8 lessons when trading on ebay

The way you list your product on eBay will have a direct impact on the success of your eBay business. Your product listing is pretty similar to your shop front, and your potential customers will decide whether to purchase your items based on the listing and description of your product.

To make your product listings effective so that you can sell your products smoothly on eBay, here are the things you must do:

1. Include the relevant keywords and search terms in your product description.

2. The titles of your product listings have to be attention-grabbing. You got to make the eBay viewers click your title link or your products will never sell. Thus, put in time and effort to learn about writing effective product listings titles. Take a look at your competitors successful auctions, see how their titles are written and take some of their good ideas.

3. The description of your product should be as detailed and accurate as possible. Let the potential buyers know precisely the condition of your product. Whether it is new or used, tell them honestly. Write about the benefits of your products; how they can help the potential buyers. Also list the features and functions of your products.

4. Never start a listing without adding photos or images of your products. If your potential buyers can’t see the items you are selling, they may leave your auction and go check out your competitors auctions which sell the similar items.

5. Make sure that you list your items in the most accurate category.

6. Give sufficient details about the shipping. Let the buyer know the cost of shipping and the estimated time needed to deliver the product. You should also provide a fast shipping option to meet the need of people who demand fast product delivery.

7. Some customers don’t want to pay with Paypal, so you should provide more payment options so that the customers can choose the payment option that best suits them

8. You definitely want as many people as possible to bid on your auctions. To do that, you’ll need to list your product at a low starting price.

Applying these tips to your eBay product listings, I’m sure they will help increase the amount of bids on your products and generate more eBay sales for you.

The video blog gives you the opportunity to enrich

Video blogs also known as Vlogs. Video blogs aren't much different than the traditional blogs except Vlogs present content and information to the visitors in the form of video instead of text.

Video blogs are interesting and interactive. With a video blog, you can communicate and reach visitors more effectively than words. There are things that simply hard to express well in writing.

You can truly express your comments and feels on some hot issues or breaking news. Your visitors will hear your tones and see your facial expression. Words and writing sometimes just cannot truly illustrate your feelings to readers.

Setting up a video blog is similar to setting up a traditional blog. You need to first choose a blogging platform. There are several choices but Wordpress platform is highly recommended. Then register for a domain name and select a web hosting package.

Once you have your domain name and hosting account set up, you may proceed to install your Wordpress blog into your hosting account. After the installation process completed, your Wordpress blog is up and running but you'll need to change the Wordpress theme. Look for a theme that best suit the topic of your video blogging. Here are some of sites that provide free Wordpress themes:

• Wpthemesfree.com
• Freewpthemes.net
• Fresheezy.com
• WpSkins.org

As you will be posting video consistently on your blog, you will need some extra tools. You must have the following equipments to run a video blog:

• A camera for creating videos
• A video editing software
• A microphone
• A tripod for creating your video posts

Once your Wordpress blog is 100% up and running and you became familiar to the process of creating and posting videos to your video blog, then you are set to start making money online. Just like the traditional blogs, video blogs also provide multiple streams of income sources to the blog owners. Below are some of the ways to make money online with a video blog:

Advertising Revenue
Since video blogs are more entertaining than traditional blogs, they can attract a lot more traffic. So, using pay per impression advertisement programs to generate income may be a good option. These programs pay you based on the number of times their ads are displayed on your video blog. e.g. $1.50 per 1,000 page views. The popular pay per impression programs are:

• TribalFusion
• FastClick
• CasaleMedi
• ValueClick

Another type of ad program is pay per click advertising program. Pay per click advertising programs doesn’t pay you based on page views. You ad revenue will depend on the users clicks on the ads. The more people clicking the ads, the more money will be credited to your account. Some good pay per click advertising programs are:

• Google AdSense
• Yahoo Publisher Network
• Kontera

There are many video bloggers claiming that they have a click-trough rate more than 10% on AdSense PPC ads. So, it is possible to make a decent amount of ad revenue using pay per click programs.

Pay Per Play Video Content
There are companies allow you to post their videos on your blog and earn money each time your visitors watch the videos on your blog. This may be a great option to Vlog owners who cannot create videos for posting on their blog on a regular basis. By joining these companies, you can use and post their videos on your blog often. You can post one video daily or in every day to keep you video blog updated and attract new and returned visitors.

One great company offering these services is TheNewsRoom.com. TheNewsRoom.com has video content related to financial news, entertainment information, celebrity gossip, and more. You are allowed to post any video content of TheNewsRoom on your blog and make money for each video play.

Post Your Video on Other Sites
Some video bloggers make thousands of dollars by posting the videos in their blog to video sharing sites like Metacafe.com and Break.com. You too can do the same to increase your income and traffic. As long as you are uploading original and entertaining videos to these video sharing sites, there will be people wanting to view them and you will earn money for each view.

Market Affiliate Products Using Videos
Web video is proven to be effective when it comes to increasing online sale. So, your video blog is a great tool for promoting affiliate products. Some affiliate products you can choose to promote on your vlog are clothing, DVDs, CDs and books. A few companies that sell these products and own an affiliate program you can join are:

• Road Kill Tshirts
• Netflix
• BMG Music
• Book Wise

Once you joined an affiliate program, create video posts that show you using and benefiting from the service product. People often need supporting information before buying an item and your video posts will encourage them to purchase the item. When choosing affiliate products to promote on your blog, make sure you pick those products that you personally enjoy since that will make it easier for you to create energetic, enthusiastic, video blog posts which will entice your visitors to click on your affiliate link to purchase the product.

Your domain name on a blog host

I have been working hard to build and grow this blog. My hard effort do pay off. This blog is currently getting a steady stream of traffic and earn me a nice income. However, there is a one big mistake I have made, which is not hosting this blog on my own domain name. The domain name ‘MoneyMakerInfo.Blogspot.com’ is actually a free domain name provided by Blogger.com and it is belong to Blogger.com.

What this mean is that I will not allow to sell this blog. With the traffic and income I get now, I should be able to sell this blog for more than USD30,000 if I no longer want to blog anymore.

If you are serious to start a blog for making money online, you should register a custom domain name and host your blog on the custom domain. There are several benefits you can enjoy from hosting your own blog on your own domain name:

You Get Total Control
You will have full control over everything about your blog. You can transfer the domain name to any other hosting company if you find that your existing web host service isn’t what you want. Once your blog have built in consistent traffic and bring in good profit, people may start contacting you asking you whether you want to sell your blog. If the deal is good, you can immediate sell the blog.

Easier to Memorize
By hosting your blog on your own domain name, the visitors can remember your blog easier. A free blog domain name generally is long and hard to remember.

Better Security
You will get added security. As the domain name and the blog are owned by you fully, this means that you don’t have to face the risk of getting your suspended or even deleted. When using a free domain name on your blog, the company that provides you the free domain name can delete your blog anytime when they find that your blog content is against their policies.

You Make More Money Blogging
You give a professional image by having your own custom domain name and own logo. More people will contact you to find out whether you sell banner ads or text links which will mean more advertising revenue to your blog. I do get a lot of advertising inquiries from visitors of this free blog even though I didn’t tell any of my visitors that I sell advertising space, probably because this blog ranks high in Google. But, if this blog is hosted on my own domain, I would have get even more businesses.

Make money online with Google Knol

Google officially launched a new web authoring tool called Knol on Jul 23. Google Knol is free and opened to everyone. It is a content sharing network where you can write and publish articles in most of the topics. Each article page or content page you created is called a Knol.

Publishing a Knol is quite similar to publishing a blog post except the tone is more formal. You can insert related picture or image to your Knol and once your Knol created, readers are allowed to comment and rate your article in the Knol.

What Benefits You'll Gain from Publishing Google Knols?

AdSense Ads is Allowed in Knols
Google said that the authors can choose to include AdSense ads in all their Knols. So, each of your Knols that attract traffic may earn you some AdSense ad revenue. But, if you are actively creating Knols that share useful content, it is possible to earn a nice AdSense income every month as you will have more Knols gaining traffic.

Get Free Google Traffic
The Google knol homepage http://knol.google.com gained thousands of quality backlinks in less than a week. It is expected that it will gain decent of backlinks just like the other two content sharing networks, Hubpages and Squidoo. Because of the huge amount of backlinks Hubpages and Squidoo have gained, they are now getting million of visitors from search engines like Google and Yahoo every month (I believe most are from Google).

This will happen to Google Knol as well. Google Knol will soon gain huge amount of backlinks and many of the Knols created by different authors will start ranking high on Google search engine and enjoy free Google traffic. Those who manage to get their knols ranked on a competitive keyword will receive steady traffic. They can include links in their Knols to direct these Google traffic to their website or blog or choose to monetize their Knols with AdSense ads so that these Google traffic can be converted into AdSense revenue.

Google Knol has their own content policy and term of service. You should read and understand them before creating a Knol to publishing your content. Google doesn’t allow spamming, any Knol that against their policy will be deleted.

Establish your potential customers

If your eBay selling business is lacked of buyers, you could quickly fail. You need to have as many customers as possible to make you eBay business a success. One proven way to maintain and grow your eBay business for success is by building a customer base. Building a customer base takes extra effort and time but it is worth doing it because a customer based can bring you steady revenue from time to time.

A customer base is basically all of those people who have bought from you in the past and it can be a literal gold mine. Putting them together will become a customer based of your own. The good thing about selling to existing customers is it is easier and less costly to entice them to purchase from you again.

Each sale is actually your most important sale. If possible, try to treat every customer as your most important customer and you will have a good chance of getting return business if you ask for it. This is the key to make money again and again from your customer base.

Here is one of the ways of getting repeat business from your customers. Build a wish list. Ask your customer if there are any related items that they are looking for. This will work especially for the items like collectibles, antiques, vintage and designer clothes, books, and other media categories. After a buyer got their item and you are confident that they are satisfied with the purchase because you have provided excellent customer service, ask them if there are any other related products that they would like to obtain and also ask them if you can email them with auctions that they might be interested. I bet many of them will say yes and you get to know what other related items you customers are also interested to buy.

Once most of your customers replied you about what other items they are interested to purchase. You can start putting together all of these wanted items into a wish list of your customers. So, you may begin to order your inventory based on the items in the wish list. Once you got the inventory, it is time to put these item up for auction. Provide the buy it now option as well for each auction and then let your customers know about these new auctions so that your customer can buy it quickly if they desire. This is a technique applied by many eBay PowerSellers to generate consistent profit.

Moreover, let them know about your free newsletter and invite them to sign up. Yes, you need to create a newsletter.

Why it is important to publish your own newsletter? Customers could easily forget you and your business. If you don't communicate with them every 30 days or so, they will forget you. By inviting them to sign up your newsletter, you can send them information that they want to read on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. This will help you stay in touch and establish a good relationship with your current customers.

Tell your customers that becoming your newsletter subscribers will get promotional discounts that others will not get. The length of your newsletter does have to be very long. One page with about 600 words will be sufficient. Feature a topic of general interest to your customers in each publication. For instance, if you are selling antiques, you may write about how to detect fraudulent antiques items when shopping on eBay. Then offer a discount to subscribers who make a purchase or win an auction in that month.

Building a customer base will secure the grow of your eBay business but be sure you keep in touch with them. Good communication between you and your list of customers will result long-term repeat business.

A guide to writing skills headline ad

The single most critical thing of generating sales through email marketing campaign is getting the recipients of your sale emails to actually open and read your email. So, the subject line or title of your marketing email is the vital part of the whole process of email marketing.

Is there any proven method for writing a subject line that is so attention-grabbing that it will make all your recipients open your marketing email every time? Unfortunately, the answer is no. However, there are some techniques that can help you write subject lines that will draw the attention of many of your recipients and entice them to open your marketing email.

Technique 1 – Prepare to Compete
The first thing you need to remember about email marketing is you aren’t sending email to email addresses. You are actually sending email to real, live human beings. These humans are probably like you. They are busy and receive a lot of emails every day. So, if you want them to open your marketing email, your subject line has to be able to compete with dozens of other emails and catch the attention of your recipients.

Technique 2 – Give a Strong reason to Your Recipients to Open Your Email
Your subject line must give a good reason to the recipients for taking their time to open and read the content of your marketing email. The types of emails that get the attention are those that concern to the interest of your recipients or promise to help the recipients in some ways.

Technique 3 – Learn from Newspaper’s Headlines
Newspapers often have good headlines. Pick up a local newspaper and see how headlines are written. Study more on those headlines that grab your attention.

You may notice that most newspaper headlines state the most important point of the topic in few words. These headlines are working well. You can follow their styles when writing your email subject line. Put the most important part of your email content with fewest words possible in your subject line.

Technique 4 – Never Use Good Subject Lines Twice
A subject line that has been used and achieved great open rate can only be used once. It wouldn’t work twice if you pick a last month hot subject line and change one or two words, then send it to your opt-in list.

Technique 5 – Keep Testing
You would never know exactly what types of email subject lines that will attract your recipients until you really put in effort to test your subject lines. You can send two or more marketing emails with different subject lines to your opt-in list subscribers. Then after some time, sign in to your auto responder account and check which one has the highest open rate. This way, you will get a clear idea on what types of email subject lines are effective.

Conclusion
The one subject line that can attract most of the recipients to open the marketing email is the subject line that makes the recipients feel that if they don’t open and read the marketing email, they will be missing something really important. The ingredients of a good subject lines are brief, direct (state the important point directly) and has a tease quality that will make the recipients click on the email subject line.