So you’ve got the buyer in front of your auction, and they’ve read the description. They’re must be interested, or they wouldn’t be looking… but just how can you push them over that line and make them leave a bid? Read on for some tips.

Improve your picture: In all that description writing, you might have missed the vital importance of your item’s picture. A picture with bad lighting or an intrusive background looks amateurish and won’t make anyone want to buy from you.

Add an About Me page: You’ll be surprised how much you can reassure bidders just by creating an About Me page and putting a little bit about yourself on your business on there. You can also have a few special offers there for people who bother to look at the page, and let people subscribe to your mailing list so that you can email them updates.

Use SquareTrade: Signing up at SquareTrade and displaying their logo on your auctions shows that you are committed to have them resolve any disputes that arise. You always see this on PowerSellers auctions - it makes you look more professional.

Write terms and conditions: Have the ’small print’ clearly visible on all your auctions, giving details of things like shipping times and prices, your refund policy, and any other business practices you might have. This helps build confidence with buyers.

Show off your feedback: Copy and paste a selection of the feedback comments you’re most proud of to each item’s description page, instead of making bidders go and look for it. If you have 100% positive feedback, be sure to write that on every auction too.

Add NR to your titles: If you have extra space in a title, put ‘NR’ (no reserve) on the end. Bidders prefer auctions that don’t have a reserve price, and doing this lets them see that yours don’t.

Benefits not features: Make sure your description focuses on the benefits that your item can give to the customer, not just its features. This is a classic sales technique. If you have trouble with this, remember: ‘cheap’ is a feature, ’save money’ is a benefit.

List more items: If you want more people to respond to your items, then list more items! You might find you have better like listing items at the same time, instead of one-by-one. There’s no need to use a Dutch auction - you can just keep two or three auctions going at once for an item you have more than one of in stock.

Accept unusual payment methods: To reach those last few buyers, accept payment methods that many sellers don’t, like cheques.

Buy some upgrades: The best upgrade is the most expensive one, which makes your item appear first in search results. In crowded categories, you might find that this is worth the money.

Once you’ve got some buyers, you want to keep them coming back to you. The next email will show you how to turn one-time buyers into long-term customers.

Have you noticed that whenever you open a newspaper, watch the TV or have a conversation, people seem to be talking about eBay? If you’ve never used it and you’ve no idea what it’s all about, then the chances are that you’re starting to feel a little left out. But don’t worry! This email contains everything you need to know about the basics of bidding and buying on eBay.

So What is eBay?

eBay is an online auction website - and not just any auction site, but the biggest one in the world. If you know how an auction works, then you already know how roughly eBay works. Someone adds something they want to sell to the site, and then buyers come along and place bids on it. The highest bid wins the item! It’s that simple.

eBay being an online auction makes a big difference, though. Buying and selling are not reserved for any elite. eBay accept almost any item, no matter how small, and will then advertise it on their sites all over the world. It’s a powerful combination of an auction and a slightly chaotic marketplace.

What is Bidding?

Bidding is when you say how much you will pay for an item in an auction. Bidding on eBay, however, doesn’t work in exactly the same way as a normal auction, at least in theory. On eBay, you tell the site what the maximum you are willing to pay for each item is, and then eBay places the bids on your behalf. That means you could say you were willing to pay up to $100 for something and only have to pay $50, if that was the highest maximum bid anyone else placed.

It’s not as complicated as it sounds - the best way to get used to it is to give it a try. First, the best thing to do is to go to the eBay website designed for your country. If you don’t know the address for it, just go to www.ebay.com and it will tell you there. Now, on the front page you should see a big box marked ’search’: just type in anything that you’d like to buy there.

Wasn’t that easy? Now you should have a list of items for sale in front of you, along with how much people are currently bidding for them and the time when bidding ends for each item. If you click one of these, you can read the description, and then - if you’re happy with the item and happy to pay more than the current highest bidder is - you can bid!

How Do I Bid?

Go ahead and scroll down to the bottom of an item’s description page, and type the maximum you are willing to pay (your maximum bid) into the box. Then simply press the ‘place bid’ button - you will need to sign in once you press the button, or go through a quick registration process if you don’t have an eBay username).

If someone else’s maximum bid on that item is higher than yours, then eBay will tell you and give you the opportunity to bid again. Otherwise, you’re now the new highest bidder! All you need to do now is wait until the end of the auction - if someone else outbids you, then eBay will email you and you can bid again.

All sounds great, doesn’t it? But by now you might be wondering whether a site as chaotic as eBay can really be all that safe to buy from. That’s why the next email in this series will be about your rights when you buy from eBay.

I read a lot of internet marketing articles, how-to based type of information so I can pass it on to you as well as make myself a better online marketer and home based business owner. However, I was amused by an article I read recently by Jeffrey Hauser, “The Internet - The Lazy Way To Make Millions.”

In this article Hauser really blasted internet marketers! I didn’t agree with his opinion of “a disturbing trend…people who grab cheap domain names and spending a few bucks to slap together a template based site.” Or “a teen with WAY too much time on their hands.”

I guess Hauser never heard of Ashley Qualls, the Michigan 17-year old who has made over a million dollars this year with just a small investment, the price of a domain name. In all fairness I know there are some people who get into this business just for the quick buck, but I disagree with Hauser’s belief that you have to spend a lot of money to make any kind of income online. That’s just not true.

There are lots of free tools and techniques that you can use to optimize your blog or your website. Ashley Qualls followed the rules of SEO, found her target audience and gave them what they were looking for.

So, if you want to make money from your blog or website, here’s some free tools to get you started:

1. Improve Your Search Engine Rankings
2. Find The Keywords You Need To Succeed Online
3. Earn Money From Relevant Ads On Your Website With Adsense
4. Increase Your Web Hits
5. ProBlogger

Hint: In the article I wrote about Ashley Qualls, she stated that she spends seven hours or more a day working on her website.

MORE BLOGGING TIPS

Its been quite a long while since the creation of blogs. Now, if you’ve been actively surfing the web, you should realized that the numbers of blogs are increasing drastically. Many sites that you’ve surfed are blogs. Did you wonder why is it that so many people are using blogs as their official site or platform for their business?

If you have a blog for whatever purposes, then you will know that blog is a very easy to create kind of website, and search engines like them. So why is this so? Suppose that a complicated website is much more important than a simple site like blogs. But then the search engine crawler likes blogs more. This is because blogs are constantly updated, all the information in the blog is updated often. Another good benefit of blogs over a website is that every post in a blog will becomes a page. Therefore, after some time, blogs can become a site which have more hundreds of pages, some can even grow into thousand of pages.

This is just one of the advantages of blogs over ordinary websites. Before this, blogs are just work as some kind of diaries. But with the advancement of technology and with enough time given, now blogs can be use for almost every purposes. Nowadays, a lot of marketers use blogs as a platform of their business. They can post and announce their updates on the products or services offer to their customers. Besides that, blog is very easy to use, and it is a very good platform to handle customer relationship. Since blog is more friendly, it can help marketers to build up their business relation more easily using blogs.

Besides that, if you really put effort on your blogs, it can convert sales better than websites. Why? Because blog is more friendly, and when you post something about some products, readers will tend to treat you as their friends and listen to your advice. This is also one of the reason why review sites can work so great when talking about giving reviews on a certain products or services. When we want to buy something, we will definitely ask for our friends and family advices first. If there are no comments from them, then we will look up on the internet for reviews. This is when your blogs come into play. Your blog will work as friend and give reviews to your readers. Just be sure that your advices given true and not simply for the sake of wanting to have better sales.

As you can see now, blogs really can works better than a website if it is fully developed. So, why don’t you start a blog right now, and when the time comes, you can just follow the wave and make money out of your blog. You can create a blog in less than 3 minutes, it is easy and it is fast. But the problem is that many bloggers do not have a proper steps how they can make money from their blogs.

MORE BLOGGIN GTIPS

This article is not intended to provide you with a host of blogging tips, but simply to guide those of you who have either just started or have been blogging for a while but have some bad habits.

Bad blogging habits are easy to get into, and one of the worst is to leave your ‘About’ page unchanged. You know the page: it is provided by Wordpress as standard and a whole host of bloggers leave it unchanged. Why they do this is known only to them, because this is the first page that a large number of first-time visitors to a blog check out, and the reason why many of them leave without looking further.

All you have to do is to say a little about yourself, who you are, and what your blog is about, why you feel qualified to write a blog about this topic and how you can be contacted. If your blog covers a particular niche, rather than being simply a log of personal comments, then your potential readers will want to know why they should believe what you say by reading your credentials on the subject.

There is nothing wrong with having a personal blog about your personal thoughts on things, but if you are presenting yourself as a form of expert on a specific topic, then you will have to persuade readers that you have a right to do so. You should use your ‘About’ page to do that.

Another tip you should take is to claim your blog with Technorati. This registers it as yours with Technorati, and you can get a whole load more visitors. Since joining Technorati most of my blogs’ traffic rocketed. It takes a while for new blogs to get going, but it’s a lot easier if you make use of sites such as Technorati. The same is true of most of the social bookmarking sites if traffic is important to you. If you are using a blog to promote a product, then this is essential.

If you have a website then don’t get lazy and be content to run your blog from a hosting site such as wordpress.com. It is better to download the software from wordpress.org, and host your own blog. You have much more control over the look and feel of it, and can use any of the thousands of plugins that are available online. You can also use any template you want, or even design your own. That way you get total customization of your blog pages, and can make it more distinctive than the majority hosted on Wordpress or Blogger’s site. If you have tried and had problems downloading and installing it then send me an email. If needed I can take you through it online, or by telephone.

These are the two main tips that any blogger should take if they intend to blog seriously. However, was I to provide the third most important tip for anybody interested in blogging, then it would be to monetize your blog. Don’t blog for nothing. If your blog concerns a specific niche subject you can likely throw up one or two affiliate programs on your sidebar so that they appear with your new posts. A three column blog is useful for this, since your regular sidebar will generally be full of permanent links.

If you monetize using Adsense, a three column layout is even more essential, since you will want a vertical block down one of the columns, in addition to some at the bottom and the middle. A good Adsense layout would be a column to the left or right of the main text column containing a vertical ad unit, a horizontal link unit at the bottom of the blog, and also a horizontal ad unit at the bottom of the latest post. You could also include a search box at the top or bottom of your main sidebar that allows a search either on Google, from which you get income, or on your blog.

You could also include one of your websites as a second search option, providing three altogether. The income might not be a lot, but most blogs with a few hundred visitors a day should be able to make from $10 to $20 daily minimum, depending on the niche. All you need are a few blogs like that.

These are my three main blogging tips. Yours would likely be different, since blogging is a very personal thing, but if you take these three on board you will likely find that you will get more visitors, have more fun and also be able to put a bit put aside for the holidays or that unexpected bill that always comes at the wrong time.

MORE BLOGGING TIPS

Welcome to mail.com Blogs, the best place for you to talk about your life, your hobbies or anything that interests you. A blog is an online Journal that lets you write down and post your experiences to let the whole world know. Aside from talking about your personal life, you can also discuss or write an essay about how the world ticks.

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