Saturday, July 25th, 2009
It all began innocently enough. I had an acquaintance that had a knack for spotting valuable things at thrift stores, yard sales, swap meets and the like, a trait I regarded highly. Our biggest commonality was that we were both songwriters and musicians, and John had an outstanding assortment of music, books, artwork, furniture, etc., despite his absolute disregard for all of the assorted occupations that necessitated an education or a tie.
While was I earning a solid living in law offices, not making much, but making an extra hundred or two per week, John had located the main distribution point for contributions for Goodwill Industries in Los Angeles, and was purchasing six foot bins filled with books for $30 per bin. John would take the signed copies, or other books which fascinated him or which he was personally familiar with, and sell them to bookstores. Once he sold a script which was signed by a producer and several actors for $900. Each been contained several hundred books, and he had very quickly acquired a vanload of books that he couldn’t store in his tiny L.A. apartment. So he called me and offered to give them to me if I would haul them away, saying that he was going to throw them in the garbage if I didn’t take them. I saw that there were many books I was interested in, so I took the vanload, about 20 boxes, and gave him $50, the first of many vanloads. John wasn’t computer literate, and I knew that some of these had to be valuable on eBay, although at that point, I hadn’t sold any books online. Very soon thereafter, John was getting about three vanloads per week, and I would simply get the boxes and give him $50 per vanload, or about seven cents per book. Considering that some of the books have gone for over $40, this was quite a hefty profit margin. In this manner, I built up an inventory of almost 10,000 books.
I began selling them online, and very soon thereafter I had gotten many times my initial $600 investment back. But what attracted me to this business was the opportunity to do a brief plot summary of the books that I was selling. This plot summary was a lot more fun to me as a writer than the rote, mechanical process of placing the eBay ad, although I did get a great deal of excitement out of watching the number of hits, and learning which authors and genres were popular. I soon learned that, even the least valuable genres, romance novels, which were generally overpublished, could be sold in groups. Danielle Steel’s books, which I had more than any other author, would sell in boxes to collectors or other resellers. I soon learned that my plot summaries, which I enjoyed tremendously, were taking a lot of my time, and that most people who purchased books already knew what they were buying, so the plot summaries became an extravagance, superfluous to the objective of becoming a successful eBay bookseller. I had to satisfy my creative energies by reading the summaries briefly, and moving on. I learned a great deal while doing this, but more importantly I became knowledgeable about which books would sell and which needed to be sold in groups. And, since I had 10,000 books, at the rate of 4-5 ads per hour, it was going to take me several thousand hours of work just to sell the books I had already acquired. It also stopped me from examining other products, or looking for other books, etc. In other words, it became an all-consuming task to move 10,000 books.
I decided to use a piece of software that enabled me to evaluate what percentage of an author’s books had sold on eBay in the previous six weeks, and what was the average price of those books. The software allowed me to make a more specific prediction as to percentage, and put the rest of the books into their groups without attempting to sell them as individuals. This enabled me to move a lot more books. I also quickly learned that condition was imperative, and that there could be a discrepancy between what I regarded as “good,” and what someone else’s impression of “good” was. So I adopted a categorical condition description that I quoted verbatim from a book on book collecting, and that problem never occurred again. In fact, my eBay ads were functioning as an educational experience for most people who were not avid collectors, since they were learning about the importance of condition as it pertained to collecting books. Anything that was not at least in “good reading condition” was donated to charities. I found I could sell most other books categorically.
The only complaint that I have not resolved on eBay was from a guy who allowed his son to purchase a book on eBay. It was my 15th sale, and the son thought he was buying a video, and had not looked at the category of the ad. He submitted his complaint before emailing me. I was definitely prepared to refund his money (it was only a couple of bucks). The father did not respond to emails but instead ignored my pleas for him to rescind his negative evaluation. This lowered my percentage to less than 95% favorable, and was very disheartening for a beginner. I joined Square Trade, a company that mediates disagreements between the buyer and the seller so as to permit the seller to have only positive feedback. At this point, I have 544 sales, and still only that one complaint, for a 99.8% rating, a number that is capable of engendering a high level of confidence in potential buyers. Books have provided me with a great reputation on eBay, which I anticipate I will be using to springboard myself into higher ticket sales.
They have also provided me with a fantastic library of over 2,000 books on my favorite subjects: music, nutrition, sports, nature, psychology, and legal thrillers. I needed to become familiar with legal thrillers because a writer’s website had advised me that a writer must know the genre he or she is writing in. My years of law offices have provided me with a wealth of very dramatic stories, some of which were very high profile.
My son, incidentally, has over 560 sales himself, which has helped pay for his musical development and living expenses. He sells concert tickets on eBay, something he is very interested in, and also has a great reputation.
After months of selling these books, as interesting as it was, I began to want to use this new avocation to free myself from the legal field. I had a price tag, and it was about $600 per week take home. I spent a couple of months looking for economies in my process which would increase my hourly capability. But try as I might, I couldn’t really get past $10 per hour, and it was becoming painfully obvious to me that, while it was an enjoyable hobby, unless I took steps to change my methodology, it wasn’t going to be a successful business. I realized that selling books is not like selling manufactured commodities which can be “relisted” on eBay, which takes about one minute, as opposed to the 10-15 minutes that it takes to write an ad for a book, since books are all unique, unless you have thousands of the same books. I was aware of the fact that many people make hundreds of thousands of dollars on eBay and I decided to seek them out and model my new methodology on their experiences.
I had performed marketing research vis a vis my utilization of eBay software to increase the value of my book sales. I began to realize that I needed new products, products other than books, or more specifically, items from which I could be assured of making $40-50 per sale. Then, if I could sell ten per day, that would be a good living. After extensive research, I came across Tim Knox’s website. Tim Knox writes an e-commerce column for Entrepreneur Magazine, and is a Power Seller on eBay. In addition, he had set up several other businesses, and according to his website, has made almost a million in the each of the last two years. His website contains several thousand products for people such as myself, many of which can be dropshipped, or sent to your customer by the manufacturer or wholesaler, and the most complete internet marketing strategy I have ever seen for achieving this objective. He and I share one major philosophy – customer service is the key to developing an eBay business. The difference is that he has taken it much more seriously than I have, and his knowledge of internet marketing is what I need to get to the next level. His website is very impressive in the scope of information it provides to anyone who wants to make money on eBay, and provides virtually every eBayer, regardless of their experience level, with new directions and tactics for improving existing profit centers or developing new ones.
One of his products is described as follows: “We asked 58 of the Internet’s Top Money Makers: ‘If you lost it all tomorrow and had to start over with nothing but the brain in your head and the experience of your years, how would you get back on top in less than 30 days?’” This question, posed to many top internet marketers, gives phenomenal insight to anyone who is interested in modeling the experience and results of people who have accomplished great things in internet marketing.
He also reminds us that TV shows such as 60 Minutes have featured people who are not extraordinary in terms of education or initial wealth that are making great money selling on eBay. Some examples and statistics he quotes include:
• Laurie Liss and her mother, Darlene, armed with little more than a computer, a camera, and something to sell, built their own eBay business that is now selling $30,000 to $40,000 in goods a month;
• A 43 year old mother of 3 pulls down $2000 a week on eBay;
• There are nearly 69 million eBay users who spend $59 million every day;
• Thousands of people nationwide are giving up their day jobs to sell fulltime on eBay;
• Most eBay sellers are home-based businesses that sell everything imaginable;
• Every minute of every day more than 150 new items are listed, more than 500 bids are placed, and seven new people register to shop on eBay;
• At any given moment, eBay is conducting some 12 million auctions, divided into about 18,000 different categories;
• About two million new items are offered for sale every day, and 62 million registered users scour the site to find them;
• As many as 150,000 people…have given up their jobs to create their own businesses selling from their own website or on eBay and other online auctions.
Unlike the “dot-com crash,” eBay is showing no signs of slowing down. Tim Knox’s experience puts you on the fast track to internet income. His background and products are presented in much greater detail at www.addtoincome.com. It is obvious to me that this man is no hobbyist and is a true professional. Regardless of your level of eBay experience, you owe it to yourself to add this man’s knowledge to your own.
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Thursday, June 18th, 2009
One of the most beneficial SEO functions for your Drupal website is building good-quality backlinks. The idea behind building good backlinks is the theory that if a page has great content, people will link to it. The higher the quality of backlinks your site gets, the better. But, you shouldn’t put too much faith in that your great content will get quality people to automatically link to you. It’s true that content quality topically means quality backlinks, but you will get a significantly less without any effort on your end. If you just put a little effort into your backlink building, you’ll successfully increase your rankings. Finding quality backlinks can take quit a bite of time and effort, but it’s worth the input. If you work at it, backlinks will consistently deliver over time.
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Thursday, June 18th, 2009
As Billy Blanks from the Tae Bo workout series would say, “Don’t bounce, don’t bounce”, that same saying would also apply to the bounce rate in your Google Analytics stats. According to Google, the bounce rate is “the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.” In Lehman’s terms, a person who visits your webpage and leaves without visiting any of the other pages on your site adds to your bounce rate percentage. Why is this important? If your bounce rate is 90%, that means 9 out of 10 visitors are coming to your webpage and leaving without exploring the rest of your site. There is a chance that your tracking code may be incorrectly installed, but the most likely reason is that visitors couldn’t find what they were looking for. Google will take note of this, which may result in getting shafted in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Improve your bounce rate by making the content relevant to the keywords you are optimizing for, and include relevant links on your page that point to other pages on your site. This will improve the search engine optimization for your website.
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Thursday, June 18th, 2009
Any website that gets ranked by Google or any search engine gets crawled by spiders, who then determine its ranking accordingly. The most significant signals that spiders receive from a website are the title tags, HTML headings and anchor text. It is important to have consistent, relevant copy in all three elements in order to send the clearest signal to the internet arachnids. If the signal differs between all three elements, search engine spiders will get confused and not be able to match up certain pages on your site with a searcher’s query. This not only means that your website isn’t getting ranked as high as it could be, but it also means that one of your competitors is now beating you through good search engine optimization.
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Thursday, June 18th, 2009
Hiring an SEO expert or agency can be a tedious experience, especially if you don’t know what questions to ask. Every SEO company has developed unique tactics and techniques that may differentiate them from the field, but if you are not familiar with how to dig out the best information, you may not know. There are certain skills and understanding of the industry that is necessary to run a great SEO campaign, and here are some questions you can ask that will help you find the best fit:
1. Could you briefly explain the PageRank algorithm?
2. What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies in regards to SEO?
3. What do you think about link buying?
4. Have you ever created an SEO tool from scratch or pieced together others?
5. Explain the various steps you take to optimize a website.
6. From an analytics perspective, what is different between a user from organic search results vs. a type-in user?
7. If you’ve done 6 months of SEO for a site and yet there haven’t been any improvements, how would you go about diagnosing the problem?
8. How do you evaluate whether an SEO campaign is working?
9. Tell me your biggest failure in an SEO project.
10. What do you think is different about working for an SEO agency vs. doing SEO in-house?
These questions may often be about how the answer is given, rather than the answer given. These questions are a great filter for SEO companies who aren’t up to snuff, while the SEO firms that are best for your business will rise to the occasion and shine brightly.
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Thursday, June 18th, 2009
When a student asks questions, he probably is confused and does not understand the concept being told…but when a teacher asks questions, it is to make sure that every bit of the concept is cleared in the mind of student and there is nothing left that the student is not aware of. Similarly, when you hire professional web Design Company to work for you, you are accountable to answer many of the questions they ask. It does not mean they are amateur and know nothing. In fact, more the questions asked from you the better it is to ensure smooth results.
When the web designer or a web Design Company asks too many questions, it usually generates two kinds of responses:
1- “They simply don’t know anything!” (The typical response)
Or 2- “They want to know everything” (The right response)
The first response is the way many people see this concept. For them, too many questions are asked by people who are inexperienced. This is the kind of reaction an average person would show, as many of us are resistant towards answering any questions. The second response, however, is the one that is in the right direction. For the web designers or the designing company to be able to work accurately, it is important for them to know every single little detail regarding your business…because in the end, nobody likes a complaining client anyways! Here are the 3 reasons why your web designing person or firm asks you too many questions before starting with the work:
They want you to be the leaders
The intentions of a web designing company are noble when asking questions from you. They want you to lay the track for them to follow. Isn’t it good if you are able to take decisions, even if you have hired someone else to take care of your business website? You certainly provide web designers the authority to work for you, and take decisions regarding your website—but the ultimate authority is still in your hands, and you are the one who’ll get to decide the wrong and the right, and how you want your website to turn out.
They want to be error-free in their end results, ensuring your satisfaction
Ever wondered what “customer satisfaction” really mean? Every web designer or web design company you come in terms with will talk big about this two-letter sentence. Asking you questions help the designers generate results just the way you want them. It is a measure to make sure the client is satisfied with the end result and there are no issues bothering him. Customer satisfaction means producing excellent and expected results, this can only be possible if you have cleared the designer about what you actually want.
Questions remove confusions
Bombarding you with questions certainly does not put you in a trial of some kind. In reality, it is a great tactic of designers to build good communication with their clients. More questions generate more answers, helping the designers understand you and your ideas very well. Many questions asked by your designer or designing firm make you realize how important these things were that you had totally ignored telling them before. The questions expose the hidden answers and make you both work firmly with each other at a comfort level.
A good Web Design Company is the one that listens and communicates with its clients. Effective communication between client and service provider is essential to get things going in a positive direction for business growth.
Bryan Williams is an expert outsourcing consultant, and specializes in web design and development outsourcing. If you’re looking for an offshore software development company or need help with windows application development and or business software development, Bryan can guide you well.
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Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
Top1position offers Pay Per Click Campaign Management Services
Pay Per Click is a fast and money-making way to attract qualified traffic to your website on all major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN and many other smaller search engines. Pay Per Click advertisement allow you to get a special and targeted position on all search engines and you pay a certain amount only when a searcher clicks on your listing and connects to your site. In Pay Per Click you will only pay for clicks that generate traffic to your site, there are no other hidden costs.
How does PPC Advertise work?
As the word “Pay Per Click” suggests, you only pay when a visitor actually clicks on the ad it is a small ad that place the search results page for specific keywords. PPC Ads pay no amount to appear on the results page they only pay that amount they have decided to when a searcher actually clicks on their ads. PPC ads are usually appeared at the top of the results list or to the right of the list.
Top1position offers:
Now Top1poition offers custom Pay Per Click Packages for managing your Pay Per Click campaign that fit in your budget. Our best and expert PPC Team can give you the top result and highest number of clicks for your budget. Our best and cost effective pay per click advertising services helps to get guaranteed visitors and gain more sales and conversions. Our PPC team is expert to getthe best sponsored rankings with specific keywords and these are truly based on search ability. We offer three best and effective PPC packages at different price cost include Gold, Silver and Bronze packages that suit your need and budget.
Top1position’s Pay-Per-Click Marketing Process includes:
Our best and effective Pay per click services are targeted, cost-effective and liable for building brand presence and generating more traffic to your site and for that we at Top1position implement the following Pay Per Click management Process:
- Comprehensive Website Analysis
- Account Creation & Setup
- Keyword Analysis and Research
- Creating best PPC Ads
- Placing Bids
- Pay-Per-Click Bid Management
- PPC Campaign Management Progress Reports
- Complete Monthly Reporting
Our PPC Packages Delivers Some Major Advantages:
- You get immediate results
- Our PPC ads are perfect for time limited
- Ideal and perfect for every size of business
- You can stop PPC ads at anytime
- Low, targeted investment
- You can control your budget
- Landing Page Optimisation
- Tracking and Reporting
- Geographic focus
- Our PPC packages allow you to bid on a large amount of keywords
Top1position is known for producing effective results through logical, systematic and hands on work be it pay per click advertising, Google campaign management or Search Engine Marketing UK. We ensure our every account is different and we offer bespoke solutions that are unique to your requirements.
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Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
Proper linkage of your website pages will play an important role in your SEO campaign. They tell the search engine spiders the meaning of the linked pages and how it plays into the overall theme of your website. It also serves as a map for the spiders to follow when they are trying to navigate and evaluate your overall ranking. This SEO technique assures that your web pages will receive attention from the search engines. There are several techniques that professionals use to interlink the pages, this includes:
Image or Navigation Links – The ALT attribute of an image tag allows pages to interlink through images.
Individual Links – These links are directly linked to other web pages, so they are very important for navigation. You want to ensure that all your tags include the correct keywords.
Subject Links – These links are helpful in content-heavy websites because they provide information on a variety of relevant subject matter. The subject names should be used as anchor text to make the link-based SEO more relevant.
Breadcrumb Links – These links appear on the top of any page. They are typically sub-heading/sub-category links that allow better navigation through a richer site. These links also should provide keywords as headings for each category and sub-category.
If you take implement these interlinking techniques into the SEO of your website, you will have an improved navigation that humans and spiders both enjoy. You also create a more user-friendly experience that will retain traffic and may turn into some healthy conversions.
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Monday, June 15th, 2009
The emergence of blogging has proved to be an effective content based search engine optimization (SEO) technique. Effective blogging works wonder for websites by driving heavy traffic, increasing exposure and creating social media impact. Millions of internet users access and contribute to blog posts on a regular basis today. Thus, many websites have adhered to blogging to drive traffic and improve their search engine ranking. However, at times, websites are confused about the implementation procedure of a blog based SEO approach. Websites, with low quality content often fail to improve their ranking due to this reason.
Frequent blog post can differentiate the success of your website from the others. Every time a new blog is updated Google spiders visit your website. Along with frequent blog posts, it is also important that the content is fresh and informative. This will compel the readers as well as the web crawler visit your website repeatedly. An average of 5 posts in a week can be a good to start with. Ensure that all these posts contain relevant and topic-driven content which will help your website win the trust and confidence of the readers.
Apart from frequent blog posts make sure you maintain the keyword density at its maximum level. The ideal usage of the keywords should be between 5 to 20%. However, also be careful that the keywords should not obstruct the natural flow of the content and is forcefully stuffed in the content. Distribute the keywords evenly across all the elements of your website such as URLs, headers, Meta tags, title tags, image titles, image descriptions, etc. Make your titles interesting to lure the audience along with the web spiders. Maintain a moderate size of approximately 250 words for your posts. Increase the size only if you think it can be interesting enough for the reader.
Blogs are used a means of connecting to others over the Internet and it is important that the posts are interesting and simple enough to connect one human to another. Too complicated or ridiculous posts fail to attract visitors and can have a negative impact on your website ranking and reputation. Relevance, simplicity, originality and being informative are some of the primary qualities which every post should adhere to. Using all these qualities you can connect to other bloggers belonging to similar business areas as your own and achieve search engine rankings, thus high drive heavy traffic and establish your online presence simultaneously.
Customized Search Engine Optimization Service by Convonix helps you get on the top search result pages across major search engines. Convonix Inc has helped websites all over the world with its expert Search Engine Marketing Services including SEO and PPC campaign management. Learn more about our consultative SEO services to achieve high search engine rankings.
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Monday, June 15th, 2009
The recession has come!
And with the way things are going, you do not know where this could lead to or if it will get worse. It is during these times that you have to be vigilant in keeping your internet business up, running and still growing.
You can still develop your business even if you have little money or no money at all.
How?
1. Use free internet marketing tools.
Free tools are rampant over the internet. You only have to search for them. There are free article submission sites to submit your contents to. Free directories to get your website out there.
Forums and social networking you can participate and market your online business. The options are endless. Take the time to choose some that you can take advantage of.
2. Recycle your leads.
Past customers should not be forgotten. No interest in the past does not mean they will not be in the present, or future. Following up and patience does not cost money. Keep in mind that most sales are made not on the first attempt, but on the proceeding ones. It hurt you and your customers to try.
3. Optimize your website.
Go for search engine ranking. Not only will you achieve more credibility if you are on the listing, you will also be seen by more and varied people. This is your way of making the customers come to you and not the other way around. Most search engine optimization strategies are free. Learn some of them and begin developing your website.
4. Offer other products.
Start selling other products. Do some research on what customers are spending their money into. Be an affiliate of that product or service. For a small fee, you will have extra commissions coming your way. There is also the possibility that you might just be more effective in that field.
5. Get on with your marketing programs.
Do not start closing and cutting off on some of your existing marketing programs. Instead, think of other ways to make that program more effective without having to shell out money. Try other techniques and methods. Focus on other options you have not thought of before.
There is no reason for you to stop earning profits in times of difficulties. With the right tools and strategies at hand, you and your business will survive the recession, in flying colors too.
Exposed: the shocking secrets of how to make massive cash fast, revealed to you in these breakthrough FREE videos that blasted me from nothing to $5,118,213 in record time: Delta Squadron
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