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Making money on eBay requires a little bit more than finding something to sell and posting it on the auction site. You’ve got to know how to make your listing stand out and encourage people to click on it.

With up to 19 million items listed on eBay at any given time, finding the exact item you want isn’t always easy. Sometimes you have to sift through hundreds of items before you’re able to find the exact item you’re looking for.

Because of this many buyers, particularly the experienced ones, skim over the listings, never actually clicking into an auction listing unless they know for sure it contains the item they want.

Furthermore, search results and category listings all look very much the same. You can use various listing upgrades such as bold or border, but the problem with that is that everybody else has those same options available to them as well.

As such, you want to do everything you can to make sure someone looking through the listings knows exactly what it is that you have, AND that you do what you can to make your listing stand out.

Using a Gallery Image to Make Your Listing Stand Out

Part of making your listing “pop” out at viewers is having a good descriptive auction title that reads well. But there is another, very important thing you should almost always have, and that is a gallery image.

By having a gallery image a buyer can see what it is that you’re selling and therefore leave no doubt as to whether or not that’s the item they’re looking for. That way, a buyer doesn’t have to waste time (something they aren’t likely to do) to click into your auction to make sure your item really is what they are looking for.

Be sure to use your best photo, one that shows important detail and doesn’t waste space showing unimportant things like your fuzzy carpet or trumpet case. The buyer is interested in the trumpet, not the case!

The gallery image is also a perfect opportunity to make your listing stand out from the others. Run a search on eBay for anything you want. Do you notice how all the listings look very much the same? Most of the time you’ll notice that everybody (especially in any electronics category) is using the same stock photo of the product. Use a gallery image that will stand out from the others!

Other Listing Upgrades

eBay has several listing upgrades available. These include bold, highlight, frame, and subtitles. In deciding whether or not to use any of these upgrades, remember that the idea is to make your auction stand out from the others. There are times when using a listing upgrade can actually cause your listing to be less noticeable.

If a lot of sellers are using a particular listing upgrade, and your auction listing is surrounded by these auctions, then your auction will simply blend in if you are using the same listing upgrade. You’ll actually stand out more by not using a particular listing upgrade if all the other sellers around you are.

However, the only way to know for sure whether using a particular listing upgrade is beneficial to you or not is through in other words, you’ve got to give it a try. And trying is often the hardest step for most people. Just remember, you won’t make money on eBay unless you try.

PowerSellerPros (http://www.powersellerpros.com) offers free advice about how to make money on eBay. Art Gib is a freelance writer.

The Internet is such a big place that it is becoming increasingly critical to ensure that your website collects visitor’s contact details.

Why? Because the alternative is that visitors click into your site, have a look around, think “hmmmm that’s interesting, I think I might come back later and find out more when I’ve got a bit more time”. Then they click away and they are gone… forever.

While they might intend to come back, they forget, they lose the website address, they forget to write your url down and so on. If you want each and every potential visitor to your site to become a potential client, then you need to capture their contact details and then keep in touch with them so they don’t forget about you.

The easiest way of doing that is to give something away for free on your website.

You might give them something physical like a voucher or some samples or alternatively you might give them something non-physical like an entry in a competition to win something or something digital like a recording, an e-book or a report. Digital and non-physical items are the best because they don’t cost you anything whereas a physical item does.

Regardless of whether is it is a physical product or service you are giving them or something non-physical which has perceived value, the client need to feel as if whatever you are offering is of high enough value to them for them to give you their name, email address and/or phone number.

You also need to ensure that whatever it is you are giving away is going to be of interest to your client. Giving away an e-book on ‘making more money’ isn’t necessarily going to be of interest to a client who came to your site looking for someone who does waxing in their local area. However an e-book on ‘How to have smooth, hair-free legs in 14 minutes’ might be!

Let’s say for example you are a holistic therapist and all these new people are calling up or going onto your website to check out what specific types of massage you do and how much it all is. You have potential clients who are right there on your website right now, interested in the Reiki, Reflexology and Indian Head Massage treatments that you offer. What now? How do you translate those website visits and those enquiries into cash? What can tip the scales to turn those visitors into revenue or profit?

Well, what about offering them a free download of relaxation recording that they can listen to before their appointment with you? Or a guide how to let the stress ooze away after work?

Whatever you decide to give away, it needs to be relevant to your business and what those clients are looking for. It also needs to be good value for their time. If your potential clients are taking the time to enter their details and read or listen to whatever it is you’ve given them, they need to feel as if it was worth their time afterwards.

Then when they start to receive communications or newsletters from you letting them know your latest offers, they will think back to the great freebie you gave them and think “yes, I really ought to book a massage”.

This is where it comes back to truly understanding that the market has evolved from the days when all that was required to build a successful business was the odd advert in the local paper. That still works for some types of clientele but for most, we need to focus on getting those client’s contact details and then building a relationship with them through our newsletters and marketing until they are in the right place in their lives to book or buy.

And your website is a great place to start. Take a look at it today and see whether it is capturing potential client’s details for you or if those visitors are drifting away and eventually purchasing or booking elsewhere.

Rebecca Kepple specializes in helping business owners massively increase their client base and profits. To get instant access to her free insider secrets report ‘The Top 7 Secrets for Massively Increasing Your Client Base’ visit: http://www.wellbeingbusinesssecrets.com/freereport.

As it name implies, in Endorsement Marketing you look to market your products through someone that endorses them. The steps you need to follow in this kind of marketing are:

1. Find an ezine or a non-competing web site that reaches your target market in big numbers
2. Contact the ezine’s publisher or the web site’s owner, and offer to send them your product for their evaluation
3. Offer to pay them for marketing your product to their audience
4. If you have an Affiliate Program, offer them to join as an affiliate, and receive commissions for people that sign under them

There are a couple of things you need to make endorsement marketing really work, like:

1. Your endorsement marketing partner must really like your product
2. It must have access to a large number of your target market
3. They must write an article about your product that includes:
4. All the benefits you can offer
5. Testimonies from your partner and other people
6. A special offer for their customers that they won’t find anywhere else
7. A rock solid guarantee
8. Your partner must have a very good rapport with their customers. If people love and trust him, they will accept his advice and buy your product

If they have it, their advice will be ten times more convincing than an ad or an article written by you.
You can’t even come close to the credibility they will have with their audience.

How To Find Your Endorsement Marketing Partners?

The more endorsers or supper affiliates you get, the more quickly your sales will sky rocket, but how can you find them? The first thing you will need is a program named Alexa that you can download from: alexa dot com

Alexa will integrate with your browser and provide you on statistics about the sites your visit, and among them will tell you how many visits that site receives. Any site that scores over 250 visits it’s worth approaching to make him your affiliate partner, and those with over 20,000 visits will be unapproachable (too difficult to convince)

Another tool you can use is Ixquick that you can find at: ixquick dot com Make a list of the most popular keywords related with your site and look for them at Ixquick. Ixquick will display results based on the top 10 positions in the major search engines. It will put a star for every top 10 position in one of the major engines. Once you found popular sites related with yours, you need to find motivated sites that might be good endorsement marketing affiliates to have, and for this you can use the Pay Per Click Search Engines.

On the Pay Per Click Search Engines, webmasters must outbid each other to obtain top listings to your most popular keywords. Those that rank high are motivated, and serious and might be partners. There are many Pay Per Click Search Engines, but the most important are:

1. Google
2. Yahoo
3. 7Search
4. FindWhat
5. eBay

And you should also try to locate targeted e-zines and for that you can enter your site’s keywords at: Bestezines dot com and at dominis dot com

How To Find Your Competitor’s Affiliates

An affiliate to one of your competitors, might be a good prospect to offer him a second income stream through endorsement marketingo of your product. The first thing you need to find is Affiliate Program competitors and you can find them at The Associate Programs Directory: AssociatePrograms dot com and refer-it dot com

Once you find them go to AltaVista dot com and write: link:competitor.com - host:competitor.com. This will search for all the links that point to link:competitor.com minus those that link to him from himself -host:competitor.com Do this search for all your major competitors and you’ll discover their most active affiliates

Once you find your ideal partner for endorsement marketing, you will need to contact him, and you will find that the most interesting ones will be harder to contact, because they receive many low quality offers, so you will need to cross the believe barrier.

If you can do it phone your contact and you will distinguish yourself from most of your competitors. Study their site and/or newsletter and make a valid comment about them, and add an in context mention of your product and/or proposal.

The best thing you can do is to personalize your letter with that person’s name, and if you can’t take it from his site or e-zine you can look for it at: betterwhois dot com here you can find the name and the phone!

Bottom line: How to avoid the recycle bin? Put yourself into your “might be endorsement marketing partner’s” shoes and think what kind of proposal you might consider as interesting.

Author of THE SECRET of The Magic Lamp and it’s 42 Self Help CD with Subliminal Messages, that can be found at http://www.drbonomi.com and also author of The Easy Home Business Web Site at http://www.easy-home-business.com

Everybody who surf’s the internet has at one time or another run into Adsense ads. Nowadays they seem to be on just about every website out there. We have them to if you haven’t noticed. If your wondering why they’re so popular it’s because they work and they’re easy to set up. And it might just be that you could use them too.

Of course many websites run by bigger companies have the ability to actually sell their ad space themselves but for smaller businesses on a tight budget using something like Adsense is a good way to go. In fact it has proven so popular that there have been a number of books written on the subject. Our goal here is to just give you the basics of the program. If you want more information you can use our search engine and type in Adsense.

Its starts with a website. You need to already have a published website to sign up for the program. It doesn’t though need to be a finished website. But you do need to have some pages published that have some sort of content that lets visitors know what the website is going to be.

I recommend waiting until the site is about half way done and it contains relevant content to what you are building. The reason for this is that once you sign up Adsense needs to be able to review the site for content. They of course do not want their ads appearing on inappropriate websites. Publishing areas that are meant to contain text can help with this more than adding all your photos would.

Okay so you’ve got the begginings of your website published or you already have one and are prepared to make some changes. The next step is to sign up. If you don’t already have a regular Adsense account you’ll be asked to create one before you can sign up for Adsense.

They’ll ask you for an email address which does not have to be an Adsense one. Once that is out of the way you can sign up for Adsense and submit your website address. Now comes the hard part, you have to sit back and wait. Probably for three or four days maybe more. And even though they will be checking out your website you can keep working on it.

Okay now assuming you’ve been approved and most websites have no reason not to be we’ll move on to the next part. Now Adsense will walk you through what to do. It’s a fairly easy process that will have you ready in no time. Once you’ve gone through their set up process you’ll be ready to post some ads. During setup you will need to be prepared to fill out a quick tax form as you do have to pay taxes on your earnings. You’ll also need to provide a bank account for them to send your payment unless you prefer to receive a check in the mail.

Once your setup is complete you’ll be ready to create some ads. Now you do need to realize that you do not get to pick who’s ad is displayed. What happens instead is your website is constantly checked for content. They search the content and use keywords so that Adsense can send you ads that will be relevant to your site. Using our website as an example we obviously get sent ads that are business related. So based on what kind of website you’ve put together you should receive mostly relevant ads.

The final step depends on who is resposible for editing your site. Our website is run by our own staff and we have the ability to not only edit our content but also the ads we display. We can pick both the size of the ad and where we want to place it on any given page. So if you do your own editing then this can be a very easy process for you.

There are two basic types of ads, text and image. You can also do a rotating ad that alternates between the two. They have some basic sizes to pick from and you can set up as many styles of ad as you like. For each page of your website you’re allowed up to three ads that can be any size. Once you’ve created the type of ad you need you’ll be provided with the link to it.

The link itself is html code that has been written for you. Once you see the code it’s as simple as copy and paste. If you pay for professional website design then the code can be provided to your webmaster for them to put it in. But it’s basically that simple they write the code for you you copy it and paste it into the appropriate area. Once you publish the page you’ll be able to see the ads, but only on the actual website not in any kind of preview mode that your website buildng program may have.

Now the final question is how do you make money? It’s pretty simple, your paid for impressions. Basically every time someone views a web page you get an impression. Once you reach 1,000 impressions you’ve earned some money. How much I can’t say as it varies. But this information should allow you to get started.

Cash Miller is an experienced entrepreneur and speaker who has spent over a decade as a small business owner. His years of experience in small business cover many topics. For more information visit Small Business Resources or go to http://www.SmallBusinessDelivered.com

If you are new to owning and operating your own website you may or may not have heard of the term affiliate program as it applies to websites. It’s actually a pretty easy concept. It basically is getting paid for providing leads and sales to other websites. To further explain I’ll briefly describe the process.

I own a website that sells DVD’s and you own a website that sells music CD’s. Now since we have similiar businesses but are not directly competing you ask if I would be willing to put an ad with a link in it to your website. In that ad is a tracking code that tells you when a customer comes from my website. Next we’ll say you have a thirty day trial program for your customers that my referral signs up for and that maybe you received a second referral from my website that buys a product on your website. So how do I get paid? One way is for the referral that you received when the customer signed up for the free trial and the other is when the customer actually purchased a product from you.

Now the payments for such referrals vary depending on what the advertiser wants to pay. But there are multiple companies from every industry offering up affiliate programs so you can to some degree pick and choose what ads to display. Some companies offer better commissions than others in the same industry. Who you choose to sponser is up to you.

So how do you go about becoming an affiliate? There are a couple of ways. One is to check websites that you would like to be an affiliate with and see if they already have an affiliate program in place. Some websites owned by larger companies have their own programs that they run themselves. They will have sign up forms available that you can fill out. But you need to realize that they will want to review your website to make sure it has appropriate content and that it is not a direct rival to their own. It may take awhile for them to review your site so be patient and they will eventually get to you. If you are still in the process of designing your website make sure you have enough finished and published for them to see what your site is about.

The other way to find websites that you’d like to be an affiliate of is to join a site like Commission Junction. They act as a middle man lining up websites that want to expand their advertising with people looking to place ads on their own websites. It costs you nothing and you’ll find a large selection of advertisers to choose from. This allows you to choose advertisers that are more appropriate to your own website. They’ll also tell you what the commissions being paid by that company are.

So once you’ve decided to become an affiliate how do you place ads on your site. It’s all copy and paste. The advertiser is responsible for providing a selection of ads for you to choose from. They’ll vary in size and shape and you can pick what is most appropriate for you. You can place as many ads as you like on as many pages of your site as you want. It’s all up to you. Within each ad is a tracking code that allows that customer to be tracked so that you can be paid.

So if you’re interested in making some extra money from your website you might want to consider becoming an affiliate and offering up some space to place some advertising. It could be really beneficial to your bank account.

Cash Miller is an experienced entrepreneur and speaker who has spent over a decade as a small business owner. His years of experience in small business cover many topics. For more information visit Small Business Resources or go to http://www.SmallBusinessDelivered.com

There are several sellers on eBay that know how to spot products that are undervalued, purchase those products, then resell them later at a higher price either back on eBay or on another site that allows sellers to sell, such as Amazon.com or possibly even Craigslist or Google Base. The key to success with this method is to have spent enough time on eBay or done enough research with a tool like Terapeak that you’ll be able to tell which products represent a “good deal” vs. a “bad deal”.

Here’s an example of one of the types of products that you can do this with and how you can do it. Take something that will be relatively popular such as an iPod, cell phone (pick a popular model), or handheld gaming device. I usually pick things that are easy to ship so that when I get them in, I’ll be able to ship them back out with USPS Priority which also gives me free shipping materials.

In the case of handheld gaming devices, such as the Sony PSP, you often find that people selling their PSP are also selling several games or UMD movies that have come along with the base PSP. Once you know the approximate sales price of the Sony PSP on eBay or Amazon, you’ll be able to target searches on eBay for Sony PSPs for sale and make your buying decision based on that going rate. Always purchase from someone with established feedback and review carefully the product description so you know what you’re getting.

The search I do on eBay for the handheld gaming devices is the name of the unit (in this case Sony PSP) along with the keyword “bundle” then add as many other qualifiers as you want to get to where you have the exact search you’re looking for. You can also put in qualifiers such as a price between two numbers and also the option for “buy it now” which will typically give you some of the best deals out there.

People post things for sale all the time with a “buy it now” option simply because they want to sell something fast. They’ll put down what they believe is an acceptable price for them and it is often much lower than the true value as determined by the eBay marketplace.

Once you find that you are the owner of this new Sony PSP core unit along with a handful of games or UMD movies, you can then part these items out and resell them separately or take some of the more valuable games and resell them separately leaving a “bundled” item still in tact. These items can be resold on eBay, Amazon or another venue such as Craigslist.

Again, the key to success with this process is really knowing the average selling costs and also becoming a better observer of items that represent a good deal or not. If you stay too broad or spread out in your research, you may not achieve the level of expertise with one item that will allow you to make money consistently on eBay. Focus on the popular products and you’ll do just fine with this strategy.

Brian Armstrong is a full time internet business coach. He mentors students on creating a full time income using the internet. His primary focus is in the internet business opportunity arena and focuses primarily on large transactions that generate signficant income.