soon see why it is very difficult for a small business to compete in such a competitive industry. You simply cannot purchase new release DVDs at 50% discount and even if you could, it wouldn't be long before prices were forced down as there is always someone willing to sell a little bit cheaper than the next man.

It isn't just DVDs that fall into this category. Take mobile (cell) phones. Here in the UK you can walk down just about any high street and get the latest phones either free or for a minimal token payment. The stores are relying on making their money from the line rental contract that you will have to sign in order to get the phone. Of course, the actual cost of the phone is not free - most new mobiles are actually worth £200 or £300 which means that if you want to buy a batch of phones at wholesale, you are going to be looking at a pretty high unit cost. As with most electrical products, the market is competitive and prices have been forced down which means that the difference between your wholesale buying price and your retail selling price is minimal. 

There are numerous products that suffer from the same market conditions as DVDs and phones and new/small traders really should avoid trying to sell such items at all costs because it will usually be frustrating and ultimately not financially rewarding. When trying to decide what products to sell, you need to be thinking about the type of market that a particular product is sold in. If there are already numerous sellers and many large companies selling at considerable discounts this is far from ideal. The exception to the rule is if you are able to add value in some way to make your 'offering' more unique. I wrote about adding value last year in one of my newsletters - you can read it here: http://www.thetraderonline.com/jul2204.html

At the end of the day, it is all about research, being realistic and having an understanding of the market that you want to operate in. Whilst it would be great to be able to buy and sell new release DVDs (or whatever) all day long, doubling your money every time, I am afraid that this is just not going to happen.

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A Website Model That Makes Money

A Website Model That Makes Money - I would like to share with you one simple stratergy in creating income with your own website. This is just one method out of simply millions that you could create for yourself. Remember the internet provides no limits. This is one example that does work for me, and may give you an insight into exactly a website model, that you may like to put into action for yourself. Affiliate marketing and/or sales of any kind on the internet, requires a real commitment, as I am sure you do already realize. The internet is really one of the greatest training grounds in the world for sales. You can try and fail many times, until you find that system and approach that will work for you. But the commitment that you show in meeting this challenge, will be a lesson that you will always remember. Success is always achieved in no matter what you do, through simple hard work. There is no easy path to success, but when you achieve the success you are after, there is no greater feeling. So lets begin. In this example my website, which for the purposes of this article i will call '????'. I will give you the exact profit breakdowns. 

With this website I treat all my affiliate products as purely residual income, much like adsense. Adsense itself generates for me, on this website, on average around $2 per day. I also use various other companies affiliate products, which generate around $200 per month. Also within the website, I sell e-book informational products, which I own the full resale rights for, which generate around $700 per month. And here lies the answer to making money online, no matter what you sell. The products, that generate the most income, are the ones that you will own yourself. Certainly I should be making more from the affiliate info products that I sell. But I lose commissions through simple affiliate url tampering. Commissions that are stolen or lost are a real pain. You can try every method in the book to protect your affiliate codes. But after all the hard work is done, you still lose that valuable income. The people who sell the original affiliate product know this, which is mostly why a high percentage of the sales price is offered to an affiliate to begin with. Because they realize that a very high ratio of sales made on their products will give them the total profit back. The reasons why people change affiliate product codes etc, could run into pages. Lets just say it is inevitable. This is the reason why I treat all my affiliate based products as purely residual income. 

But as you can see in this example clearly where the highest return on investment lies. And that is in the products that you actually own. You can purchase resale rights for info products easily, and it involves not much money at all, most products are available for under $50. Or if you have the time and patience to search the internet. You can find amazing e-books that have free resell rights and the information they contain is really valuable. You will find these types of treasures occasionally, and the lights will start flashing in your eyes when you do. The information that you have just discovered is of value and that is a real key to success. This is why I, at this point, strongly emphasize the importance of this one principle. Only sell products that you feel strongly about and you know that will be of great value to the person who may purchase it. That includes products you have bought the resale rights for, or a free product, you have discovered with resale rights. 

If you sell strong products with real informational value consistently you will always succeed. Your customers will return, quite simply because they know where the value of the information they seek is the greatest. And that is at your website. Always remember to put yourself into your visitors shoes. Ask yourself the question? Would you buy the products you are selling? Answer this question with a Yes. And you will be really on the start too online success.

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At Home Internet Jobs, Who Said It Was Easy?

At Home Internet Jobs, Who Said It Was Easy? -I’m sure you’ve heard it all before, build a website and people will come. But if you’ve built a money-making website, that’s not what you want to hear. After all, you picked one of these at home internet jobs, because you want to be financially independent and your own boss.

Here’s one alternative from the many home internet jobs you’ve surely read on the net. Join an affiliate or partnership or referral program. Study these three alternatives, to help you maximize your profit streams.

1. Exclusive retailer. 

There are many online malls; they offer a comprehensive range of products and services. Concentrate on supplying the needs of a narrower market segment. You’ll be unique and sought out. 

2. Join the more profitable affiliate program. 

Although there are literally hundreds you can join, take your time. Read the FAQ section. Check out their products. If the products and services they offer are ones you look for, there’s a good chance that you’ll earn as an affiliate. 

Other factors you may want to think about. Are the commissions high enough, that you’ll turn a profit? Remember you’ll need to set up your own website, and secure advertising money. Choose to join an affiliate program whose products are mid range and will sell it self with little effort. 

3. Create a website that focuses on your passion. 

Although the focus is on the range of products that the affiliate program has, that’s not the only thing you offer. Give advice that is contextual to the products. Maybe you could write about the history of the products, or the processes involved in manufacturers. You could write about the celebrities who use this. Build a website that’s full of contents that your customers can use to better their lives. You’ll win their trust. They’ll soon become your most loyal customers. 

Here’s one home internet job opportunity you may not have thought of. It’s a profitable and excellent venue to a steady stream of profits.

Be an online retailer of e-books with the reseller or reprint rights. Here’s one of the many ways you can do it. Offer a one time entry fee for the subscriber, it can be $20.00 a year or life time subscription fee. The subscriber will have the right to download any e-book from in your library. Some of the more successful business models target niche markets. You can be a retailer of e-books that specialize on the recipes of different countries. Wouldn’t that be fun? You can commission e-books or buy from known e-book authors. Read the e-books to be sure you’re selling the real deal.

What are the benefits you received from reading that e-Book you just purchased? Right an article or review explaining the benefits and then get that article or review published and placed in front of the eyes of your best prospects.

Be a dropper shipper and establish your storefront at EBay or the competitor Yahoo auctions. EBay’s traffic alone runs to approximately 800,000 visitors daily. It’s the worlds’ best online auction, and you wont’ go wrong. 

Now what’s a dropshipping business? It’s a business model where you put products on a website or through EBay. You take the orders they come and pass these on to the dropship supplier, who ships this to your buyers. 

Another way of putting it is, you’re the middleman, and you take the orders via Paypal, credit card or fax. 

All the home internet jobs here will net you profit. All you need is a computer, internet access and basic knowledge about your pc and the net.

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A Smart Trick for Attracting Higher Paying AdSense Ads

A Smart Trick for Attracting Higher Paying AdSense Ads  - There are no guarantees in life, so I don’t guarantee that following these tips will bring you more money every time. However, I do guarantee that they will greatly increase your chances of pulling more of the top-paying AdSense ads to your site than if you don’t follow these suggestions. 

Enough with the disclaimers, let’s get down to the business of making money. Google lets advertisers bid anywhere from a minimum of .05 per click right up to a whopping $100. It should be pretty obvious that you’re not going to get rich running .05 cent ads on your site, but getting a few $100 ads, or even some $10, $20, or $30 ads can’t be a bad thing, right? 

Now the problem is, Google is pretty closed-mouthed about who is paying what for their ads, and there is no real way to determine which words pay the most per AdSense click. 

But ah, far away in a parallel universe we find another Pay-Per-Click provider called Overture. It seems that Overture is less sensitive about releasing their top-priced words and anyone who cares to find out what web sites are paying for words and phrases can do so by simply using Overtures tattle-tale special pricing tool (http://www.pixelfast.com/overture/). And it couldn’t be easier to use. You simply type in a key word or phrase and the tool returns a list of advertisers using that word and how much they are paying. It even shows you the actual ad. 

Oh what a treasure trove of wealth-grabbing results this can be if you know what can be done with that priceless information. 

Consider this possibility 

Any key word or phrase that’s worth big bucks on Overture is probably worth big bucks on Google as well, maybe even more, right? So try this experiment: 

Enter the phrase “SEO Services” without the quotes in the Overture tool (http://www.pixelfast.com/overture/). When I entered that phrase on the day I wrote this article, I was found a company called SEO Inc. that was willing to pay $8.01 per click, followed by SEO Advantage at $8.00, and Online Web Consultants at $6.50. Other bidders appeared below them in the $3.00 range straight on down to some who wouldn’t pay more than a dime per click. 

Now, if a company is willing to pay that much money for a click on Overture, it is probably willing to pay that or more on Google. Even if that particular company isn’t advertising on Google, you can be pretty sure that the same key phrase is drawing near the same bid price from other companies who do advertise on Google. So what that means is there is no way that you can possibly afford NOT to have some web pages posted somewhere that are targeted to those sweet-paying words. 

All you have to do is use Overture’s pricing tool to find the highest-paying key words that are related to your site and then optimize those words to start pulling similar ads. If all goes to plan, you can perhaps double, triple, or even quadruple your AdSense revenue without needing any increase in traffic or click-through rate.

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The First Step In A SEO Marketing Campaign

PPC Advertising – The First Step In A SEO Marketing Campaign  - Often, sites view seo and PPC marketing as exclusive marketing techniques. Each marketing method has its advocates. In reality, both have a place in the Internet marketing process. If you intend to pursue a major seo effort, a PPC campaign is a critical early step. 

PPC For Testing 

Let’s say you have a site offering a service or product in the travel market. You’ve put together a healthy budget and decided to go for broke. Yep, you’re optimizing and trading links in an effort to go after keyword phrases with major traffic and competition. For instance, you’ve decided to have a go at “Europe travel”, which has roughly 400,000 searches each month and major competition for high rankings. You spend two years trading links, adding content and so on. Miracle of miracles, you pop on to the first page of search results. You start shopping for your private jet only to realize a very disturbing thing. You are getting thousands of visits, but few sales. After running calculations, you find the site is converting at 1 in 10,000. 

Houston, we have a problem. 

A PPC campaign should be used to test your site against keyword phrases before you spend the time and money on an seo campaign. The best platforms to use for your campaign are Google Adwords and Overture. Yes, click fraud is a problem, but less so on these platforms. 

After opening accounts and laying a credit card down at the PPC alter, you need to give some thought at to how you will test your keywords. Here’s a hint. The campaign should be designed to test the keyword phrases, not maximize sales. This may sound like a strange statement, but keep in mind the purpose of the campaign. You are determining whether you have picked appropriate keyword phrases for the seo campaign. So, how does it all go wrong? 

With both Overture and Adwords, you have the ability to designate the reach of your keyword phrases. Most pick the “broad match” option, which is terrible for testing. With broad match, your advertisements are going to appear for your keyword phrase AND variations of the phrase. Since the ad is appearing on a variety of keyword phrases, the results can give you a false impression of the value of the primary keyword phrase. 

Going back to our example, we start a Google Adwords campaign for “Europe travel” and use the default broad match option. After a month, we are happy to find the ads converting at 1 in 70. Having validated the keyword phrase, we set off on the long seo campaign. But are we really sure about the validity of the keyword phrase. Since Google has been known to seriously expand keyword phrases under the broad match option, how do we know that the true keyword phrase isn’t “European travel”? We don’t unless we take a few additional steps. 

The first step is to limit the PPC advertisements by bypassing the broad match option. Instead, you want to limit the appearance of the ad only to searches for the exact keyword phrase. In Adwords, this is known as the “exact phrase” match. To designate it, you simply place brackets “[]” around the keyword phrase. Second, you need to track traffic originating from the ads. This can be done using tracking tools on your server or through the tracking options offered by each PPC platform. Regardless of your choice, the resulting data will give a much truer picture of the value of the particular keyword phrases. 

Nothing is more aggravating then getting top rankings, but miserable conversions. The only way to beat this problem is to test, test, test. Using PPC campaigns at the outset of an Internet marketing efforts can save you a lot of headaches later on.

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Are you using both sides of the GoogleCoin?

By now most of you realise that Google can give our websites the ability to appear within their results pages using a Pay Per Click model (PPC).

This is called Google Adwords

Hopefully, you will also be aware that that Google offers website owners the ability to display these PPC results on their own websites.

For this privilege, Google will pay the website owner a share of the PPC revenue earnt from any click throughs on the results displayed on their website.

This is called Google Adsense
So there you have both sides of the Google coin.

On one side, the ability to drive low cost targeted traffic and on the other side, the ability to generate revenue from your existing traffic.

You'd think that was the end of it but really it is only the beginning.

Heads or Tails?

Heads it is….

Let's look at Adwords

There are those that think… …write your ad, pays your money and away you go.

Which to 80% of the people using Adwords, this seems to work OK for them. Remember I said OK!

For the other 20% , these guys and gals, are testing,changing, innovating and working Google as hard as they can.

"Like Bruce Lee taught us the art of fighting without fighting, Chris Carpenter shows us the art of website revenue generation without a website!"

Tails you win!

Secondly, while most people just cut and paste Adsense code into all the pages of their site, they just leave it at that thinking job done!

They don't explore the high value keywords in their market or niche.

Why do that?

Well if you knew what the more profitable keywords and terms are, you can write content and these words can be displayed. Google Adsense will then look at your page content and work out what to display.

You could double your income by changing words on your site. Maybe Life insurance to life assurance or personal loan to loans or adverse credit to bad credit.

Also sites tend to use one format and one position for the ads.

Try different layouts and work out which ones work best for you. You may be surprised.

There are several tools that can help you identify keywords but the best for you would be either the Google Adwords program or Overture view bids tool.

Don't worry about thinking you are doing anything wrong. In fact, think about it - you will be creating relevant content for Google to display and for their users to read. Users are happy, Google are happy and you will earn more revenue from Adsense. So hopefully you'll be happy too!

A Win Win situation!

Again, like most things rather than reinvent the wheel there is a whole book on Adsense written my friend William Charlwood has written The Definitive Guide to Google AdSense which tells you exactly how to make money by hosting small ads on your website. It is a detailed road-map of everything you need to do to get going and then maximise your AdSense
income.

Once you've got it right, you can look forward to a check every month from Google.

Good Luck!

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Pay Per Performance Web Traffic

Why should you pay to get web site traffic, isn't SEO enough? It's a fair question - after all most businesses on and offline have tight budgets to play with and need to make each and every penny count. So why should you as a business pay good money to drive targeted traffic to your site?

Perhaps there's a clue in the last question. What other options are there?

You have 3 basic choices to get traffic to your website:

1. You pay - using PPC, ezine ads, banners etc...
2. You borrow - constructing Joint Ventures and endorsed offers with partners
3. You grow your own - with natural search engine optimisation

So which is the best?

Well they all do a different job and have different characteristics, perhaps the best information source you could hope to find on the a subject 

But why PPC?

You need PPC because you can:

• Control the flow of traffic to your website
• Target buying customers and those most likely to buy through correct keyword targeting
• Test different offers

The last benefit above is perhaps the most important. Remember a page on a website doesn't have to stay recorded online forever...

Just because you've completed your site in terms of the pages you want to add (although in truth you'll never be finished as you can continually add more related content), this does not preclude you from testing other pages...

The value of testing

Simple scenario: You want to test 2 price points for a product/service. (Yes you can do this and people don't have to know about it so don't be worried).

With a PPC campaign you can have your normal web page (Page A) sitting as normal at the well known web address with all of your normal links pointing to it.

You 2 price point test pages (Page B & C) are a different kettle of fish - they sit off to the side and you push traffic to them using PPC to quickly determine which is the winner.

You can do this for any test you dream up, the bottom line is you can quickly determine what is working and what is not in your marketing.

Knowing what's not working is more important than what is (particularly if you are sailing close to the wind) because you SAVE money you would otherwise have thrown away.

The Affiliate Advantage

When you have a website that is converting well, you will be able to attract many affiliates (and even super affiliates if you are doing a good enough job and providing a good enough incentive package).

Affiliates can make your business explode overnight if you have done your homework and have the site converting well.

If you have not you may attract them, they may pump some traffic and then they will disappear to pastures new when they see you are not doing a good job.

In summary

If I could give you one reason why you should use PPC and in particular Google Adwords as part of your internet marketing campaign it would be this:

"Feedback fast, feedback cheap"

Yes you may spend a little money up front, but you can save yourself a whole lot of heartache on the back end.

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