Making Money Online, Google Adsense & Online Auctions

Selling On Ebay

Posted on 22nd November 2009

Copyright 2005 Richard Grady

As some of you know, I spent many years buying and selling both on and offline and several of my products are based upon my own experience in this area. I know that the vast majority of my customers and subscribers have an interest in trading whether it be on eBay or at the local market but more and more I am seeing people with completely unrealistic expectations of what they will be able to do. Most commonly these unrealistic expectations are in respect of how much it actually costs to purchase specific products and what they can then be sold on for.

I regularly get emails from people who want to know where they can purchase products such as mobile (cell) phones, new release DVDs, Playstation games and similar at, say, a 50% discount to resell on eBay. The fact is that such a thing is not available - it is a simple case of supply and demand and competition.

Take DVDs for example, most people think that these are excellent products to resell on eBay because they are very popular, not particularly expensive and easy to package and ship. Unfortunately, they could not be more wrong. The DVD market is one of the most competitive that there is - take a look for yourself and see how many auctions there are on eBay for DVDs at any one time. I have just looked and counted almost 300,000! At any one time there will only be a certain number of buyers wanting to purchase a particular DVD and if you take into account the numerous different places there are that each buyer could purchase from, it is likely that in general, there will be more copies of an individual DVD available than there are buyers to purchase them. This situation causes prices to fall. The other factor that forces prices down is the fact that one DVD is the same as another. By this I mean that from a buyers point of view, there is no difference to a new DVD purchased on eBay to one which is purchased from their local DVD store. Often the only way to differentiate is on price and of course, the only way to make the price more attractive to a buyer is to lower it.

The above reasons help to explain why the wholesale discount on a new release DVD is just £1 or £2 at most ($2 or $3 roughly in the US). When you take into account the fact that the large retail chains can purchase thousands of DVDs at a time and receive a bigger discount than individual traders, you soon see why it is very difficult for a small business to compete in such a competitive industry. You simply cannot purchase new release DVDs at 50% discount and even if you could, it wouldn't be long before prices were forced down as there is always someone willing to sell a little bit cheaper than the next man.

It isn't just DVDs that fall into this category. Take mobile (cell) phones. Here in the UK you can walk down just about any high street and get the latest phones either free or for a minimal token payment. The stores are relying on making their money from the line rental contract that you will have to sign in order to get the phone. Of course, the actual cost of the phone is not free - most new mobiles are actually worth £200 or £300 which means that if you want to buy a batch of phones at wholesale, you are going to be looking at a pretty high unit cost. As with most electrical products, the market is competitive and prices have been forced down which means that the difference between your wholesale buying price and your retail selling price is minimal.

There are numerous products that suffer from the same market conditions as DVDs and phones and new/small traders really should avoid trying to sell such items at all costs because it will usually be frustrating and ultimately not financially rewarding. When trying to decide what products to sell, you need to be thinking about the type of market that a particular product is sold in. If there are already numerous sellers and many large companies selling at considerable discounts this is far from ideal. The exception to the rule is if you are able to add value in some way to make your 'offering' more unique. I wrote about adding value last year in one of my newsletters - you can read it here: http://www.thetraderonline.com/jul2204.html

At the end of the day, it is all about research, being realistic and having an understanding of the market that you want to operate in. Whilst it would be great to be able to buy and sell new release DVDs (or whatever) all day long, doubling your money every time, I am afraid that this is just not going to happen.

About the author:

Richard Grady has been helping ordinary people earn online since 1998. He writes a free newsletter which is published every two weeks. To subscribe (and claim your free gifts), visit: http://www.thetraderonline.com/newsletter.html

E-Business Strategies

Posted on 22nd November 2009

Though there are a number of e-commerce web solutions in the market, what makes your e-commerce venture stand out from the thousands of other such ventures on the Internet and fetch you a high Return on Investment is your e-business strategy. If you have your e-business strategy neatly defined, it would be easier for you to choose your customized e-commerce solution.

Depending upon your ebusiness strategy, website developers develop for you
e-commerce web solutions that suit your business best. Choose a developer who has plenty of experience as an ebusiness solution provider in developing successful e-commerce websites that include sites geared towards selling specific Products or Services, Dating sites, Auction sites, Social Networking sites, to name a few.

A good e-commerce web site design would provide: (1) a 'Unified Storefront' that is a well-displayed showcase of products (2) a 'Shopping Cart System' where you place your selected products (3) a system that integrates your online data transactions and e commerce payment solutions with your existing accounting system and (4) a fine-tuned Search option to locate just the kind of product you want.

A successful e-commerce web site design should have an intuitive and user-friendly control panel enables administrators to manage the webstore and sales — whether it's membership, product or service purchases. It should have a system for keeping records of returning customer profiles, allowing them to retrieve and re-order from previous orders, speeding up the process.

E-commerce web development should also focus on database driven website design to allow business websites the ability to create additional value for their users and add functionality that retains customers. It provides an easy mechanism for collecting information about customers.
For developing a profitable e business auction site, there are a set of vitally important power-packed options and tools you should have. For instance, your should have a full Admin Area to exercise complete control over the web-site (2) Multiple Payment Modules (3) the option to run your site as Private Or Public Site and (4) a complete Auction Interface.
Besides, there is a complete strategy working behind it to make your presence felt in the huge auction marketplace even if you are running not a whole auction site but say an e-Bay store. And impressive eBay web design can double sales in incredibly short period of time. You need a professional eBay Stores Designer who would help you create a successful store right from the logo and layout to setting up categories and sub categories and advise you on the proper text and keywords to use in your SEO eBay store.
Orient InfoSolutions is a leading IT solutions provider that specializes in creating customized e-commerce solutions for you based on sound e-business strategy. It provides flexible e-commerce web solutions to setup and run an online business with real-time credit card processing and secure online transactions. The solutions are engineered in a way to serve as your very own ebusiness strategist. You can visit OrientInfoSolutions.com for some indepth and comprehensive information of highly effective e-commerce web solutions.

About the author:
Ben Stewart

Higher Paying Adsense

Posted on 22nd November 2009

There are no guarantees in life, so I don't guarantee that following these tips will bring you more money every time. However, I do guarantee that they will greatly increase your chances of pulling more of the top-paying AdSense ads to your site than if you don't follow these suggestions.

Enough with the disclaimers, let's get down to the business of making money. Google lets advertisers bid anywhere from a minimum of .05 per click right up to a whopping $100. It should be pretty obvious that you're not going to get rich running .05 cent ads on your site, but getting a few $100 ads, or even some $10, $20, or $30 ads can't be a bad thing, right?

Now the problem is, Google is pretty closed-mouthed about who is paying what for their ads, and there is no real way to determine which words pay the most per AdSense click.

But ah, far away in a parallel universe we find another Pay-Per-Click provider called Overture. It seems that Overture is less sensitive about releasing their top-priced words and anyone who cares to find out what web sites are paying for words and phrases can do so by simply using Overtures tattle-tale special pricing tool (http://www.pixelfast.com/overture/). And it couldn't be easier to use. You simply type in a key word or phrase and the tool returns a list of advertisers using that word and how much they are paying. It even shows you the actual ad.

Oh what a treasure trove of wealth-grabbing results this can be if you know what can be done with that priceless information.

Consider this possibility

Any key word or phrase that's worth big bucks on Overture is probably worth big bucks on Google as well, maybe even more, right? So try this experiment:

Enter the phrase ''SEO Services'' without the quotes in the Overture tool (http://www.pixelfast.com/overture/). When I entered that phrase on the day I wrote this article, I was found a company called SEO Inc. that was willing to pay $8.01 per click, followed by SEO Advantage at $8.00, and Online Web Consultants at $6.50. Other bidders appeared below them in the $3.00 range straight on down to some who wouldn't pay more than a dime per click.

Now, if a company is willing to pay that much money for a click on Overture, it is probably willing to pay that or more on Google. Even if that particular company isn't advertising on Google, you can be pretty sure that the same key phrase is drawing near the same bid price from other companies who do advertise on Google. So what that means is there is no way that you can possibly afford NOT to have some web pages posted somewhere that are targeted to those sweet-paying words.

All you have to do is use Overture's pricing tool to find the highest-paying key words that are related to your site and then optimize those words to start pulling similar ads. If all goes to plan, you can perhaps double, triple, or even quadruple your AdSense revenue without needing any increase in traffic or click-through rate.

About the author:
Diane provides marketing and internet profit tips.
For more Google AdSense tips, visit http://www.adsense.deeljeabiz.com
Email : deeljeabiz@gmail.com