eBay 4 Beginner’s Meeting
7/15/06

www.JanelleElms.com
consulting@janelleelms.com

Personal Coaching
Personal/corporate – in person, email or by phone
$500 an hour – 2 hour minimum

 

 

Upcoming Classes & Tour Dates:

  • September 22 – Portland, OR

  • October 24th – Vancouver, BC

  • October 19th - NYC

  • October 26th – Seattle, WA

Next Meeting:

 

Women of Intention Network (WIN) meeting – 2-5pm Crossroads Mall Community Room (inside mall, across from Hallmark)

  • July – 26th (Wednesday)

  • August – 15th (Tuesday)

eBay 4 Beginners meeting – Crossroads Mall Community Room (inside mall, across from Hallmark)

  • August – 12th – 10am-1pm (Saturday)

www.JanelleElms.com/newsletter - to be notified of upcoming meetings
www.JanelleElms.com/ebaysuccessnewsletter - read archived monthly newsletters
www.JanelleElms.com/free-ebay-meetings - to download the monthly outlines of each meeting
www.JanelleElms.com/ebay - The resource for all that is eBay
www.JanelleElms.com/ebaystoretips - Get your FREE eBay Store’s Report – “I Want To Be That 1% - 5 Quick eBay Store Fixes”

 

 

Topics:


1. eBay Live – the 5 hottest new companies to check out!


The Solutions floor at eBay Live was outstanding this year! Over 100 companies, who could help your eBay business, exhibited this year. Each year at Live, I always thoroughly explore the Solutions floor to find those rare gems…the companies who can truly make a difference in your business…drive traffic, create marketing, infuse new selling channels, and of course increase your bottom line. This year there were 5 companies that impressed me with their unique solutions for your eBay and e-commerce business. They have all been added to MY solutions directory at www.JanelleElms.com/ebay.

Remember, for the most part, these are all brand new companies to the eBay community. They may not have ALL the kinks worked out yet, but of course would appreciate your feedback in making their product better.

 


Prosper – This company blew me away at eBay Live. To see such a simple answer to a complex problem was incredible.


We have all heard stories about Entrepreneurial success...they usually go something like..."We knew we had the best idea. Uncle James loaned us $12,000 to get us started and now our annual sales are over 2 million dollars!"


Unfortunately, many of us don't have an Uncle James...and perhaps by now you have done what I did when I started - begged and borrowed $$ from any person you have ever known or been related to and maxed out all your credit cards - all with the knowledge and belief in the dream to run your own business. Or perhaps you have tried to get a loan from a bank or the SBA. How did that go when you said, "All I need is $12,000 to buy this inventory, so I can sell it on eBay."? Bet the suits promptly handed you the money, yes?

 

With over 1.3 million of us now making a living selling on eBay, you would think that the rest of the world would have caught up to eBay being a viable business venue, but unfortunately the financial institutions don't quite understand entrepreneurship - the American Dream. How could they - we are taught in our school system how to work for others - not how to stand up on our own and run a successful business.

I have, over the last 8 years, watched the eBay Community grow from a collectible marketplace to an amazing entrepreneurial business - with incredible success stories. But I also know that of the many entrepreneur traits, one of the hardest is understanding how to grow your business and take risks. What is standing in your way of achieving and living your dream? Do you need $12,000 for inventory, perhaps $2000 for new shipping equipment, or how about $9000 to rent out that warehouse you need if you are going to expand, would $3000 get you the e-commerce website of your dreams and you may need $30,000 for a debt consolidation loan for all those maxed out credit cards from creating your business. Let others in the community help you achieve all that you can imagine. This is where Prosper comes into the picture. You set up a free profile, join a group (you can join mine!), and then borrow the money! The cool part – the money comes from others in the community!


Ok…I will break it down a bit for you:


Borrowing:

  1. Create a loan listing for the amount you need to borrow.

  2. YOU set the maximum amount of interest you are willing to pay.

  3. Then people bid on how much they want to loan you and what they are willing to take as an interest rate (always at or below what you have set).

  4. At the end of the ‘auction’, Prosper combines the top bidders with your loan request and creates a loan for you. Your loan could have 1 lender or many.

You can read more here: http://www.prosper.com/public/borrow/about_borrowing.aspx 


Lending: Now, you can also make some money from this new site…by lending money to the Borrowers. Plus, I love being able to help entrepreneurial start-ups. Here is how lending works:

  1. Check out the profiles of the borrowers on Prosper. You can read about why they want the money, what they are going to do with it, how they intend to pay it back, and go over in detail their credit rating.

  2. Bid the amount you are willing to lend and the rate you want.

  3. If you are one of the ‘winning’ lenders for that loan, you will receive your monthly share of the payment in your account.

You can read more here: http://www.prosper.com/public/lend/about_lending.aspx  

How cool is this?!!


You can contact them with your questions here: http://www.prosper.com/public/help/support.aspx 

 

 


FilmLoop – Ok guys, this one is FREE – can’t get much better than that. I have preached on stage, in my books, in the eBay workshops…almost everywhere…that you need to do marketing in your business. People don’t know what you are selling unless you tell them. FilmLoop has come up with a genius way to easily, with a quick copy & paste into your listings, do just that.
Check out my listing that is using FilmLoop as a marketing tool: The 3 eBay Books You Must Have! How fabulous is that?


The gallery box is color-customizable, as is the header text information. FilmLoop grabs all of your current listings (including your Store Inventory) and creates this full-fledged cross-promotional tool for you to use. When a buyer sees something they like, they simply Click on the picture and you have found a new potential buyer! And did I mention that it is free!!


Ok, here is the quick ‘how to’ (but refer to the site for specifics and screen shots):

  • Type in your eBay User ID and click the button that says, “search by seller name or ID” and click Search

  • On the bottom right hand corner, click ‘Open in FilmLoop’

  • Right click on one of your items in the FilmLoopand choose ‘Post loop on websites or blogs’

  • On the box that pops up – pick the following for the top 2 drop-down menus:

    • Site Host/Destination: eBay.com

    • Loop Link Style: Flash Gallery Looplet

  • Click ‘Customize Gallery’ – and you can change the header info, color and even include a link (remember, no linking OUTSIDE of eBay though)

  • Then follow the instructions for copy & pasting this fabulous marketing tool into your eBay Listings!

For my poor Motors people who always seem to be left out of the cool tools – this works amazingly for you!! Check it out: http://network.filmloop.com/motors 

Please check out their help/support page here http://www.filmloop.com/support/ if you have further questions.

 

 


CityMax – I have been eyeing CityMax for over a year now. So they aren’t one of my ‘new kids’ on this list, but they are one of the top companies that have wowed me. I have said repeatedly – the perfect e-commerce solution is a triangle – an eBay auction, an eBay Store and a website. You just never know where your buyers are going to find you. If you are only selling on eBay, you are missing 72.8% of your market – egads! You can increase your sales by over 300% with your own e-commerce website.


Now, there are a lot of places where you can get your own website – Go Daddy, Yahoo, even eBay has eBay ProStores now. However, the unique thing about CityMax is that it is inexpensive and easy – our two favorite words! You can have a great looking, professional website in less than 10 minutes. If you can create a Word document, you can build a website (but they also have a package that they will do it for you!). I built (ok, ok, it’s not done yet), but I built www.tinkernel.citymax.com in literally 7 minutes. Go, check it out – I’ll wait!

But the extras that I am VERY impressed with include their integrated website builder that allows you to seamlessly sell your website inventory on eBay, and a ‘Make Money’ section that provides you with free tools to develop your e-commerce strategies. They provide you not only with an easy to customize website, but give you all the tools (in fact over 450 of them!) you need to grow your success. Some of these tools include:

  • Access to inventory

  • Search engine submission

  • Pay-per-click

  • Affiliate/banner ads set up

  • Customer tracking reports

  • Message boards

  • Over 1500 designer templates

  • Credit card integration

  • Free advertising credits

  • And so much more

These sites start at less than $20 a month – this includes all of the above mentioned fabulous features including a shopping cart, money making training, and search engine optimization guidance for your new site.


Sign up now for your FREE 10 day trial (all you need is 7 minutes to be convinced)


For further information and support, please go to: http://www.citymax.com/support/host_ask.htm

 

 


Camdeo – If a picture is worth a 1000 words…can you imagine what a moving picture is worth?!!


Your listing description is your salesperson. What you convey to the customer (& how you convey that) has a direct effect on whether that person purchases the item. Now many of you have gotten pretty good with writing excellent ‘feature & benefit’ descriptions…but what if YOU could tell each and every person who dropped by how fabulous that product is? Ok, ok…I realize you are already working 24 hours a day, so how could you possibly find time to tell each and every one of the 200 million people on eBay about your product? Video. Simple…very effective…video. You can now show your product in more detail, give your buyers a sample of how it works, and use your ‘selling personality’ to move more items at higher prices. (people have seen an increase in their sales as high as 60+%!!


Camdeo has two levels of membership – one is FREE (woohoo!) and the other, with a bit more space to hold your videos is $2.95 a month (with a reduced yearly fee membership too). All you need is one of those cheap little webcams to record you (or your assistant) talking about your products. Camdeo then provides you with a library to keep your videos. With a quick ‘copy & paste’ of a link, you now have a live video salesperson in each of your listings. 

Camdeo is great not only for use in your listings…but also on your blogs, websites and even for online dating.


For more information, please visit Camdeo. If you have additional questions, you can contact them here: http://www.camdeo.com/contact.php

 


SmartyAds


SmartyAds isn’t going to be for everyone – because some people truly just want to clean out their house or ‘play’ at selling on eBay. However, if you are looking at making this a business, then you MUST understand Search Engine Optimization. The big players on eBay and the internet are using Pay-per-click campaigns to drive insane amounts of traffic to their businesses. If you want to compete, then you will want to know about SmartyAds.


Many people ‘try their hand’ at PPC – and since they are stabbing at the dark, they tend to lose money and never try it again. Others are just completely unsure of how to do PPC, so they choose instead to do nothing.


SmartyAds was the first company to make my ‘hot list’ at Live, because they take all of the guessing out of the equation. This company puts together, based upon your eBay listings, a monthly PPC campaign targeted for your customers. 


Here are some of the features:

  • SmartyAds uses proprietary software technology to create a custom portfolio of keywords just for your business

  • SmartyAds will continuously analyze your inventory and automatically replenish your ad campaigns on a daily basis

  • You don’t have to learn, download, install anything – they do it all for you

  • You create a monthly budget and only pay a commission when a transaction is successful.

I will be ‘guinea pig’ testing this product myself over the next 3-6 months and will keep you updated.


Go check them out now!


Here is their contact number: 240-949-2700 (9-6pm est)

 

 

2. Make More Money – www.janelleelms.com/makemoremoney 

  • Earn extra money by promoting best-selling eBay Educational Books. Finally, after numerous requests, I have created an affiliate program for my best-selling books and eBay Store consulting. Thank you for your patience while this site was being created. 
    Now you will be able to utilize your About Me page, blog, website, classroom and more, to sell best-selling eBay books – you do nothing and make money! Pretty cool setup! Check it out here: www.janelleelms.com/MakeMoreMoney

 

3. HTML class – Lisa Stephens of Somersault Media (www.janelleelms.com/smedia) teaches you how to make your listings and Store look more professional – making you more money.

Introduction to HTML (by Lisa Stephens)

In-line style declarations


There are two ways to declare styles, one is with a style tag and the other is to use in-line declarations. Today we will review in-line declarations and introduce use of a style tag at the end.

Example:

<p>This is a line of text with default styles assigned.</p>

Gives us: This is a line of text with default styles assigned.

<p style="font-size:14pt; font-weight:bold; font:'Trebuchet MS'">This is default text with the style defined in the p tag. </p>

Gives us: This is default text with the style defined in the p tag.

So, what can we style this way? There are many properties available, some of which apply to text, some of which apply to the “box model” and others that apply to background, font, visual effects, positioning and tables. Below is a short list of available properties.

A few style properties:

 

·        background

·        background-attachment

·        background-color

·        background-image

·        background-repeat

·        background-position

·        color

·        font-family

·        font-style

·        font-variant

·        font-weight

·        font-size

·        font

·        word-spacing

·        letter-spacing

·        text-decoration

·        vertical-align

·        text-transform

·        text-align

·        text-indent

·        line-height

·        margin-top

·        margin-right

·        margin-left

·        margin

·        padding-top

·        padding-right

·        padding-bottom

·        padding-left

·        padding

·        border-top-width

·        border-right-width

·        border-bottom-width

·        border-left-width

·        border-width

·        border-color

·        border-style

·        border-top

·        border-right

·        border-bottom

·        border-left

·        border

·        width

·        height

·        float

·        clear

·        list-style-type

·        list-style-image

·        list-style-position

·        list-style

Inheritance

Inheritance refers to the concept that tags without styles defined always “inherit” the styles of the containing tag. Remember, all tags are contained by something else whether it’s the HTML tag at the top of the page or the <body> tag or some other tag. If no styles are defined anywhere, then the browser interprets the defaults.

So, if they <body> tag has a background-color property defined, for instance

<body style=”background-color:red;”>

then all page backgrounds, table backgrounds, paragraphs, etc. contained within the body tag will have a red background.

If we want the background color of a particular paragraph to be white instead of red, then we style the paragraph as follows:

<p style=”background-color:#FFFFFF;”>

Now, just this paragraph will have a white background. Additionally, all elements contained within this paragraph will have a white background by inheritance.

Inheritance is complicated, why do we need to know about it?

Inheritance, if not well understood, can cause a lot of frustration for novice HTML coders. Having a little basic knowledge can go a long way to smoothing out code issues later on. The main thing to remember is “the inner-most style definition wins”.

The other important note about inheritance is that in eBay, all user-entered HTML is part of an inheritance chain of styles already. eBay frowns on taking over any of the native table tags and restyling them because that changes the default look and feel of the eBay elements on the page as well as the custom HTML. So, the way to style your custom HTML is best done with in-line style definitions as defined above –or- with custom style declarations using the style tag. For example:

<td style=”font-size:14px;”>

This is permitted because it is an in-line style declaration. The next <td> tag will not have size 14 font unless the style attribute is manually included in the tag.

<style type=”text/css”>
td{color:#333333;}
</style>

This is NOT permitted because it restyles all td tags on the page. This particular code will change all text in tables to a gray color. In eBay that means all the header text, all the navigation bar text, etc. Styling the general tags in eBay is a no-no.

Style definitions using the <style> tag

The above HTML code is an example of using a style tag to define styles. This is a simple yet powerful technique that allows application of styles across a page with a single line of code. For instance, the above example re-styles all table text to be a different color and I don’t have to run around cutting and pasting style attributes in every table cell! Slick, but we have to be careful how this is used on eBay sites. The next installment on styles will cover using <style> tags successfully and legally on eBay.


4. Sourcing – What do you need to know about drop-shipping?

www.terapeak.com/janelle - 1 month free trial

www.worldwidebrands.com/ebay - $10 off coupon

http://www.worldwidebrands.com/wwb/kh_freeebook.asp - free e-book about selling online, including information about drop-shipping

What is it?

Buy initial item

Item in stock

What goes in the box & on the label?

Who handles returns?

Re-stocking fees?

Pre-purchase on-hand inventory

5. Open Question forum - ask the PowerSellers anything

6. Seattle eBay Store Sellathon

 

 

Resources (find these resources and MANY more at www.JanelleElms.com/ebay):

www.auctionbytes.com – THE eBay newsletter to signup for…Ina provides you an option for two – pick both…they are free and fabulous!

www.JanelleElms.com/webmaster - Marcus is a GENIUS, inexpensive and oh so quick. Use him for any technical web stuff you might need.

www.JanelleElms.com/terapeak - A research tool that allows sellers to utilize marketing trends on eBay to more effectively price and position their listings. Receive a 2 week FREE trial of powerful researching. 

www.JanelleElms.com/endicia - Endicia Internet Postage lets you print postage for all your mail. All you need is a PC, an Internet connection, and a laser or inkjet printer. Receive a 30-day FREE trial. 

www.JanelleElms.com/vistaprint - receive 250 free business cards 

www.uShip.com - A shipping marketplace that saves buyers of large items a significant amount compared to FedEx, UPS and traditional freight quotes. 

www.WorldwideBrands.com/ebay - The ONLY Directory Publisher of Drop Ship and Wholesale Product Sourcing information on the Internet that is Certified by eBay. Entrepreneur readers receive $10 off the sourcing products of their choice. 

www.WhatDoISell.com/ebay – What Do I Sell is an interactive membership website that specializes in teaching online auction sellers creative, professional strategies and techniques for selecting products to sell on eBay, locating legitimate suppliers, and how to effectively sell in the eBay Marketplace. 

www.LogoYes.com/ebay - LogoYes is the only website that lets you create your own professional-quality logo online in minutes. No design experience or special software is required, and the process is fast, easy and affordable. Receive your own pre-sized logo for your eBay Store and end-of-auction email as well as 250 FREE business cards. 

www.elance.com – Complete your business needs by using this easy, quick and cost-effective outsourcing service. Projects include copyediting, html templates, logo design, and more. 

www.platinumpowerseller.com/ebayu - PowerSeller Mike Enos offers a FREE newsletter packed with tips to assist in your eBay success. 

www.JanelleElms.com/mpireresearcher - Ready to change the way you do business? No more jumping from one application to another. No more re-entering information. With Mpire, daily, repetitive tasks are fully automated. Gain more of your time back. All the functionality to run your entire business including accounting, in ONE complete, easy to use business solution tool. Check out the new research tool!