Is this eBay's perfect companion?

publication date: Feb 11, 2009

eBay Confidential eZine
3rd February 2009

• Life Without eBay? I Don't Think So! Unless of Course...
• Recession? What Recession? Five Ways to Lift Your Listings Way Above Others Selling Similar Products
• Get £1,000 - £2,000 Products Free of Charge and a Great Gift To Help You Succeed
• As I Was Saying!

Hi,

Life Without eBay? I Don't Think So! Unless of Course...

I don't think I could ever face life without eBay; eBay remains one of the world's largest online trading places and eBay also represents one of the easiest ways possible for virtually anyone to make a good living online.

But it worries me, just a tad, to learn today that during November AND December last year Amazon.com beat eBay in terms of unique visitors to its site. Research by Nielsen Online says Amazon's page views were up slightly on the same period the previous year while eBay's views had dropped in December 2008 compared to the same month the previous year.

That still won't make me lose sleep, I'm not one to throw all my business eggs into one basket, I've always believed in having lots of money making strings to my bow, of which eBay is just one string and, arguably, the most profitable also. Not forgetting, of course, that Amazon is not an auction company so eBay will always be top of the tree for reaping vast rewards for items that might cost very little but could interest countless people worldwide. And fetch incredible mark ups! Like a bundle of fifty or so cigarette cards I paid £20 for on Tynemouth Railway Station flea market which recently sold at prices from £2 to £50 each! That's EACH CARD, not each set!

So that news of Amazon overtaking eBay on page views holds no fear for me, I don't sell on Amazon anyway, and strangely the fact I don't sell on Amazon is causing me to ask myself: WHY?

My readers already know Sharon Fussell, one of my sub-editors on 'eBay Confidential', and they also know the fact she sells both on Amazon and eBay and recommends others do the same. In fact she insists we should all follow her lead and tells many fine tales of some items always proving more profitable on one or the other site. Sharon also writes about arbitrage opportunities between the two companies, involving buying low on either eBay or Amazon, and reselling those very same items at much higher prices on the other site.

I can highly recommend Sharon's fantastic Sold Dispatch Now programme which reveals how you can use Amazon to create a great additional income stream.

Full details here

We should definitely take her advice and sell on both major platforms, but I'd personally go one step further and suggest every one of us should have at least ten, and hopefully a lot more, currently profitable online income streams.

I reckon I have at least 100 income streams to pick and choose from, all of which make money, but if I had to choose my top income generating streams, they'd be:

• Selling on eBay, selling anything legal on eBay, as long as the profits far exceed the work involved.
   
• Selling on Amazon, not sure what yet, but probably books, old and modern, used and brand new.
   
• Affiliate marketing for major companies like Amazon and ClickBank, eBay and PayDotCom. I actually do promote those firms' products and do very well despite the fact it takes just a few days of my time each month. I particularly like building mini-sites, having just two pages, featuring a sign up box to get people to join my mailing list and adding sales messages to my mailing list autoresponder then leaving orders to arrive without my involvement. That's autopilot profiting at its best.
   
• Building sites packed with articles - usually created by other people - which I obtain free of charge, and which generate commissions every time someone clicks on AdSense promotions or buys a product recommended at my sites.
   
• Bundling resell rights titles with plr reports, creating a simple sales page, then uploading my unique new product to ClickBank and waiting for orders to come rolling in. Surprisingly, I rarely, if ever, sell those products myself. I simply click on a box inside my ClickBank account, indicate what percentage I'm prepared to give affiliates to market my product, then I leave the business to run on autopilot. And run it does, often to the tune of several thousand pounds a year, without me ever communicating with enquirers or buyers direct.
   
• Posting messages in forums and submitting free classified ads. linked to affiliate products which people reading my entries might buy and send big fat commission cheques my way.
   
• Also... but then again...

I'd better stop listing ideas right now, Nick Laight, he who publishes this eLetter you'll be receiving quite soon, might get on his high horse and remind me this eLetter is for eBayers - "THEY'RE INTERESTED IN EBAY - GIVE THEM EBAY OR MAKE ROOM FOR SOMEONE WHO WILL!"

Actually, that is a joke, Nick is just as keen as I am on growing multiple income streams, some closely related, some completely different, and it was he who asked me to write about other ways to add substantial profits to our readers' weekly income.

Then he said "Why don't you...?, to which I said "I already have created a new course to show our readers how to make money from eBay and dozens of very different income streams alongside, including all of those mentioned above."

When he read the course he said, "Wow, yes, I see what you mean. I love it! You can tell our readers about the new course sometime soon, today they want to know more about making money on eBay". And he's right of course, this eLetter should be about making money on eBay, but I won the battle and 'he who must - usually - be obeyed' has allowed me to tell my readers more about my new course - tomorrow.

Nonetheless, before I get onto eBay only stuff, I thought you'd like to hear what people who joined my course last month have to say about it. Oh yes, and tomorrow I'll even show you sites my students have created since they joined my course. But I have to restrict the number of new students on my course, purely because the course involves lots of one to one communications and I really do need to spread myself across a wide area of different people and different interests. At the end of this eLetter I'll tell you what current students think about my course.


Recession? What Recession? Five Ways to Lift Your Listings Way Above Others Selling Similar Products

Imagine this, there's a product selling so well and fetching really high profits on eBay, you and dozens of other people have just joined the bandwagon, and suddenly you find yourself amongst hundreds of identical listings and you're struggling to make any sales at all. What do you do to lift your listings above those of competitors? You could:

- Check recent finishing prices for the product and offer yours BUY IT NOW below what other people are charging. But only slightly below, you're not a charity!

- Use a sub-title to offer a free gift and also to make your listing wider and more noticeable than competitors' listings.

- While you're at it, put a border round your illustration, especially if it's identical to all the others. Use a prominent colour for the border, try also using thick dotted lines for the border, but don't overwhelm the picture or you'll make it look tacky. The idea is to attract early interest to your picture and, once inside your listing you add other benefits not available in other people's listings. Such as: a link to your About Me page featuring your telephone helpline number, screenshots of your positive feedback from past buyers, an outstanding guarantee such as '110% Money Back if Product Does Not Live Up to Your Expectations'. I've offered similar guarantees many times and I have never been asked for a refund, but be careful and make sure what you say about the product is true!

- When other sellers use a few paragraphs to describe their product, you should use twenty, or more. 'The more you tell, the more you sell' is a maxim known to all the world's most successful copywriters and it simply means the longer the sales letter the higher your product's perceived value is likely to be. Do this by studying everything other - successful - sellers say about the product, add their comments to a Word or other editing file, then chop out duplicated and ambiguities, finally reword the text into your own unique order-pulling description. Do not copy their wording, just emulate it!

- Say your product is in limited supply and watch people jump fast to send you their cash. Nothing attracts more interest, nothing activates more bidding fingers, nothing makes money faster than a limited offer. Your product can be limited by number, by time, even by price. So you could use a sub-title saying something like:

** Ten Buyers Only. Order Now! **

** Offer Ends 20th February **

** Order Before Price Goes Up **

What if your product is readily available and stock will never run dry? Not a problem, you can still say it is limited, that is the way many limited edition companies operate and it's entirely legal. So, for example, when you read 'XYZ Collectible. Limited Edition' this does not meant the product is in limited supply, it can simply mean just a few items will be sold during a specified time period, but there are many future advertisements to make up for the 'shortage'. Okay it's arguably wrong to fool people this way, so I recommend you offer a free gift with your product, make it something nice, also valuable, and make it the component that's in 'limited supply'. When you run out of limited supply freebies, look for something different, and something else different after that, and...


Get £1,000 - £2,000 Products Free of Charge and a Great Gift To Help You Succeed

Years ago, before the children arrived and concentration proved impossible, I was a dab hand at entering and also winning competitions offering valuable prizes, such as a year's supply of dog food (which I sold because I don't feed my dogs proprietary food), a year's supply of wine (which I drank all by myself), gold ingots, holidays, expensive jewellery, bicycles, and much more besides. However, the main problem with entering competitions is you don't always get the prize you're aiming for and very often you win something that doesn't suit you. Such as holidays, for example, which I hate; also bicycles for non-biking people like me; also dog food for dogs with posh palates. What to do with all of that valuable but unwanted stuff? You sell it of course, through the classified ads in local newspapers and latterly online, on eBay! I no longer enter competitions myself, I'm way too busy today, but I do recall making several hundred pounds each month from stuff I won but didn't want! You can do the same and there'll be a special free gift next week to show you how! It's called 'Christmas Every Day' because that's exactly how it feels to be a regular big prize winner.


As I Was Saying!

Let's go back to those people I promised to tell you about, people already taking part in my latest course? Well these are just a few of my students, there are many more saying equally nice things. Will you be joining them soon? Find out by waiting for my email tomorrow!

Good Morning Avril, I just wanted to say a very big thank you for this course, to say I'm pleased with the content so far would be a gross understatement. The work and effort that you are inputting plus your infectious enthusiasm for helping your students makes this course not only a pleasure to work on but to get results that are achieveable. This is the first site I have built and I made my first sale $27 last Thursday (someone from Arizona) don't know how. Francis Ruane

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I'm impressed with the initial amount of info/direction you've provided. I've read thru all materials and will set up a new blog/landing page tonight.
 
I really am looking forward to working with you as a mentor (mentoress? :-) as you have a knack for explaining stuff simply and concisely.
 
Cheers,
 
Bob Beckman

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I think since you are doing all this work for us, I'm sure you would like to get some feedback from your members. I've read everything so far, I created a Clickbank account, but I previously didn't have a clue as to how it all would finally come together.

I've so far learned a great deal and had fun doing it. I can't wait to try something else!

Georganne Fisher

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Thanks for your quick response, the blog site has been configured as per your suggestions and the Adsense ads are now there and look good. I've quite surprised myself how straightforward it was (when you know how)!

I've purchased from you and others in the past but things never quite went right and got left and then nothing happened and basically I gave up. It's not that the ££ making urge wasn't there I think it was probably like a lot of people I needed that little bit of extra push / help that you provide.

Peter Agate

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Want to find out more? Then just wait until tomorrow. I'll send you a email that gives you full details of how you can join them!

Until then

Avril