Posted by SydneyJohnston at 3:09 PM | TrackBack

April 26, 2007

eBay Selling: New eBay Ruling Allows Video Links From Your Auctions

On April 16th, eBay announced they would now allow sellers to link to videos that promote their auction listings. They've got some examples for us to see:

Buy Pete's Awesome Martin Guitar
Trevor's Dancing Saturn Car
Copy Room Stapler
Vintage Lego Men
You Will Love G4
Buy Abbey's Bike

Some of these are quite fuuny - I especially like Pete's guitar and the copy room stapler.

Note: you CAN'T embed your videos in your auctions - which I've been doing for quite some time now! Darn it! I'll have to quit doing that, apparently, which I'm not pleased about. Videos have to be in Flash format and eBay has selected these sites as their hosting partners: YouTube, Google, MySpace, Microsoft, and AOL.

The Rules For Linking To Videos

Here are eBay's video rules:

* Links to a video in the listing provided they comply with the following requirements:
o The video must conform to all eBay policies, including but not limited to:
+ The seller must be the owner of the underlying rights, including intellectual property rights, or authorized to distribute it by the owners of such rights.
+ The video may not solicit unsafe payment methods such as Western Union.
o The video may not include software that harms or interferes with the viewer’s machine (for example, a virus or spyware), uses it for malicious or unauthorized purposes, or violates the buyer’s privacy.
o The video must deliver the content in flash animation format and be hosted by a site that takes strong measures to provide safe content that does not contain malware. To attempt to safeguard eBay members, sellers may only link to the following websites to host video: YouTube, MySpace, Google, AOL and Microsoft.

Non-permitted links include, but are not limited to:

* Links to websites or pages that offer to trade, sell or purchase goods or services outside of eBay. This applies whether it is a static URL or an active link.
* Links to sites that solicit eBay User IDs, passwords or email addresses from buyers
* Links that encourage buyers to place their eBay bids through a site other than eBay
* Links or other connections to live chat systems
* Links to subscribe to newsletters or mailing lists hosted outside-of-eBay

Videos & Reality 101

With these new linking rules, eBay is simply acknowledging a reality on the Internet - video is here and is not ever leaving. The future of Net sales lies, at least partly, with video. Righ now, video is a novelty - sort of. Soon, though, videos will be expected and sites without them will be behind in the Net selling game. This applies to eBay, too. How soon will this happen? We're seeing the first stirrings now, with such developments as eBay video linking and sites like Free IQ.

How do YOU learn about video? The best way I know is with the guidance of Jim Edwards and Mike Stewart. Thanks to them, we have videos all over out sites and plan on making many, many more.

http://video.auction-genius-course.com

Posted by SydneyJohnston at 2:50 PM | TrackBack

April 23, 2007

Free IQ: Join Free IQ While It's Still In Beta

If you have any interest - at all - in making money on the Internet, you need to join Free IQ - and join it now. What is Free IQ? It's hard to say. It calls itself "The Marketplace For Ideas". But it's a sort of youtube and Clickbank combination- and much more. It is promoting Net marketing - no consumer products - and currently lists all kind of freebie stuff, like videos, ebooks and e-courses. Naturally, it also sells products but you don't have to buy anything to profit from hanging out.

It's set up like a search engine - the free stuff on the left and the "for sale" items on the right.

Why You Should Become a Member

According to the CEO, Brad Fallon:

"As a registered member, you can write reviews, save your favorites, and even upload your own content. Plus, you can create your own web site on Free IQ. You can upload your photo, bio and all of your videos, audios and ebooks. You can even create your own web site navigation and categories and manage your own web site on Free IQ."

What Does It Cost To Join?

Nada, nothing. Based on its name, I presume it will stay that way although who knows where this intriguing program will go in the future.

Two Reasons Why You Should Become An Affiliate

Reason #1: You can make money as an affiliate. According to their affiliate agreement: "if you refer a person to Free IQ and they sign up a free account, then that person is signed up as your customer; you'll be paid an affiliate commission for any purchase that person makes for an entire year—with or without a tracking cookie!"

They even have a two tier Content Provider agreement (Content Providers are folks who post their own material for sale at Free IQ): "If you refer a Content Provider who sells premium media products on Free IQ, you'll receive affiliate commission on any sales made by that content provider for an entire year. And that's on two tiers also, meaning that if the Content Provider you referred refers other Affiliates or other Content Providers, then you'll receive affiliate commissions for any sales they make, as well—also for an entire year."

In fact, this is the best affiliate agreement we've ever seen:

http://iqaffiliate.auctionknowhow.com

Reason #2: affiliates get access to phone calls, webinars, etc., that the average user doesn't receive. For example, tomorrow, Tuesday, April 28, there's a phone call with a marketer who

"... alerted some of his customers about a product that he was an affiliate for. {He} made such a massive amount of money starting 11 minutes later that he had to change PayPal accounts so PayPal wouldn't shut him down."

Very cool.

If You Have Content To Sell, Join & Post Today!

Naturally, if you have content to sell that's related to Net marketing, you should post immediately. Nothing is certain in life (well, not much anyway) but we think Free IQ is almost guaranteed to succeed.

Why Free IQ Is Almost Certain To Be A Success

The first, of course, is that Brad Fallon is the CEO. Most of you have most likely heard of Brad. He and Andy Jenkins are the owners of Stomp The Search Engines and now the very successful StomperNet program. Brad just doesn't have a lot of failure in his life.

Secondly, they already have more than 30 full-time people, including programming and development, QA testing, design and usability, content acquisition and support, technical support, training, and administration. Obviously, they're very committed to the success of Free IQ.

According to Brad: "We'll be archiving all of training materials by topic and skill level. So whether you're brand new to internet marketing or a seasoned expert, we'll have what you need, when you need it.

Home Page: http://freeiq.auctionknowhow.com

Affiliate (details): http://iqaffiliate.auctionknowhow.com

Affiliate (join): http://joinaffiliate.auctionknowhow.com

Posted by SydneyJohnston at 2:41 PM | TrackBack

April 20, 2007

AuctionGeniusWealthPlan.com

If you want to change your financial situation in life, the first problem you MUST solve is cash flow! I solved that problem for myself with eBay.

But ... once you can pay your bills, you will most likely start thinking about wealth. What's the difference? To me, wealth is money that comes in without my constant participation & effort. Yep, lots of cash flows in but I have to keep working to make that happen. So I've been looking for ways to get that money coming in while I go on vacation. About six months worth of vacation.

I solved my problem with the Auction Genius Wealth Plan and we just opened our new "doors", so to speak. And I had a professional designer do a book cover for me. What a change from my past pitiful efforts. :-)

If you haven't seen this and would like to get a FREE copy, please do.

Posted by SydneyJohnston at 2:57 PM | TrackBack

April 17, 2007

MSN Ad Center: Learn How To Use MSN's Ad Center

"Do you need more traffic to your websites and auctions?"

Of course, I included the picture above because the question is so absurd. We ALL want more qualified potential customers looking at whatever we have to sell, no matter how well we're already doing.

One major source of traffic on the Net is the pay per click search engines. I admit to NOT being an expert on this subject and the only one I've actually tried is Google AdWords. However, I recently decided to give the new Microsoft AdCenter a whirl and was delighted to receive an offer from Jeremy Palmer, author of "Quit Your Day Job". Jeremy is one of those super affiliates and drives traffic to his goodies via the new kid on the block - the MSN Ad Center. What I like about pay per click is the ...

SPEED! SPEED! SPEED!

I love getting free search engine traffic but it truly does take time. So a good strategy is to set up a site to get traffic from the search engines - AND EBAY - but use pay per clicks in the early days of a site. Up till now, I've only used AdWords but have recently been looking in the direction of Yahoo Publisher Network and MSN.

So ... it was timely when a friend offered his free video on MSN. Here's some of what I learned:

* I have an intense interest in autopilot. I learned some cool ways to more easily manage my MSN campaigns
* Keyword & bidding tips
* How your traffic can be highly targeted
* How MSN is different from Google - and from Yahoo, naturally, although I don't know Yahoo at all, either
* Best of all, he offers a live demo that shows how to use the MSN Ad Center

What I think I will like the most about the MSN ads: we can link directly to an affiliate site without building our own pages. We can't do that at Google, anymore.

If you want to see the free class and get the $50 credit, go here:

http://msn.auctionknowhow.com

Points to note:

* The offer is only good to customers in the United States
* The $50 credit only extends to new Microsoft AdCenter accounts

But while the offer is only good for new US-based customers, everybody will benefit from the free training.

http://msn.auctionknowhow.com

Posted by SydneyJohnston at 2:49 PM | TrackBack

April 14, 2007

Keyword Avalanche: 4 Reasons Why You Might Want To Invest $1

I don't hang out on public discussion boards. Especially those on eBay. If you want to get depressed in a BIG hurry, hang out and read the negativity and griping that goes on. You will feel your energy decline by the second!. Recently Perry Marshall said:

"You know what I hate about online discussion forums? Too many boneheads bellyaching and moaning instead of solving real problems ..."

Amen, Perry. So I only participate on four forums - and one of them belongs to Keyword Avalanche. Here are a few of the reasons that I like the Keyword Avalanche site:

1. One of the instructor/partners is a military captain named Tim Gorman. Quite simply, Tim is THE best article marketer I know. I use articles heavily in our business and I've learned so much from Tim that my process is much more effective. At this time, he doesn't have any courses, eBooks, etc. - you can only learn from him inside KA. I'm going to meet him at the Systems Seminar in a couple of weeks and I'm really looking forward to it. Tim has a full time job in the army - and still has created a part time Net business earning $20,000 a month. No tricks, no 'black hat' search engine tactics, no sneaky stuff. He's doing things the right way and being richly rewarded for it. Gotta admire that.

2. You get credits for Nichebot. If you're not familiar with Nichebot (nichebot.com), it's one of only two keyword tools I use to play the search engine game that Brad Fallon & Andy Jenkins have taught me. I love the keyword research - which is too involved to explain here - and I also love the ROI tool. This is, of course, Return On Investment and it works like this ...

The ROI Tool

+ Total Clicks: (Total monthly clicks from publisher)

Let's say you've chosen a keyword that costs $.12 and you set a limit of $1.20/day, or 10 clicks. Using the standard of 30 days in a month, you would then receive 300 clicks.

+ CPC: ( Estimated average cost-per-click)

+ Conversion rate: let's assume, for this example, that your conversion rate is 5%

+ Profit: you're selling an ebook for $9.95

Would this be a worthwhile campaign? Judge for yourself ...

This handy dandy little tool has saved me from a lot of mistakes.

3. There are currently 254 videos on every possible topic you can think of, like how to FTP, set up webhosting, email accounts and autoresponders, copywriting, setting up a sales page, testing, ezines, keyword research, ebooks, pdf, blogs, shopping carts, feeds, easy & instant web design tricks, traffic, getting links, and ... whew, you get the idea.

4. There are a ton of freebies, including articles & templates each and every month. They also negotiate discounts on many of the latest software and info products. I've learned to never buy anything without checking on KA first.

There is lots more but this is what I personally use the most. Your interests might be different and you will find other items to be more valuable. But the good news is that you can check all this out for one measly dollar!

http://onedollar.auctionknowhow.com

This is a protected area, not available to the public, and you need the information below to access it:

Username: kashe
Password: vault

Keyword Avalanche is NOT accepting new members at this time and won't allow any new members until August, 2007 so you have to go in this back door - or wait till the end of summer.

http://onedollar.auctionknowhow.com

Username: kashe
Password: vault

Posted by SydneyJohnston at 2:24 PM | TrackBack

April 11, 2007

"kalpesh m." Is A Plagiarizier & Content Thief

Someone named "kalpesh m." blatantly stole one of my articles and placed it online:

"His" article (ha!)
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976952440

My original article:
http://ezinearticles.com/index.php?12-Items-You-CANT-Sell-On-EBay&id=65391

I found out about this because of the honest and decent staff at gather.com who took the trouble to inform me. Thanks gather.com - you're righeous dudes!

Posted by SydneyJohnston at 4:15 PM | TrackBack

April 8, 2007

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter, planet earth!

If only the message of hope that Easter signifies would sink into the consciousness of our hate-filled world! Perhaps there would then be genuine change.

Posted by SydneyJohnston at 11:27 AM | TrackBack

April 6, 2007

An Outdoor Bench & Dogwood Winter

I recently order a new outdoor bench called the Lutyens and it's incredibly cool:

My new outdoor bench

Then "dogwood winter" has appeared in the southland. In case you're not a southerner, you might be wondering what in the world I'm talking about ...

"Similar to blackberry winter a dogwood winter is a term used by Southerners to describe a period of cold weather that coincides with the blooming of the local dogwoods.

Typically the trees bloom sometime between mid-April and mid-May (depending on the weather variations of the season) and such a cold spell is often the last winter-like weather of the season."

We definitely have blooming dogwoods here in GA. So, using my new bench may not be a possibility right now but that horrible heat will be here soon enough.

Posted by SydneyJohnston at 10:50 AM | TrackBack

April 4, 2007

What To Sell On eBay: A "Popemobile"

If you're wondering what to sell on eBay, consider the used car of a pope. Back in May of 2005, there were 8,500,000 hits to an auction of a Volkswagen Golf that was formerly owned by Pope Benedict XVI. The car was won by the Golden Palace casino for €188,938.88. The Golden Palace has achieved a certain notoriety just for buying weird stuff like a haunted picture and the famous cheese sandwich.

Now this Volkswagen is for sale again, so if you're interested in a famous car here's your chance. Curently, there are 65 bids and the current price is US $202,700.00, which hasn't met the reserve. Personally, the fact that somebody famous has used or owned an item means nothing to me, but I know that isn't true for many people. Perhaps this is one of those famous 'pieces of history'?

Auction for a 1999 Volkswagen Golf

The most interesting part of this auction is that the seller is protecting the auction from publicity seekers by allowing pre-approved bidders only. Wise move.

Posted by SydneyJohnston at 11:12 AM | TrackBack

April 1, 2007

Golf Cart Accessories Create A Custom Golf Cart

Last week it was 84 here in Atlanta (In March? Global warming is only a myth. Ha!) When the weather gets warm all the passionate golfers head out to the fairways. Wondering if golf carts & golf cart accessories sell on eBay, I checked out the completed listings, and sure enough - golf carts certainly do sell, even when parts of the country still have snow on the ground.

What goes into making a custom golf cart? Here are a few ideas ...

1. Replace your golf cart seat with a new leather one or use some kind of fancy fabric.

2. Wheel rims

3. Steering wheel

4. Paint and/or decals

When creating a custom golf cart, you don't want it to look like a pimpmobile, so be restrained and keep your accessories within the boundaries of good taste. After all, golf is a fairly conservative game and your fellow golfers won't appreciate golf cart accessories that are loud and garish. So choose a theme and have all your accessories fit within those parameters.

Posted by SydneyJohnston at 1:52 AM | TrackBack