Setting Realistic Goals for your eBay Business

Setting goals sometimes seems like a useless task. It would seem if you want to do something, you just get to it and finish. Though that sounds easy enough, I think there is more to it than that.

Having something to work towards is important. If everyone’s business plan, or goal, were simply, “Make More Money” most businesses would not succeed. Though you can’t practically say, “My eBay business is just like Microsoft”, I believe it is a mentality that gets us where we want to be.

Success is measured subjectively, relative to each person. For some, hitting the million dollar mark is success, while for others it is the simple fact of being able to quit their job to stay at home and have that freedom. It’s important to establish what it means to be successful for you. Don’t just think about it, write it down. Know what you want, and don’t forget it. Ideas in our head almost always seem to drift away if we don’t manifest them somehow and sometimes immediate action isn’t possible… so simply write it down.

The practical thing to do, however, when it comes to eBay, is to measure your current business, or, if you’re just starting, to know how to measure it. This means taking into account your total sales and everything that goes along with that, such as your eBay fees, Paypal fees, what percentage of auctions ended successful compared to how many items were listed and the average price each item sold for.

If this sounds overwhelming, take a step bank and look at the whole picture. If you’re an established business, it’s as simple as measuring each statistic above within any given time period. Take auctions listed each week, month, and depending on how old or young your business is, each year. If you’ve just started, each week you list, measure these statistics after each of your listings end. This way, you’ll know which items are selling well, where you can change certain aspects of your business, and, most importantly, how much profit you’re making.

One of the most important parts of measuring your business statistics is to know eBay fees. I sometimes get excited about how much I’ve sold and looking at the price on My eBay, think that I did well. Then I pay my eBay fees and realize I did not do quite as well as I had thought. If you have an accurate knowledge of eBay fees, this will increase your potential for profit.

Of course, you’re wondering what all this has to do with setting a goal for your eBay business. Pretty much everything. If you know your business inside out, you can set realistic goals that you’ll know which areas of your business to improve. Making more money as a goal, then not knowing how to get to that goal, leaves you stagnant, and, worst of all, making the same amount of money.

So, define what success is to you and write it down. Then measure every aspect of your business, whether you just finished your very first week of listings ever, or you’ve been in business for a few years, or ten years. Then use that knowledge to meet realist financial goals in accordance with your own definition of success.

A Destination for Your Back-Up

In SEO Delhi Company (e-fuzion) the key words destiny is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then you site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site. The accepted standard for a keyword density is very low in measure. To get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it. Here SEO Delhi (e-fuzion) takes very simple steps to check the density. It fist copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word processing software program like Microsoft Word. Then enter into the edit menu and click select all. Now go to the tools menu and select word count. After completing the replacing function, the words will offer a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keywords in the page. SEO Delhi Company (e-fuzion) uses the total word count for the page and the total number of key words you can now estimate with the key word destiny. To make a decision what terms you should target, you need to find out what terms are searched more regularly. SEO Delhi Company (e-fuzion) uses proposal suggestion, free work tracker service. Both of these tools are ideal for this job. This company also covered the basic outlining principles. For create a site with valuable content, products or services, it places primary and secondary key words within the first twenty five words in the page content and spread them evenly through out the document. This company uses the key words in the right fields and references within your web page. Like title, Meta Tags, Headers etc. It uses reports and analytics to see where your traffic is coming from. Evaluate the client’s location and their incoming sources whether from search engines or links from other sites and the key words they used to discover.

Affiliate Tip – Build A Website

One of the first things you should do as an affiliate marketer is to build you own website. Yes, you can market affiliate programs without it by adding links to your email or signature file on message boards, but you will be very limited in how much you can earn this way. Building a website allows you to expose the products you are promoting to a much larger audience with less effort.

Decide on a Topic

Your first step is to decide what you would like your website to be about. Find a topic you like, something you are passionate about. You will be spending a lot of time creating content for your site, so it may as well be something you enjoy reading and writing about. Your enthusiasm for the subject will shine through as well, and will get your visitors interested. Once you have your topic, make sure there are affiliate products available that compliment the site and that there are people interested in buying it.

Pick a Domain Name

Use a site like register.com, or your web host’s site to research available domain names. It helps to have one of your major keywords in your domain name. So if you decided your website will be about growing roses, try to work “rose” in the domain name. You want your domain name to be easy to remember and easy to type. Try to avoid using dashes in the name and find something that’s available as a dot com address.

Hosting

The next step is to set up a web hosting account. You should be able to get by with a basic personal website package to begin with. Get some recommendations from others when it comes to choosing the actual hosting company. You want a service that is reliable and has good customer service. After all, you won’t be making any money when you site is down. I have been using Dayana hosting for years and highly recommend them.

Site Builder or Software

Let’s talk about how you can build your website. Your options are using a site builder, like internetbasedfamilies.com or software like Microsoft FrontPage, or my favorite x-site pro. A site builder is usually easier to use in the beginning and hosting is included. You will pay a monthly fee for the software and hosting combined. If you build your site using software like x-site pro or FrontPage, you have the added initial expense of buying the software, but your monthly hosting costs are usually lower. Of course a third option is to have someone else design the site for you. You should still get familiar with the site builder or software, so you can make changes to the site.

Getting Traffic To The Site

Your last step will be getting traffic to your site. Optimize your pages for search engines to get free traffic. You can also write articles and submit them to article directories. Pay per click advertising and buying ads on other related sites or newsletters are also great ways to drive traffic to your site.

Making money online with blogs

When you think of the term blog, does it represent money to you? Do you believe that you could make money with this new craze? Well let it be known, that yes people really are generating more business to their companies and they are making money. When it comes right down to it, blogging can easily enlarge your net authority, and increase credibility and market value. Some people even claim that they are only in business because blogging has made it possible for them. They also claim that the business they have gotten has increased significantly as a result of it.

The object is to have a niche and to keep everything small; if you are looking for range of view or balance you will find yourself lost in the shuffle. The general premise of a blog is to sell an idea, anyone who makes blogs are not merely asking for money because of the blog itself, the ideas are the star of the show and the blog is merely the vessel to transport it to the clients. It is one of the best ways to gain reputation in business networking, this in turn leads to more business and finally to what you have been striving for which is profit. They are kind of like a tool that you need to transport information in short bursts, as to not confuse or overwhelm the customer. By keeping them short, many business people believe that the original message or core idea remains intact. There is thought amongst the net industry that far more intangible ideas and products are being peddled online these days, this in turn decreases paid content value, rerouting the connection between the business and the client is the primary goal.

One of the best methods to date, to generate business and profit is to employ a good blogger. Bloggers have a way of gaining trust; they also can capture the market with the use of strategic reputation. Microsoft is one of the leading employers of the blogging trend, and uses the blogs on all their sites and sales pitches. Microsoft feels that if they have multiple blogs that give small portions of information and tid-bits, of needed content they can reach a broader market and keep people informed on what they are doing in the business and any market adjustments that may come your way. If more companies go this route, you could easily see a change in the face of business. Faster communication between client and company, more precise information packets that are not stressing to understand, and an overall cleaner appearance are the goal with the blogging industry. These little vessels of information just may be here to stay.
http://www.payitforward4profits.com/rodl13

Special Rules For Selling Software On Ebay.

Computer software is one of the biggest sellers on eBay – after all, everyone using eBay has a computer, don’t they? There can be problems, however, if you try to sell certain kinds of software that eBay doesn’t allow. Used software is a minefield, and you could end up buying something dodgy to resell without even realising it.

Here are the various kinds of software that you’re not allowed to sell on eBay, and how to spot them. You should always try installing used software before you sell it, as this might give you a few clues.

Pirate Software.

This one is reasonably obvious, but pirate software can be hard to spot. The biggest things to look out for are auctions that don’t have pictures or only have pictures from catalogues, unrealistically low prices, and come with no manuals or documentation. Microsoft software comes with a ‘Certificate of Authenticity’, which you should check. Software that is on recordable media such as CD-RWs is usually pirated.

If you see software that offered for download only, it is often pirated – but not always. Some small software developers allow download licenses for their software to be resold on sites like eBay. Type the name of the software into a search engine, and go to the manufacturer’s site to check. Remember that software you download is very unlikely to come with resale rights, though.

Beta Software.

Beta software is pre-release software, issued by companies for testing purposes. Companies generally do not give permission for their beta software to be sold or redistributed, as it won’t be as good as the final product. Do not buy anything that says it is ‘beta’, and return anything you receive that says ‘beta’ or ‘not for resale or distribution’ anywhere on the CD or during the install.

Academic Software.

Some companies sell special ‘educational editions’ or ‘student licenses’ for their software, which are designed to make it affordable to students and teachers. You can only sell this software if you are a licensed educational reseller for the company, and your buyers are educational users. Academic software will usually say somewhere on its CD or in its installation what it is.

OEM Software.

OEM stands for ‘Original Equipment Manufacturer’ – this is software that is only supposed to be distributed with a new computer, as it came pre-installed on the computer. The licences for this software usually stop you from selling it without also selling any hardware. Look out for the message ‘for sale with a new computer only’, or similar. Note, though, that it’s usually fine to bundle any OEM software you come across with computers that you sell on eBay.

If you sell any kind of software that isn’t allowed, then eBay might shut down your auction, or your sellers might realise what they’ve bought and leave you bad feedback. It’s not really worth the risk.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, how about we try to get you a few more customers for the items you have that aren’t against the rules. In the next email, we’ll take a look at the real power of eBay store newsletters.

Google PR is Case Sensitive

After a little digging up, I found enough evidence to believe that…

1. Google searches are never case sensitive – as we already knew.
2. Google PR is case sensitive – as I suspected, according to web standards, URLs are case sensitive. Google and other search engines follow this standard.

There have been a few reported cases of the same pages being in Google’s index 2 or more times because they were linked to with different cases (ie.: /ABC.htm, /abc.htm, /Abc.htm) – see this post.

The root of the problem, as you may have guessed, is Microsoft’s ignorance towards web standards. Microsoft servers are set up in opposition to the web standard on case sensitivity in which /ABC.htm is different from /abc.htm. IIS ignores the case different and gives control of the request to wrong file.

My site is on a Windows Server, how bad is the problem?
Well, it’s not going to ‘bring down the internet’ as some lammers might suggest, but there are issues that need to be addressed. IIS’s choice to ignore case sensitivity means search engines (which are case sensitive) will index the exact same content for different URLs. It’s very unlikely a website would be penalized for this, but it can definitelly impair your website’s ability to rank well. It makes it specially difficult for the duplicated page to rank well for the terms it targets.

This is only an issue if there are two or more links point to the same URL in a different case. You can avoid this problem by always using lowercase in your link tags, but you can’t stop other websites linking into the same URL in capital letters – so something must be done on the server in order to deal with this issue.

How can I fix it?
I can almost picture you “URL Rewrite Junkies” jumping up and down with the solution on your hands, but as we all know, URL Rewrite is a feature only available to proper web-servers, nothing you’d expect to see in IIS.

A. Server Component (IIS alternative to URL Rewrite)
Not free, not easy to setup and can only be installed on your own server. The only upside is that this would work for all files/scripts/directories on the website.
An alternative for URL Rewrite in IIS – ISAPI Rewrite.

B. Script (and a little permanent redirection)
It’s free, it’s easy to setup and can be installed on any server, not just your own. The only downside is that you can only enforce case sensitiveness for requests that are handled by this script. This means static HTML pages, directories, images, etc would still be exposed to this issue. HOWEVER, if with a little help from a custom 404 error page you can do just about anything. But that’s a whole other topic…

Here’s how you’d enforce case sensitiveness using VB Script:

<% ' Force lowercase URLsIf Request.ServerVariables("URL")<>LCase(Request.ServerVariables("URL")) ThenResponse.Status = 301 'Permanently RedirectedResponse.AddHeader "Location", LCase(Request.ServerVariables("URL"))Response.End()End If%>

It doesn’t need to be the very first thing on every page, but in order to perform a proper permanent redirect, this has to be execute before any content is written to the response’s output stream, ie.: Before any HTML or Response.Write.

Hope this helps a few up-and-coming SEO experts (and wanna-bes)