Making Money on eBay - Online Marketing continues

The trick to making money on eBay is to continue your online marketing regardless.

Long time, no blog.

When we last left our hero, he was head-down/bum-up figuring out eBay and selling on this.

Some basics distilled during this:

1. eBay is a silo and they don't want you selling outside their site. Simple.
2. The big money is being able to sell outside your eBay site. (Although you can make millions yearly selling on eBay itself.)
3. eBay, then, is great for test marketing and perfecting your sales pitch -- at least to shoppers and buyers.

Now, the bloom is off the rose with my work at Bright Builders. Had considerable problem with their "BrightLister" program. Found a free service from Auctiva which will schedule my sales and also host my images for free. Bright Builders has some excellent resources on their subscription site. But their main scene is selling you ecommerce hosting.

After BrightLister quit working (it was multiple scheduling for me so that I was adding to my own competition), I also found that their pricing is just average for the industry. I can get my domain names cheaper and hook them up myself. If you are a geek like me, then you know how to do all this ecommerce stuff without having to pay someone $30-60 per month on top of their training fee.

And you do get a version of HammerTap - which is the key vital tool to the whole thing. HammerTap alone is nearly that cost above. However, if you're already paying for the other, then you don't need to pay twice. It is the BrightLister failure which really set me down this line.

That training fee is what's keeping me going. Essentially, it comes down to having access to their training site and also biweekly conferences. You might say that the amount of conferences - about 12 - come to nearly $500 per 15-minute period.

Worth it if you don't know anything, and frustrating if you do.

Jury is still out on what to do with all this.

But I am really motivated to pay off that training fee and all my other bills.

Turns out I only need a few sales every week to replace my 20-hour week day job. Something like $30 per day - which would be 6 sales of $5 items. Today I've gotten four so far.

Plan is to get around 18-24 regular sellers, which would then get me around $1K per week. This pays off my bills within this year. I then convert over to a corporation and save my taxes for the year. More money, more problems...

Now that is about 90 CD's per week - but I'll be getting these dropshipped and only need to send off that many emails per week, just a few hours' work. Not bad. If I spend 20 hours per week sending emails, then I'm 5xing my income and having to work at something I like (better) and not have to break my back or put up with all sorts of inane nonsense during that time.

So - even despite the above, it's working - I'm on my way...

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Update: 10/18/08

What Bright Builders (brightbuilders.com) promised never materialized. Their training has some roots in Napoleon Hill, but the missed the one point he covers in Law of Success - which is to over-deliver and ensure the value of your contribution out is greater than the income you derive from that service.

I was surprised that after 24 weeks, my training was over and I was no closer to making that $6K back than when I started.

A full rundown of how you can get that same training and tools they offer for free is found in more detail at http://tinyurl.com/666jlr