My Internet Experiment

I’m currently reading “The Now Habit” by Neil Fiore, Ph.D.

I picked it up along with some other books that will help me deal with some of my inadequacies in my business and personal life. Procrastination has long been a problem of mine that I believe started in school, and then proceeded throughout my life. I’ve seen it thwart my success numerous times, and I’m finally sick of it.

I’ve tried a lot of stuff including steam rolling my own fears and following the advice of Just Do It. While this works in some instances it adds to the stress of the activity, and the probability of failure. What I’ve found interesting in “The Now Habit” is that it addresses these underlying fears and allows you to move forward in a stress free productive way.

What’s also interesting is that it points out that you’re not always a procrastinator, there’s something in your life even currently that you absolutely go about doing with no reservations. For me it’s been learning about new opportunities on the Internet. I absolutely love to go out and learn everything I can with no reservations. Everyday I soak up new information, I rarely if ever procrastinate on this task.

What tasks do you go about eagerly? What’s your inner dialogue with those tasks vs. the tasks that you procrastinate doing? What’s the difference in expectation?

Enjoy this post and start paying attention to your inner dialogue, your expectations of what should be vs. what is, and why you procrastinate. I think you’ll start finding patterns that you can use to correct yourself. If you find any value in this post check out the book he does a much better job at explaining it than I do.

Have you been in the pursuit of how to take the perfect digital picture for eBay? I know at one point in time I was having a very difficult time with my pictures.

I would browse through other people’s listings and see how great their photos looked and wonder what they knew that I didn’t. I eventually figured it out on my own but I was stumbling the other day and ran across a site that explained it better than I could.

Here it is:

http://www.theswitchboards.com/articles_professionalphotos.html

I suggest you bookmark it and read it through several times.

Make sure you stop back by here and sign up for my mailing list because I just found a secret source of cheap high-powered lighting to get the perfect digital picture. And I’m going to share it with my subscribers first.

Today I’m going to show you in text and video how to conduct free ebay market research using Terapeak.com

1. Have whatever you want to research in front of you, so you can examine it while you are researching it. Next visit http://terapeak.com
2. Look your item over, find out what make and model it is.
3. Type this into the Terapeak search bar and hit research.
4. Scroll down the listings viewing each one comparing it to what you have. When you find one that has a similar picture and title to what you have click on it.

Next let the comparisons begin

• Check the Ending Price Tag - What did this auction bring? Is it a Buy It Now or an Auction?
• Look at the Shipping Costs - Is the shipping low or high compared to what you could ship for.
• Look at the Seller’s feedback - Does he sell a lot?
• Look at the Buyer’s feedback - Does he or she buy a lot? or is it a newbie with low expectations?
• Look at the categories it’s listed in - these will be in blue hyperlinks at the top of the page
• What’s this seller’s specialty - are they selling this type of item all the time?
• Is the auction similar to what you are going to sell - Are there more or less items included, is the condition the same or better?
• How does the seller word the auction? Is it guaranteed to work? Is the description accurate, is it long or short?

After reviewing these things you’ll start to get an idea of what your listing should look like, and what you should take and apply to your auction.

General Tips

• Have a similar title to the top sellers - don’t copy directly I believe this is against ebay policy
• List in the same categories as the top sellers.
• Find the descriptive words that will captivate your audience.
• Overcome your shortcomings with the use of a Guarantee, or better description. Have the item professionally tested, or learn how to do it yourself.
• Lower your shipping with my other article

That about sums up my research, if you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact me.

You’re fresh ready to start something new, a little excited, a little nervous. You’ve got this crazy idea that you are going to sell something on eBay and make some cold hard cash 7 days later no hassles no problems. Right?

7 Days later - You’re buyer’s paid you, you’ve made more than you thought possible, you’ve even shipped the item the same day because you’re so excited that you sold something on this fascinating site called eBay.

Alternate 7 Days later - You didn’t get any bids, you had 42 visitors or worse no visitors, you’re items still sitting in your house staring at you wondering why you failed to sell it.

Now - What happened in either incident? Some might call it beginners luck, or beginners bad luck. The truth is that eBay can be a mysterious mistress - especially to the faint of heart and the newbie seller. She holds a lot of secrets that as a newbie you can’t even begin to unravel.

I remember one of my first auctions, I didn’t know what the heck I was doing, I saw all of these fancy listings with auction templates, shipping terms, paying terms etc… I was nervous, but I had read a book explaining how to do everything, so I listed it anyways. This book stated that low opening bids attract more bidders - I listened and listed. 99 cents for a brand new set of snowboard bindings. 7 days later that’s what they sold for, or maybe it was $2.35 or something. WAY under what I had paid, it was one of my first losses, and a bad one at that.

I didn’t understand what had happened, why did the last pair I sold go for $28.57 and this pair only brought $2.35 what did I do wrong? Now I was hooked, I started looking for answers everywhere, I had to explain this phenomena. I had to solve the problem. I eventually did and today I look back with fond memories of all the losses that drove me to do better with my listings.

Are my listings perfect now? No, but I have vastly improved over the days when I was using eBay’s listing system, and selecting any option I thought would help sell my item.

So what’s this post about? It’s a post of encouragement and a reminder to anyone who’s going through the challenges eBay throws at you - keep going you will see the light, and seek the education you need to get you through the tough spots.

A few quick reminders on listing items

• Research it first - Don’t go listing blind
• Find your key words for you title.
• Know how much is the lowest you’re willing to take, I recommend a starting bid of $9.95 at least otherwise it may not be worth your time.
• Don’t list cheap things - make sure it’s worth over $9.95
• If you’re going to start it at a price above or below that look at eBay’s fee schedule to save some money
• Read my Shipping Article and apply it - know how much to ship before you list.
• Use the basics - don’t select every option known to eBay - A simple Gallery Image should be enough.
• Take good pictures - host them yourself
• Write a good description including anything that’s wrong with the item, and the good things about the item.

Well that about sums it up, I’m sure I’m forgetting something but that should get you off to a running start.

P.S. Have you joined my Mailing list yet? If not, join now to get eBay tips delivered right to your mailbox!

Hey guys today I’m going to show you how to insert video into your eBay auctions.

Now you can either watch the sample video below for a quick and easy instruction, or you can follow my step by step directions. It’s your choice.

Quick and Easy

Slow and Painful

Get a Youtube account

1. Visit www.youtube.com
2. click sign up in the upper right hand corner of the screen.
3. now you can either use your existing gmail/google account or you can sign up for a new account

Take a video with your camera

• Make sure it’s less than ten minutes or 100 megabytes otherwise split it into two or three videos
• If your doing a video on a product keep it simple, short, and sweet. Just show that the product works or whatever you think warrants the time spent on this video process.
• Upload the video to your computer - either save it in a specific folder that’s easily accessed or download it to your desktop. Every camera and computer setup is different otherwise I’d show you how. But to quickly tell you just right click on your “My Computer” open up your camera’s drive if it’s plugged in and look at the video you made. Right click and hit copy then paste it to your desktop - the thing that’s always there Now you know where it is.

Upload the video to Youtube

• Login
• Click “My Account”
• Then Click “Upload New Video”
• Insert a Title of your video i.e. “Demonstration of Canon SD500″
• Insert a Description i.e. “I show you that this camera up for auction works.”
• Pick a video category that best suites the video your uploading.
• Click Sharing Options then scroll down, make sure that it says “embedding” is enabled.
• Also make sure that it is a Public Video.
• Click “Upload a Video”
• Click Browse and look at your desktop or wherever you saved the video file, then click “open”
• It will now upload, it may be a timely process depending on your internet speed and the size of the video file.
• After it’s done you’ll have a bunch of html code in a little box that has the saying “Embed This Video on your Site”
• Highlight and copy this HTML - open up Notepad by going to Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> Notepad
• Paste the text into the notepad and then save it to your desktop for quick reference.

Listing your eBay auction - through eBay’s Lister

• In the auction description tab write your description then hit the “HTML” button at the top of that tab.
• Find your Notepad file with the saved embed information and open it up.
• copy that html and paste it into your auction description.

Listing with Inkfrog

• Fill out the Inkfrog Create a Listing form
• When your down to the description click “on” WYSIWYG.
• Finish your description, and when you know where you want your video open the Notepad file with the embedding information and copy and paste the html into your description.
• Hit preview and see how it looks

One final tip is to place the (<center>) tag around the video like this (<center>) if you want it centered - disregard the parentheses.That’s it you’re done

Where did I learn how to do this

I learned most of this at a website called My Silent Team run by Jim Cockrum.

www.mysilentteam.com

This is my affiliate link - if your going to sign up please sign up through me and help me stay open, I highly recommend this site and will feature a whole review on it in My Recommendations Page shortly.