• Welcome from Brian McGregor 
• Inspirational Quote of the Day
• News and Views
• Website versus eBay
• 10 Ways to Kill Your eBay Business
• The Skype's the Limit
• A Gift from Me to You
• Someone's auctioning what? Unusual items currently available
• Finally
• My Products Catalogue
• Back to Newsletter Archive

Hello and welcome.

A particularly warm welcome to you if you're a new subscriber. It's good to have you as part of the family taking my eBay newsletter.

You know that saying, "The grass is always greener on the other side of the hill"?

I regularly get emails from people who clearly operate with that belief. They seek my advice about product X or service Y.

There's no problem in that - there are indeed new opportunities all around us and it makes sense to get input from someone who might be able to give you the inside track.

However, I also feel that many people allow themselves to be in a continuous state of searching for "the next big thing" on the internet. They move from scheme to scheme, idea to idea, and never give themselves the chance to build something worthwhile.

For all those people, I have great news for you today.

You can stop your searching.

You already have at your disposal the easiest and quickest way to make money on the internet.

I'm talking about eBay.

There is no other opportunity on the internet that I'm aware of which will let you put your product in front of 157 million people, at the cost of a few pence or cents.

The only trick is to find a product that sells well on eBay. When you find one, sell it continuously from multiple identical auctions.

Then, find another product that sells well on eBay. Sell that from multiple identical auctions.

And replicate that process as often as you can .

Your income from eBay will start small, but it will soon grow as your products and auction numbers increase.

There may be greener grass on the other side of the hill.

But eBay grass is green enough for me!

Look forward to speaking with you again soon.

Brian
-----

1. A Useful Tip

I received the following email from one of our readers, and it provides a tip which you might find useful....

Hi Brian,

Thanks for another great edition of your newsletter. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one to be in eBays bad book for policy violation.

Concerning the phone numbers for eBay, (Editor's note - see the last newsletter) I've another tip for contacting customer support. As you'll be aware 9 times out of 10 you'll get a standard canned response which doesn't address any of the issues you've raised or a 48 hour delay before any kind of response at all - And that's when they can be bothered to reply at all!

This is a method I've used on eBay a few times for sorting things out when you simply don't have the time to wait.

eBays still growing giant, recently opening up a new site dedicated for Ireland in addition to all the other global sites already running. Now, as I'm sure your aware your username & account work on every eBay site worldwide.

A few months ago, I along with several similar sellers had some negative feedback posted by a competitor. A new account was created purely to purchase goods & leave negative feedback without paying.

Now if you know your eBay policy, you can not create an account purely to leave feedback. Any feedback left in this manner can be removed.

So it was in my interests to get it removed as soon as possible. Firstly I emailed support via ebay.co.uk. As I expected I got the standard response which was at the most, highly unhelpful & did not address my chief concern -Getting the feedback removed promptly.

Although I continued to reply to this message, I also logged into other eBay sites (Australia, US, & a few others) to address my concern via their help system.

With that done I now had several teams of customer care issues "working" on my problem.

Within four hours of contacting them, eBay Australia had responded & removed the feedback from my record. 24 hours I had a reply from eBay.com which was followed by a response from eBay.co.uk three days later. If I'd just left it with eBay.co.uk it would have been on my record for almost a week.

Just goes to show how you can use this method & eBays ambitious plans to your advantage when you need to. Play them all off against each other & you may get the result you need quicker than expected.

Feel free to share this with your newsletter readers if you feel it appropriate.

Best Regards
Mark

Thanks again to Mark for this idea.


2. Speaking of Feedback...

You may not know, but including recent feedback within your eBay auction description can dramatically increase your auction's performance.

For one jewellery seller, this small addition to their auction descriptions resulted in an increase in successful sales of over 500%.

So, this is a great idea, which will give your auctions a real lift off.

However, the problem is that copying the latest live feedbacks into your auction description would be a nightmare to do manually. And then you have to keep updating it with your latest feedbacks.

And what if you run several auctions? Or tens of auctions? Or even hundreds?

Fortunately, Powerseller Mike Enos has just announced a clever solution to this.

It's definitely worth a look.....

You can read all about it here.


3. How Buyers use eBay

This is the kind of information I like. On the Seller Central portal, eBay has published a free report on buyer behaviour.

For UK readers, Seller Central is a service provided for members who sell on eBay.com.

The report includes statistics on the number of unique visitors to eBay.com per month, visit patterns by day of week and category, plus typical traffic paths (how buyers navigate the site).

The information is in PDF file format.

You can get it from here.


4. Keeping in Touch

One of the difficulties for many eBayers is that they are out of contact from their auction information for long periods of time.

For example, you have your auction information on your PC at home. You go to work, and you've lost access to all your auction files and folders on your home PC. You can only look at these files and folders when you get back home from work.

Or, you may keep files on your PC at work which you would love to access from your home PC.

The best known solution to this problem is software called pcAnywhere.

However, pcAnywhere has proved difficult to set up for those who are not too technically competent with PCs.

Thank goodness a new solution has just been announced which is extremely easy to set up and use.

If you want to be able to take control of your eBay auction information from anywhere, or indeed any work or home information, it might be useful to consider GoToMyPC.

The good news is that you can try GoToMyPC free.

If you're in the UK, you can get more information here.

If you're outside the UK, you can get more information here.

I know many people have a desire to work for themselves, and they believe that the internet has the potential to turn that desire into a reality.

The question is, where do you start?

For most people, the only option is to begin their internet business alongside their normal work. This for many probably means some evenings and weekends have to be invested in the internet.

If you are one of those who aspire to make money at home from the internet, I have a simple but sincere message.

I have said this many times, and in many forums - there is no easier or better business to get into on the internet than eBay.

Easy, because you can start with one auction of one unwanted item you already have in your house. And eBay's Help screens will show you how to create your first auction. It isn't difficult - there are millions of people doing it.

Better, because the biggest problem of any internet business is solved for you by eBay.

Do you know what that problem is?

You will know Google is the king of internet search engines. If you look on Google's home page you will see exactly how many web pages Google searches. It's currently standing at a little over 8.1 billion.

If you have a website, and you're trying to sell products from it, what chances that your web pages will get returned in Google searches against 8.1 billion others?

And that is the biggest problem for an internet business - how does anybody know your web site exists? It's a massive, massive problem.

I know I said eBay solves this for you, but I guess you probably don't believe me.

Let me try and show you how.

Instead of creating a website and adding it to the 8 billion or so already there, let's imagine you submit an item for auction on eBay.

Immediately your auction is available to 10 million UK eBay members, and over 60 million US eBay members if your auction is relevant to eBay.com. Some of these members will be prospects to buy your item. They won't all want what you're selling. But the ones who do, will come to your sales page (auction listing) precisely because they are in the market for what you are selling.

How will they find your auction?

Whenever members are interested in a certain type of item, over 70% of them will use eBay's search facility to find auctions which offer such an item. If you're offering this type of item, your auction listing will be returned by the search.

If the prospective buyer likes the title of your auction, he or she will click through to read your auction description page.

And this "sales page" is where you have the opportunity to convert these visitors into bidders and buyers.

You could have prospective bidders reading your auction description page literally within minutes of you placing the auction on eBay.

You can have as many auctions running as you like, and it will cost you pennies per day per auction.

Plus, incredibly 112,000 new people each day register with eBay. So, the eBay market place is constantly expanding. The name is already well known, and it is promoted and re-promoted by every new member and every auction listing.

There really isn't anything else quite like it in the business world. On eBay you can have created an auction, sold an item, collected the money, dispatched the goods all within a matter of days.

Like the man said, "You start the journey of a thousand miles with just one step". If you want to make money selling on eBay, why not start today?

Having said all of that, you may indeed have a website. Or several websites. The good news is that eBay can complement your website activity too.

All the traffic you get to your eBay auctions can be channeled through to your website. My free ebook, 'The eBay Traffic Funnel', shows you how to do it.

If you've a website, and you want to see how eBay can help you get more traffic to it, take a look at 'The eBay Traffic Funnel'.

You can get your free copy here:

It’s surprisingly easy to virtually kill your eBay business, if you’re not careful.

Yes, I know, you can probably start over again from scratch without it costing you anything, but do you really want to?

So, if you want your business to end up dead in the water, here are some simple ways to do it.

1. Lie about an item

Say it works fine when it sometimes doesn’t work. Say it’s in perfect condition when it has a scratch. Your customers will hate you!

2. Mail your item whenever you feel like it

Make sure to leave your customers hanging around, wondering when their item is going to turn up. This makes sure they buy from someone else next time.

3. Let items end anytime

Few people will be around to care about your auction if it ends in the middle of the night. Why go to the trouble of working out whether auctions will end at a good time?

4. Don’t bother with email

Customers are just time wasters anyway. eBay businesses are supposed to run themselves! Never give informed responses to questions about your item.

5. Sell rubbish

Really, it’s just eBay. You can just sell any old tat from the market for a 200% profit. Let quality be someone else’s concern – I mean, really, what do they expect for that price?

6. Refuse to give discounts

You know what your items cost, you know what your profit margin is going to be, and you’re not going to negotiate. Remember that giving customers special deals might make them feel good and come back to you again.

7. Make your listings ugly

As many colours, flashing lights and animations as possible will really give those customers a headache. Write as much in CAPITALS!!!! as you can. Preferably big, red capitals. Be sure to use the fonts Impact and Comic Sans. For an extra special touch, see if you can figure out a way to add some music.

8. Don’t take photos

It’s such trouble, after all. If buyers are picky enough to actually want to see items before they bid on them, then screw ‘em, that’s what I say.

9. Write short descriptions

Be as brief as possible, and use lots of mysterious abbreviations. This obviously makes you look very cool. You can even just write the title again in the description box. Think of the effort you’ll save!

10. Use reserve auctions

Now, this is a fairly controversial final choice, but it really is one of the best ways to scare away your customers. They’ll see ‘reserve not yet met’, and click that ‘back’ button before you know it. Luckily, they can always bid in a normal auction for the item somewhere else.

Well, there you are. How to close your eBay business in 10 easy steps.

I know you're not guilty of any of those.

Are you???

Well, it looks like eBay are buying Skype. As I write this, the formals are being sorted.

In case you've never heard of Skype, this is a very fast growing company who are in the Voice over Internet Protocol business. VoIP is the technology which enables PC users to make free phone calls to each other.

Skype's software effectively enables your PC to be an internet telephone. In other words, by using a microphone and speakers any PC with Skype can make a telephone call to any other PC with Skype. Skype makes use of the spare capacity on your internet connection - broadband or dialup. This means these telephone calls are free!

There has been much debate about the plans eBay might have for Skype. Some market watchers feel eBay are paying over the odds for Skype. Others can't see the benefit to eBay in owning Skype. Yet others think it's a superbly strategic purchase.

I'll reserve my own judgement until eBay make their plans known.

However, here's an idea for you to consider. But you'll have to move fast!

While eBay are deciding what they're going to do with it, Skype is currently still free. For the moment.

In my experience, whenever a takeover occurs, the customers of the company taken over are usually taken care of best. So, as its free, I would suggest you join Skype now.

So, when eBay announce whatever new services they have in mind, you'll already be in position as a Skype customer!

Given that it's free, it seems like a good course of action to me.

You can go to Skype's site here.

There's a guy called James Jones who I rate highly. He is the author of an ebook called 'Emergency Cash Generators'.

It's full of clever and innovative ways to generate cash. And mostly the methods described have nothing to do with the internet.

Anyway, James won't let me give you THAT ebook for free. But I can give you one of James Jones' other publications.

The free gift this time is an ebook entitled '12 Little Known, High Profit, Low Start-Up, Kick Butt Business Ideas for 2005 and Beyond'.

That title is quite a mouthful. But then the ebook warrants it. It is 72 packed pages fully explaining the 12 business ideas.

There is BOUND to be something in this ebook that you can take and apply to make money.

If you'd like to download this brilliant ebook from James Jones, please click here.

Nothing surprises me when it comes to internet auctions. Amuse yourself with some of these beauties.

I wouldn't like to be in his shoes when she finds out!

I think I know that face. I'm sure I saw it at an eBay presentation!

I'm afraid I'm old enough to remember him! But who's the lady?

This is just what you wanted. Isn't it?

I remember when...

Disclaimer - I have no association with any of the sellers of the above items.