WIN Meeting 4.11.06

WIN Meeting 4.11.06

2:10: Welcome & introductions.

Announcements:

5/9: next WIN meeting 2-5 PM.
eBay 101 this week, eBay 102 next week
eBay Live: eBay Live is like the wildest trade show you’ve ever been to, wrapped in a Grateful Dead conference and bible revival from the deepest South, attended by 15,000 insane eBay lovers. It’s a great place to learn (181 classes) and make contacts!
www.janelleelms.com/vistaprint: great printing site for all your marketing needs, business cards, post cards, stamps, etc.
Janelle will invite Melody of Crave Seattle to speak at one of the WIN meetings. She is a genius entrepreneur responsible for www.craveparty.com and involved with www.womenwholaunch.com. She has written a Crave Seattle book coming out this fall. The next Seattle Crave is an Urban Bus Adventure on April 22. Check out www.craveparty.com.
www.womenwholaunch.com is an incubator of women entrepreneurs to submit ideas and have other women help your business move forward.

Work Smarter, Not Harder:

Janelle has been receiving emails from many folks basically saying they want to be rich but don’t want to work to get there.
She’s also observed that many of us are working too hard and thinking too much about things. A perfect example: dwelling on feedback scores!
Another example of thinking too hard can be seen in the online dating world. Janelle and a guy friend were talking about this and her friend concluded that there must be more men than women in Seattle because when a guy posts an ad up he gets a few replies. When a girl posts an ad, she gets a gazillion replies. Janelle pointed out that its how men and women view the laundry list (the must haves of your potential date/mate). When guys see a woman’s laundry list and they match 3 out of 10 on the list, they think, great! They’ve got an in. When a woman sees a guy’s laundry list and they miss one item on the list they don’t write. It’s very interesting to see how women carry these traits into their business. Women often think too hard & worry about having their ducks all lined up before acting.
Being an entrepreneur is like flying by the seat of your pants. Don’t spend too much time thinking about things and trust your intuition!
Seattle Crave Melody says that for every 30 of her ideas only 1-2 are successful.

Mastermind Business Session: Alice In Stitches

Intro:

Alice is a gifted quilter! Quilting has been her main business for the past 18 years. She is working on blending her craft with an eBay store. She is finding it very challenging to sell quilts and artwork on eBay. She is adding notions, fabrics and patterns to help fill out her inventory. She is shooting for the upper end market and wants to see if there is a market for more expensive quilter items. Her store has been open for 3 months. She is experiencing some doubt.

Feedback about Alice’s Store Front:

Fun place to look
Want to see quilts better, improve photographs & sizes
Want to see quilts in relation to a couch or bed so viewer has a better idea of dimensions
Want to know more about the artist – tell us who you are
Want to see more creative language to attract the level of customer Alice is targeting. Try visualizing kind of customer you want to attract. A good book to read is “Attracting the Perfect Customer.”
Design your store front so that Alice’s personality and creativity shows. Design a beautiful banner and store front. You don’t need to spend time learning how to design. Find someone else to design it. Use your business smarts to have creative control over your project. Seattle Crave Melody has to have talent around her to be successful. She says there is no point to knowing everything. It’s your business to make sure there are other good people to do the work for you.
While someone is designing your store front, have them design a basic auction/store template for you. The basic eBay stores template is pretty bad.

Have designer create tabs across tops.

Feedback about Alice’s eBay store name:

Alice searched overture keyword tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/) to look for hot keywords to create her eBay store name: stitches quilts *fabric* gifts.
You have 35 characters you can use for your store name. Her store name is good.
Take the asterix around *fabric* out. Do not use symbols in your store name. They take up character space and the web spiders don’t recognize them.
Now Alice needs to come up with a business name. She already has Alice In Stitches that she has been using before eBay. She needs to go to www.godaddy.com and buy a domain name that she can use as a redirect like www.aliceinstitches.com/ebay. A redirect url takes you straight into an eBay store. When a customer enters your store through a redirect and buys, you get 75% off the final value fee.

Auction strategies:

How many auctions week should she post? Keep close track on what item you’re listing, what they’re selling for and what your profit is so you know how many more items you need to list.
How many listings should you do? Focus on the things that are selling the best. Be sure to list items on the auction site either through an auction or fixed price listing. These listings draw customers to your store.
What kinds of auctions should she post? Give the buyers what they want. Research pulse.ebay.com for the latest customer hot list. Post items with hot keywords. Don’t put “quilts” in auction unless they have fabulous keywords like: Seattle skyline space needle. If there aren’t any solid search words for one of your items, don’t put it out on the main auction site. Keep those items in your store.
Baby items always do well. Baby is a good search word. Babies are a $16 million industry. Maybe Alice could offer personalized baby quilts.
Promote the heirloom quality of her items. Use that as a hook. Quilts that can be passed on to your grandchildren, etc. transmission of history – play up on it.
Sign up for www.ebsqart.com. It costs $67/yr. Because ebsq is a highly searched eBay keyword you should place the keywords and logo in your store and auction listings.

Alice spoke about how challenging it’s been to start up a store and bring in other merchandise. She doesn’t have time to create anymore. Janelle stressed that she needs to think like a buyer. Just because quilting is her passion, it doesn’t mean that quilts will be successful on eBay. eBay may not be the right marketplace for her quilts. She should consider hooking up with Crave as well as targeting the East Side Seattle clients. She should display her artwork in restaurants like Chez Shea, downtown Seattle.

Search Engine Info:

Choose the classic eBay store template that doesn’t cover up the descriptions. The web spiders need to read the description.
You have 300 characters for store description: use hot keywords & eliminate commas & punctuation marks. This will make your description look ugly.
Alice needs to change her description to keywords.
Cover up this ugly keyword paragraph with a header including logo or picture and text about your store. Janelle calls this HTML gift wrapping.
You can send your logo, text and elements to Marcus at www.webmaster4hire.com. He knows how to create a store header.
Check out http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ and pulse.ebay.com for keywords that clients are using.
If you can’t think of keywords, ask other people that aren’t so close to your business to describe what you’re selling. It helps to ask somebody who knows nothing about your world. Also use a thesaurus. Just don’t think too much!
eBay store categories are SEO. You now have 300 categories that are 30 characters long. You will have a primary category like Handmade Artist Quilts. You can have a 2nd subcategory like twin or queen. You can even have a 3rd subcategory like fabric or color.
Spiders don’t like the same word over and over again. They think it’s spamming. Don’t use the word quilt too many times. Use the categories and subcategories to break the quilts down into smaller pieces.
This expanded category tree will also make it easier for you to list a single items in two separate store categories giving you greater coverage.

More about optimization:

eBay has done a ton of work behind the scenes so your store and listings can be SEO. You just have to get your keywords right.
Optimization has to do with relevant key words.
Store title (35 characters), description (300 characters) & store categories (300, 30 characters long) are optimized.
About Me (unlimited characters and offsite links allowed), auctions, and hyperlinks are optimized.
A basic store has 5 pages that are SEO; a featured store has 10 pages.
eBay Reviews & Guides are optimized.
Yahoo, MSN & Google are the main search engines that send out web spiders looking for spider food. Give the spiders good spider food and you will get bumped up on search engines.
Spider food are relevant keywords that you use and how you link them together. For instance, create custom pages in your store (like History of Quilting) and then write a Review & Guide that matches your custom page. Spiders like it when you weave those pages together. Janelle likes it because you’re working smarter not harder. You’ve created one product that can be used multiple times and also feeds those hungry spiders.
Spiders also like to read the first 300-500 words in your listings. You could say in your description, I have some great deals for your today and the spiders will walk (or crawl) away. But if you say, Don’t forget to visit my eBay store stitches quilts fabric gifts, they will like that kind of food.

Suggested custom pages for Alice’s store:

The History of Quilting
How to care (store, wash) your heirloom quality quilts.
How to hang quilts
Buying Guide
Buyers buy confidence and security! Include testimonials on about me page
Top 10 Lists: really good custom page: preselection/ pre-shopping.
Trending
Newsletter
FREE instruction page quilt block of the month: actual patterns
Shows & Events Page
How to cut out a perfect square and turn into an eBay guide once a month.
Tips & Tricks: Craft & Sewing Tips by Alice. Then, move your archived tips to a website and create a book out of archived tips.
Portfolio page
Store policies

Janelle reiterated that being entrepreneur is hard work. One way to work smarter, not harder is to create one product that can be used multiple times. For instance, create a custom page, send the info over to reviews and guides and use it on your website.

Janelle stressed that as a proprietor Alice could lose everything in her life: her house, car, boat, and house in the Cayman islands…she needs to protect herself and her business. Get CPA and incorporate. Besides the tax benefits that you can write off when you’re incorporated, when you want to sell your business, it’s very easy because the company entity continues on even though you step out.

Janelle suggested Alice contact her CPA:
Marc Christianson
Christianson And Associates, P.S
marc-cpa@comcast.net
(206) 851-2654

Business Organization Tips:

Turbo Lister is one of many listing management tools to help you automate the listing process. You need a listing tool to be efficient in your business.
Create folders in TL to help you organize your listings.
eBay has an accounting feature that dumps data into QuickBooks.
Think really big – think of a BIG business woman. Martha Stewart does not fill in QuickBooks. Because that’s not where she makes her money. She makes money coming up with ideas.
What would The Donald do? He doesn’t do his taxes. He sets up standards for how things are supposed to be done and then it’s automated so he can go on to buy more property.
What can you unload off your plate?
If a company, a person, a software program can make it easier - hire them. For instance - Janelle’s amazing cleaning person:
Linda Taylor - (425) 861-4066
Pay for those expenses out of your business income.
If you’re worried about your spouse fussing over a cleaning lady, do a tester and have him watch how much more time you have to spend with him & on the business and how relaxed you are.

Online Postage Tips:

Don’t spend time standing in line at the post office.
Use an automated service. Most eBay Powersellers use endicia.com
Go to www.janelleelms.com/endicia for a 30 day free trial.
Endicia allows you to promote yourself. You can even print your website in giant pink letters on the label! You can change your label depending upon the season. People pay attention to labels.
Endicia.com costs about $8-12/month.
Endicia.com also has stealth indicia so your customers won’t complain about handling fees.
Purchase the largest label you can for your packages. Make sure you’re not buying UPS labels.
A great eBay vendor for shipping products is Seattle’s own: epackngo.
http://stores.ebay.com/EPACKNGO

Giving Back:

Last month, several WIN members contributed $575 to the Girl’s Inc. for 60 girls to attend the girls’ summit in May. There is still time to contribute so more girls can attend. Please send a contribution to studio@pigandpanda.com. You will receive a letter for this tax charitable contribution from Girl’s Inc.

Nice Girls Don’t Get Rich Homework:
Discussed mistakes from the book.

Mistake #6: I set artificial boundaries because of fear. I can’t stay home, make money, and be committed to my family.

What are you going to do about it? Artificial boundaries come from life chipping away at my confidence and perception of what can happen. So, feel the fear and do it anyway.

Mistake #7: Not balancing strategic with tactical. I make a goal but don’t write it down so I don’t have a plan to reach the goal. Fear probably holds me back from writing it down so I can make it happen.

What are you going to do about it? My goal is to become a Powerseller so I need to find out what are the requirements. She has to sell $1000 a month or $33 a day for 3 months and uphold a 98% feedback. If what she’s selling now isn’t working, she either needs to sell more or move in another direction.

Mistake #8: Staying in the safety zone (editor’s comments: which is a misnomer because safety zones are really more like a prison).

What are you going to do about it? Talk about it helps get it out of the safety zone, feel more comfortable. Fake it till you make it. If you say it, somebody will have to hold you to it.

Mistake #18: Not taking care of myself. Real mom issue. Put other people first.

What are you going to do about it? I’m committed to work out 3x/week. Janelle commented how easy it is for us to nurture our business just like we do in our relationships. We need to do a better job protecting our businesses. Be just as fierce with your business as you are protecting your family. Use your intuition as a woman. It’s powerful. Nurturing is not a bad thing just be sure to balance it with protecting as well.

Mistake #17: Not taking care of material possessions.

What are you going to do about it? I get so busy that those things get neglected. You need to protect them and maintain your possessions. I’m going to get my car serviced.

Smart Women Finish Rich Homework:
Discussed plans from Basket 2 work:

Plan to get an IRA going again.
Move old 401K to a new one.
Look into plans for self-employed people: SEP IRA.
Find a financial planner.

Homework for 5/9 WIN Meeting:

Read Dream basket 3 from Smart Women Finish Rich:
What steps do you need to take to get one of your dreams and put money into your dream basket?
Bring 1 thing you did to start earning your dream.
Find a financial advisor. Go through process with 3 people. Discover what that means to you and your business.
Read mistakes #26-50 in Nice Girls Don’t get Rich.
Bring the top 3 coaching tips you followed.
Fill out and return Alice’s Business Mastermind sheet.

Laura’s business is our Mastermind project next month.