There is a new info product out promising to teach people how to sell over $120K worth of products a month on eBay – well, they admit that $100,00 a month isn’t typical. I haven’t bought this product, but my understanding is that it involves flipping cell phones on eBay. I do have some experience selling cell phones on eBay and there are a couple points to consider about this program before you purchase it:
- In her promo, the “Selling Queen” shows her PayPal transactions totaling over $100K per month… she doesn’t compute how much of this is profit.
- Cell phones are considered a “risky” item by PayPal – there are a lot of stolen cell phones on eBay. If PayPal notices even a few cell phone sales in a week on your account, they will freeze the money and you won’t even be able to ship the phones to your customers.
- If a lot of people are buying this product – there will be a ton of competition to find what few great “flippable” cell phones that already exist on eBay.
Jim Cockrum (whom I greatly respect in the world of online business) teamed up with the Selling Queen to add value to this product. I won’t give anymore of the details that I heard about it away – but I see several problems with this product and would recommend only buying it if you have the $100+ it costs to spare.
Whether you have your own business or are just starting out… you will soon realize that you need some help. Do you want to hire an employee or two? Do you have enough work for an employee? What about reporting taxes for the employee? It can be a lot of work just to hire someone then who knows if they will even work out!
Even if you have a handle on everything yourself, you could probably expand faster if you had someone to handle your mundane tasks. Here is where outsourcing your work could be a huge advantage for you. Unlike with employees, you can just outsource what you need done – when you need it done.
How do you start outsourcing? The first step is to decide what you want to outsource first. You probably want to start with remedial and time-consuming tasks such as:
- Customer service/answering email
- Billing
- Bookkeeping/accounting
Once you get your remedial/mundane tasks covered, it’s time to kick it up a notch. Outsource some of your talent intensive activities you need done such as:
- Web design/maintenance
- Graphic arts
- SEO optimization
- Marketing
Even if you can handle tasks such as web design – why waste hours and hours when you could be expanding your business with that time? So now that you’ve decided what tasks you want to outsource – how do you find talent? You probably don’t want to run a local ad.. instead you need to find people in other countries who are willing to do your work for a lower hourly or per job rate. Two popular places to find talent are elance.com and odesk.com. You can post jobs to this site and get bids.. also read reviews of the people/companies on there who will be doing your work.
I just took the plunge recently into the outsourcing world – I hired a company to build an affiliate marketing site I’ve been planning on doing for a long time but never had the time to do it… so far so good!
If your interested in learning more about outsourcing check out the ebook Sourcecontrol for more in-depth info about outsourcing, including how to avoid hiring the wrong people and wasting valuable time and money!
To get the most out of Twitter for your online or offline business, you will probably want to use various apps. There may be some things that you see other people doing with Twitter and may not know how to do yourself… chances are they are using a Twitter App. There are actually many free Twitter apps that you can use – I will be reviewing some of the ones I use at various times in this blog.
One Twitter app that you may or may not know about called SocialOomph.com. It is a pay site for most features but is free for a few cool features also. Free things that you can do with Social Oomph include:
- making and sending welcome messages
- scheduling an automatic Tweet(s)
I use Social Oomph to schedule Tweets…. if you are using the Free account you have to schedule each one by hand which can take a while depending on how many you want to do. It still beats logging into Twitter every few hours to tweet though. Keep in mind if you are scheduling Tweets to not simply copy and paste the same thing.. Twitter usually doesn’t allow duplicate tweets but you can get around this by copying and then putting in an extra space or changing a word here or there.
Check out SocialOomph.com for some cool FREE Twitter features!
If you are just starting out trying to make money online, finding a niche product to sell is probably the best way you can start. How do you find a good niche? Research. Here is a cheat sheet to some decent niches selling well now on eBay!
Niche Item #1: Heart Rate Monitors
These are used by athletes and gym bunnies or by people who need to keep an eye on their heart rate.
Why they are an exciting niche item:
- They have a 75% success rate on eBay (75% of all monitors listed on eBay in the last three months sold!)
- They are lightweight and easy to ship and store
- One size fits all
Niche Item #2: Plus Size Shoes
Many big-foot’s out there find it very difficult to find shoes that will fit them comfortably from regular retail stores.
Why they are a super niche item:
- While these are commonly made by popular shoe makers, stores often order only a handful of pairs in larger sizes, which means that more and more, our big-footed friends must turn to buying online to get what they need.
- They have a high success rate on eBay (women’s size 11 sell at 61.9% and men’s size 14 at 75%
- Both men and women alike can require plus size shoes (Hot tip: women’s size 11+ high heels could make a great little niche)
Niche Item #3: Plus Size Maternity Wear
Another plus-size item with huge success on eBay
It’s a profitable niche because:
- Maternity and baby gear always works because people are always going to have babies, so you’ll never run out of customers!
- Clothing items are easy to ship as they light and not fragile.
Niche Item #4: Military Insignia
Collectibles always make great niches and you can dig really deep to find the best ones. They are also perfect for people who are interested in them – you’ll find it much easier and much more rewarding when you sell something you enjoy. To really niche it up, go for US military insignia from the Vietnam War which is big on eBay.
Why military insignia makes an excellent niche:
- It rarely dates or goes out of fashion
- There are so many sub-niches to discover like Russian war medals and World War 2 helmets.
Niche Item #5: Antique Clocks
Another great collectible item
They are a first-rate niche because:
- You’ll appeal to both collectors and home decorators
- They have an eBay success rate of over 67%
- You can often pick these up very cheaply from flea markets and yard sales, then sell them on to make a profit
Niche items really are the way to go for newbie sellers and there are so many out there to keep you interested and best of all, make you money!
April 26th, 2010 in
eBay |
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For the past few months I have been posting a link to my eBay products on Twitter… simply copy your item URL.. then use a URL shortener like Tinyurl.com – to reduce the length of the URL. Go to your Twitter account and give a brief description of the item and paste your Tinyurl link. If you have a counter on your eBay listing – you will actually see the hits accumulate just moments after you post your Tweet.
I thought this was happening because I have a few thousand Twitter followers and assumed it was my followers checking out my items. However, my wife has only a handful of followers and posts links to her products on Etsy. She is experiencing high hit counts as well with basically no followers. Obviously Google or another search engine is picking up these Tweets (and quickly to!). My advice: start a Twitter account to post your products… don’t even worry about accumulating followers quickly.
April 6th, 2010 in
Twitter |
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