Buy at Police Auctions and Resell on eBay

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Police auctions are a prolific source of goods that have been lost or more commonly stolen and have not been subsequently reclaimed. 

Most goods sold by the police are auctioned in local high street salerooms and promoted in the local press approximately seven to ten days before the sale.  Some amazing bargains are possible with many lots fetching around ten per cent of their possible resale value.  Goods are usually auctioned without reserve and sold to the highest bidder. 

The fact they are poorly advertised explains why few people know about police auctions and why some lots sell at a pittance and generate high profit margins on eBay.

However, you won’t find rare antiques and high class jewellery selling at most police auctions or stored in a dirty garage waiting to be reclaimed.  Expensive items are usually stored in bank vaults or in high security lock ups and displayed on police websites until their owners are found.  Valuable items are never sold off cheap!

Because many goods have been confiscated from criminals, you won’t be surprised to see police auction lots matching items commonly targeted by thieves, such as computers and jewellery, garden furniture and spare parts from cars.  Lost items are typically the kind of things people leave on buses and trains, or in parks and nightclubs, for example, and include the likes of umbrellas and purses (without money inside them), costume jewellery and toys. 

So you’re likely to find mainly low value items selling at police auctions, with market value ranging from a fiver or so to a few hundred pounds. 

Low value they might be, but for many resellers police auctions represent the bulk of their sales, including on eBay.

Now you know how they work, let us talk about turning police auctions into a profitable source of goods for your eBay business. 

These tips will help:

1.  Learn about police auctions in your area.  You’ll find them by contacting high street auctioneers listed in local telephone directories and asking if they organise sales on behalf of the police.  Write down phone numbers for auctioneers performing police auctions and telephone every few weeks for information about scheduled sales and others held at short notice.

2.  Ask to be placed on police auctioneers’ mailing lists for information about forthcoming sales.  Give saleroom staff your telephone number, as well as your email and street address.  This is because some auctioneers send details by email or telephone and others send their catalogues by post. 

3.  Make a note in your diary about auction dates and where sales will be held.  Telephone auctioneers a few days before the sale to check for changes to date or location, and to make sure items you want to buy have not been removed from the sale.

4.  Do not bid on items you have not inspected beforehand.  Many times faults and blemishes are hidden behind other auction lots, or camouflaged with lot number stickers, and you could end up buying something that looks good in the catalogue but is badly damaged and unsuitable for reselling later.

5.  Find out when viewing day is and arrive in good time to inspect lots from all angles.  The best time to view is the day before the sale or an hour before the auction begins, preferably both.  Last minute viewing will reveal damage caused to goods part way through the viewing period, as well as highlighting lots withdrawn from the sale but still showing up in the catalogue.

6.  Study the auctioneer’s terms and conditions; you’ll find them in the catalogue and displayed on a wall in the saleroom.  Many salerooms require intending bidders to register before the sale and some charge a small registration fee to deter time-wasters.  The fee is usually refundable against winning bids.

7.  Check what the rules say about paying, namely when payment is due and by what method.  Take plenty of cash because manyI will leave it as it is but there were some unusual things in. Like a silver thimble. I was think about making it £265. xx salerooms lack merchant facilities, and some salerooms refuse to hand over goods until cheques have cleared.   

Big problem: waiting seven to ten days for cheque to clear gives plenty of time for your goods to be damaged in storage, and auction companies are not obliged to compensate you for breakages or loss.

See if any constabularies in your area promote their own sales by keying something like ‘police auction Durham’ into the search box at google.com

Note: Do not pay to join sites offering information about police auctions until you have tried locating that information by yourself.  Many of those sites offer a very reliable service, at low cost, but some services are over-priced and sometimes out-of-date.  Try searching for yourself and making notes about websites listing police auction dates free of charge.   Do a search for ‘police auctions free information’ and you’ll find all the information you’ll ever need to make police auctions you main product buying source.  A similar search today took me to free information and links to sites detailing police auctions. 

In Praise of Auction Selling on eBay

I’ve always liked auction selling, more so than listing products fixed price and there are several reasons why. 

For one thing, auction is a great way to determine the value of an item you haven’t sold before and which no one else has offered recently on eBay.  That being the case you can’t do an advanced search for recent listings for similar items to see how much they fetched.  So you run an auction and let bidders say how much your product is worth. 

Another good use of auctions is to generate a bidding frenzy between two or more people placing bids much higher than they originally intended, not merely to win the product but to stop someone else having it.  Yes, it does happen, and no, I don’t know why.

Then there’s a reason that has more to do with fast turnover of goods and never having to pre-test or guess selling prices or dispose of stock at a loss.  This technique works contrary to the way most sellers source and list products on eBay, typically by buying in bulk at wholesale discounts and using a fixed price multiple product eBay listing.  Some sellers do but most sellers don’t test prices by performing several different priced offers before running long-term promotions.  And that sometimes means sellers lose out on potentially higher prices and bigger profit margins for their products.

The better way is to obtain one unit of product, on the high street if necessary, then you run an auction with a starting price matching the lowest profit you need to make after all acquisition and selling costs.  Run a ten day auction to optimise viewer and bidder numbers. 

One of three main things will happen:

(i)  No one bids and the product goes unsold.  You can check your listings for mistakes and oversights which when corrected might generate bids and sales.  If none exist you will probably drop the product and use it yourself or sell it off at a loss.

(ii)  Only one person bids and you make a tiny profit, suggesting the product is unlikely to be a regular seller. You’ll probably do another few test runs just to be sure.

(iii)  Lots of bids ensue, some much higher than your minimum acceptable profit price.  So you send the first product to your winning bidder and you submit Second Chance Offers to some or all unsuccessful bidders whose bid achieves your minimum acceptable profit.  When Second Chance Offers are accepted you obtain sufficient stock to fulfil orders, plus another couple of units to relist the product on eBay.  Use the same starting price as before and see how many bidders emerge and how far prices go.  As before, fulfil your winning bidder’s order and submit Second Chance Offers.  Rinse and repeat one more time.

After the third auction you’ll have a good idea if your product is a likely long-term regular seller, as well as knowing what the majority of people are prepared to pay for it and what level of inventory to carry without overstocking or running out of product and delaying delivery. 

From thereon you can use multiple product fixed price listings based on the optimum price from your combined auction listings, both cutting your eBay listing fees and allowing your listings to develop a sales history to help them rank higher in eBay search returns.

Learn more about Second Chance Offers at:

http://ocsnext.ebay.co.uk/ocs/sc

Tipping the Scales in 2016 and Beyond

January is never a very profitable month for me on eBay, mainly because antiques and collectibles auctions are few and far between from November to early spring, and that’s when I tend to spend less time looking for products to sell and more time looking for ways to improve my earnings on eBay. 

Today’s eLetter gives you the benefit of my findings to help grow your own profits this year on eBay. 

In no particular order:

* At a flea market last week an old selling friend told me ‘You don’t make money when you sell, you make money when you buy.’ 

He means, of course, that simply spending the majority of your time listing stuff on eBay isn’t the most important part of the money-making process, especially if like many people you buy products you think might make money when you really should focus on buying items you know will make a healthy profit. 

My friend explained it like this:

Visiting dealers at flea markets go from stall to stall, picking up anything and everything going cheap on the day and from which they expect to make a few pounds profit on eBay.  ‘People like you.’ he said, pointing to me. 

And he’s right, I do sometimes leave a fair with four or five plastic carrier bags filled with hundreds of different items, mainly postcards and ephemera, few of which have more than a passing chance of making a couple of pounds over what I paid for them. 

My friend on the other hand leaves each fair with a couple of items wrapped up in newspaper and shoved into his jacket pockets. 

My friend is selective in his buying habits and rarely buys anything offering less than fifty pounds pure profit.  He does it by inspecting just a few products at flea markets and other buying locations, like auctions and antique shops, and he selects between ten and twenty items to research for profit potential. 

My friend makes notes or takes photographs of items he wants to research and then goes to a coffee shop where he uses his mobile phone to research prices paid recently for similar items on eBay.  When there’s a clear profit to be had he makes a purchase. 

I tried following his lead at the same flea market in Gateshead Stadium.  In my case I studied and made notes about thirty or so real photographic topographical postcards - among the highest priced collectable items on eBay - and then I studied recent sales for similar items.  Ten items promised profits of ten pounds each or more and the other twenty or so would just about recoup their investment.  I bought those ten items and ignored the rest.

This same idea of buying only when you’ve researched an item’s potential resale value on eBay can be applied to virtually any product.  Go and give it a try.

* Aside from only buying products I know will make money, I’ve decided to focus more on repeat sale items than one-off affairs.  So instead of buying, say, an antique print likely to make ten or twenty pounds profit on eBay, I’m looking for original artwork since passed into the public domain, allowing me to copy those designs and sell them hundreds of times as prints and other decorative pieces. 

I might get to pay fifty pounds for my painting or other original artwork but by choosing carefully I can earn ten or twenty pounds and maybe more from reprints.  As long as the subject of the original piece appeals to a potentially unlimited audience I can sell copies indefinitely.  That potentially unlimited audience covers people interested in iconic artists like Rembrandt and Louis Wain and collectable subjects like dogs and transportation.

Other repeat sale items guaranteed to make money over the indefinite future include greetings cards (just one design can generate a full time living spread across marketplaces other than eBay, such as Amazon and Etsy); wedding favours (there’s a bottle opener reproduced from an antique key design that’s selling several times every day as a gift for male attendants at the wedding); reproduction vintage photographs (especially topographical images, such as street scenes, which I’ve personally sold in abundance), and numerous other products alongside. 

Find repeat sale products at www.goofbid.com.  Choose ‘eBay Tools’ top of the screen, then ‘eBay Most Popular Tool’ bottom right of the dropdown menu.  Next page enter a product type into the search box and GoofBid will return listings for items achieving multiple sales, sometimes thousands of sales over a couple of months.

Use some of those listings to create your own unique products based on other people’s best-selling designs but make yours better and more appealing.

*    I make a lot of my own products, things like jewellery and keyrings featuring various dog breeds, and they always sell and make a decent profit.  But twenty items is my maximum output each day and that doesn’t take into account describing and listing those items on eBay or packing and delivering them to buyers. 

Compare that to visiting art and craft fairs looking for products on display which already match those fetching regular sales and high prices on eBay and you’ll realise how anyone can buy many more items to resell than they might ever make themselves in the average working day. 

For the record, some of my highest profits have come from selling the work of local artists and craftworkers on eBay.  You’ll find fairs advertised in your local evening newspapers, usually at the weekend.

Now please go try those ideas yourself and let me know how you get on.

Time to Plan Your New Year Resolutions

New Year resolutions more or less describe things you plan to do for the first time in the early New Year or which you have already done in the past and want to do better in future.  Such as losing weight, for example, or being a better parent, starting your own business, beginning a correspondence course, and so on.

In business, resolutions might focus on developing new products and introducing innovative selling campaigns, along with performing other tasks you may have thought about in the past and didn’t develop to their maximum potential or they were dropped at the planning stage.   

So you may have enjoyed a great Christmas selling period in 2014 from products you dropped from inventory in January, 2015, and failed to restock for Christmas this year. 

Maybe you found a product other people were selling aplenty on eBay and you had an idea for making your version very different and potentially sell more units than other people are selling.  Then another product idea came along, followed by another, and another, and they all got lost in the muddle. 

Now let me suggest ways to prevent similar problems by revealing the thinking behind my own New Year resolutions and recommend ways for you to create your own plans for bigger profits and reduced workload and stress in 2016.

Here we go:

*  I’ll start by telling you about my close friend who sells on Amazon, using FBA (Fulfilment by Amazon), a process whereby he lists his products on Amazon’s site and sends goods to Amazon to take payment and fulfil orders direct to buyers. 

Having once sold exclusively on eBay, and doing very well, he decided to expand his products to Amazon where, after just a few months he says Amazon sales beat eBay by about seven sales to one every day.  More than this, using FBA he doesn’t have to pack products and submit them for delivery and he doesn’t have to deal with delivery problems or bounced payments.  Amazon does all of that for him, at a cost, but one my friend says is negligible compared to available profits. 

So my resolution is to expand my selling beyond eBay, including on Amazon and Etsy.  I’ve chosen Etsy because listings are easier and take less time to create than on eBay and feedback isn’t quite so in-your-face and damaging to a seller’s reputation than on eBay.  So I can spend less time listing similar products on Etsy than on eBay and less time worrying about negative feedback blighting my business reputation.

They’re just two of many viable and reliable selling platforms and you may find other platforms more suitable to your own requirements.  

One thing I don’t want you to do is stop selling on eBay which remains one of the most heavily visited sites of all and generates a good income for millions of sellers.  Not forgetting that eBay is the world’s biggest auction website where finishing prices can sometimes exceed all reasonable expectations.

* The 20:80 Rule, sometimes called ‘Pareto’s Theory’, suggests that, among other things, close to twenty per cent of an entrepreneur’s time is spent performing tasks that will make eighty per cent of his income and, conversely, eighty per cent of working time typically accounts for twenty per cent of income.  That suggests you could work just one-fifth (20%) of your current working week and still take home four-fifths of your current profits.  So if you normally work forty hours a week and make, say, one thousand pounds profit each week, Pareto’s Theory suggests you could make eight hundred pounds every week working just eight hours.  Or thereabouts! 

So my resolution is to determine my most profitable working hours and where I am achieving limited profits from four-fifths of my working day.  Then I’ll expand my twenty per cent of profitable tasks and reduce or eliminate proportionately lower profit tasks.

Personally, I find that vintage postcards I have cherry picked at flea markets and antiques fairs amount for the majority of my profits on eBay, while items bought at auction typically yield lower profits and demand longer hours spent listing them on eBay and fulfilling orders.  So my resolution is to spend more time and money at flea markets and antiques fairs buying vintage postcards representing subjects currently fetching the highest prices on eBay and cutting back on buying auction lots containing mainly low and medium price items.

*  A report I’ve neglected since finding it online six months or so back reveals numerous reliable statistics telling why some auctions end with higher finishing prices than others, including that bidders tend to trust PowerSellers more than ordinary sellers and that auction finishing prices tend to grow in line with a seller’s positive feedback rating.  So the more positive feedback ratings you have, the more your auctions are likely to make.

So my resolution is to grow my positive feedback rating and work very hard to avoid neutral and negative feedback and having poor feedback revised to good.

This report is an eye-opener covering more than just auction listings and the reason I haven’t read more than a snippet or two is because it’s written in statistical jargon with lots of charts requiring more than a cursory glance.  So I haven’t had time, or rather I haven’t made time to read a report I honestly believe will have a very positive effect on my eBay profits.  That is something I will correct when things slow down for me on eBay between Christmas and the middle of January.   The report is called ‘Online Auctions Efficiency: A Survey of eBay Auctions’ and you can download it at:

http://wwwconference.org/www2008/papers/pdf/p925-huA.pdf

Don’t let the early date on that report deter you because many of the findings remain just as valid today.

*  Lack of focus is the main reason people fail on eBay and other marketplaces and it’s a problem anyone can solve with a diary and pen.  You do it like this:

-  When you find products fetching high prices and regular sales for other people, you make a note of the product in your diary, along with ideas for making the product more profitable for you than for other sellers.  Spend at least half an hour developing the product by jotting down profitable ideas from other people’s listings, comparing other people’s prices to sales ratios, and so on.  Now move forward five to ten days in your diary and place a big red asterisk top of the date allocation along with the product name and the date you researched it.  This allows several days for the product idea to ferment in your mind and present itself as a workable or not so workable idea.  If the idea still sounds good, you make the second date in your diary the day you turn your product idea into reality.

Sell Corkscrews on eBay

I knew I'd found something special when a colleague who normally sells vintage postcards turned to listing corkscrews on eBay instead.  

She's someone I check out often and use as a role model because she regularly achieves high prices for her postcards.  I have learned a lot from her.  But I stood to learn - and earn - a great deal more from this new-found interest of hers: vintage corkscrews.

The very first of her offerings, a corkscrew with handle shaped like a mermaid, made over £1,000.  Others, also with novelty and ornate handles, have fetched double figures and, from my experience, they're commonly found at offline auctions and flea markets where price tags of twenty or thirty pounds are common.

Marvel at these recent eBay finishing prices: a rare 'flip out' corkscrew made from brass and resembling a flick knife made £2,051.61; an Italian stirrup shaped corkscrew went for £2750.00; a ratchet corkscrew from 1869 fetched $1812.77, not one of which were well described or blatantly unusual.

Tips to Help You Buy and Sell Corkscrews for Profit

* Corkscrews have been around since the mid-1600s but it's those from 1850 onwards that fetch the highest prices at auctions on and off the Internet.  Before the middle 1800s, most household objects were made to be used, not looked at, so they were plain, functional, not ornate and grandiose such as some appearing later and which now fetch fabulous high prices on eBay.  So, generally speaking, the more ornate and elaborate the corkscrew the higher its price is likely to be.

* That said, I've seen very plain corkscrews priced about £1 a time at flea markets fetching a fiver or more on eBay so it's worth buying anything that's genuinely old and very cheap.  'Dirty' usually suggests the item is old and because few plain corkscrews become auction best sellers you'll rarely find them faked or made to look older than they really are. They are almost always worth buying!

* The earliest designs comprised a steel spiral fixed to a wooden handle. Subsequently handles became precious works of art, made from silver or gold encrusted with diamonds or inlaid with ivory or mother of pearl.  In time the simple spiral was replaced by mechanical devices to make opening bottles easier still, some even had a small brush attached for cleaning dust from bottles.  More desirable and consequently more valuable are specimens with unusual attachments such as brush or bell cap (a metal piece to fit over the bottle neck), and sometimes containing precious jewels or painstaking artwork.

* The Victorians' love of all things new-fangled, somewhat risqué, and heavily ornate, spawned some of the most beautiful and highly prized items. They include a multitude of corkscrews sold not all that long ago on eBay, with 'Victorian' in the title and fetching forty to eighty pounds each.  All were ordinary looking with simple wooden handles and commonplace screw. Similar vintage items not labelled 'Victorian' reached lower prices. So that word 'Victorian' could double your corkscrew's value, as long as it's true!

* My research revealed antique French creations fetching two to three times their corresponding English manufacture values.

* Add something a little unusual or with separate use and corkscrew prices rise, such as a folding antique corkscrew that fetched £158.00, a French creation depicting a champagne bottle with pocket knife in the handle that made £159.99, and a UK corkscrew shaped like a lady’s legs that went for £185.00.

* The screw is sometimes called a 'worm' or 'helix' and was made from twisted wire or cast into shape.  Because corkscrews were constantly used and in regular contact with water and alcohol, the worm on older corkscrews is frequently found broken, damaged or heavily rusted.  

Rust can be cleared or reduced with oil which also helps keep moving parts in working order. Serious damage or sloppy repairs to screw or handle can render a common corkscrew almost worthless and will seriously reduce the value of most highly prized specimens.

* The most collectible corkscrews are those with ornate handles, unusual mechanisms, popular maker's name.  Popular makers include Merritt, Gaskell and Chambers, Lund Lever, Samuel Pemberton.  Precious metals add significantly to resale value. 

* A past famous owner increases value significantly and there are collectors specialising solely in items once owned by the likes of Al Capone and other gangsters alongside more respected citizens such as U.S. Presidents, well known entertainers, writers, and so on.  

Study the long list of corkscrews with past famous owners at the Virtual Corkscrew Museum: http://www.bullworks.net/virtual/signat.htm

* As for virtually any collectible, the addition of a popular theme or subject, for instance a dog or frog depiction, a sport or hobby, leads to multiple bidders from several eBay product categories and can fetch unexpectedly high prices. By far the best corkscrew-related web site I studied values a corkscrew with a rare Swedish penknife attached at £150 and another with a boy's head made from a golf ball at £170. 

A Four Letter Word That Makes Fortunes on eBay

That four letter word is 'topo', short for 'topographical', and in collecting terms it describes items having close connections to specified towns and cities. 'Topo' isn't just an abbreviation, today it's a word in its own right, and you'll hear it used hundreds of times daily at flea markets and collectors' fairs.

In context it goes like this:

"Got any topo postcards of Hartlepool (or other location)?"

"Where do you keep the Belgian topo?"

"Are these topo prints of Easington in Yorkshire or Easington, County Durham?"

And so it goes for hundreds of different product types and millions of different locations.

You'll find named locations depicted on pottery and paintings, books and badges, daggers and dog collars. But it's named places on paper that tend to attract most collectors, and the highest profits too.

Paper collectibles have other major benefits for sellers over topographical items depicted on materials like china and metal, wood and brick.

Those other items are heavy, costly to post and they take up lots of space in your home or other business premises.

But paper is usually flat and easy to store, as well as consuming very little space. Paper is easy to pack, inexpensive to post, and can often be purchased in bulk at local auctions, flea markets and boot sales.

There's another major reason why immense profits can be made on paper items costing pennies to buy and fetching high mark ups on eBay. It has to do with the fact that our ancestors (Victorian being the most popular era for paper collectibles) accumulated and kept vast amounts of paper items and those items were usually kept together for many decades until someone finally decides to sell them, usually at auction.

So it's no great surprise to find auction salesrooms packed with huge boxes and tea chests filled with paper items and fetching just a few pounds each on the day. Inside those boxes and chests you might find hundreds, even thousands of items relating to local, national and even worldwide locations.

Such items can fetch amazing prices on eBay where it isn't uncommon for one item from an auction lot to fetch more than you pay for the entire boxful.

These are some of the items to look out for:

Advertisements, advertising novelties, almanacs, banknotes, beer mats, billheads, blotters, bonds and share certificates, bookmarks, bus tickets, business cards, calendars, cheques, documents, ephemera, film posters, film programs, football programmes, funeral items, guidebooks, letters, letterheads and invoices, maps, newspapers, photographs, postcards, posters, prints, public notices, railway tickets, scrapbooks, scraps, suicide notes, theatre programmes, trade catalogues ....

... and any or all of those items can be found in those huge box lots that generally attract low bidding at auction.

The reason they fail to fetch high prices locally?

It's because of another four letter word involved in the days between buying and selling those items. That word is 'work', which few people seem to like, and most local auction buyers prefer to make big profits on one or two select items.

However, anyone prepared to work at sifting and sorting, scanning and listing all this fabulous topo stuff separately on eBay can easily make £1,000 or more every week!

A Simple, Cost-Free Way to Drive Traffic to Your eBay Listings

Here’s a great way to eliminate rivalry on eBay, an incredible way to make sure hundreds of people open your listings and buy from you without ever studying similar products listed at the site.

Imagine this: you’re selling Product A, as are hundreds of other people on eBay, and for those other sellers it’s a question of trying to make their listings stand out from the crowd when a potential buyer keys ‘Product A’ into eBay’s search box.  Just how do those sellers get buyers to choose their listings over all the others?

One way is to make their listings different, by offering lower prices and bonus gifts, for example, and that can work well for someone with hours to spare and who doesn’t mind fighting price wars for the lifetime of their products on eBay.

All you have to do, however, is make sure your listing is the only one people see when they search for ‘Product A’!  But in this case, it’s not people searching on eBay you want to capture, it’s millions more people using Google and other mainstream search engines.

The trick is to drive traffic to your listings from outside of eBay in a way that ensures only your listing appears to countless potential buyers.  The way to do that is to get your eBay product link, and only your link, to as many people as possible.

This is the sort of traffic you’re looking for:

i)  People searching for information about a specific subject but not necessarily looking for something to buy.  So they might want to know what causes acne, for example, and how to cure the condition using such as home remedies, camouflaging techniques, and more besides.  They have no particular product in mind right now.  But if they see a product along the way they’re very likely to buy it.

ii)  People on the lookout for a product to treat acne, either a specific product they know about already or something they see recommended by other sufferers, preferably people who’ve already found a cure … or know someone who has. 

Now let’s look at just one way to redirect all that traffic to your product listings, in this case for an imaginary product called ‘Acne Away’.

The way to do it is called ‘guest posting’ and simply means submitting content to someone else’s blog, preferably a high profile blog related to your product type.  The more people who visit the blog, the greater the number of people likely to read your post and the more visits will be made to your Acne Away listing. 

Guest posting is a little different to the usual way of posting on other people’s blogs where visitors typically write a short post to compliment whatever someone else has written.  Those short posts, usually at the end of the main feature can prove very profitable and drive traffic, but remember you’ll be sharing that traffic with sometimes hundreds of end-of-page blog posts. 

But most visitors encountering page end posts read the first ten or so and then move away from the blog, so you have to be quick to get your post noticed.

One way to do that is to make a list of blogs relating to your product and visit those sites daily, looking for new content and being one of the first to respond.

Now on to guest posting which demands a little more work and is potentially much more profitable.  It happens where your contribution is the main feature of the page, not just an add-on comment at the end.  Your feature might be read by thousands of daily visitors to your chosen blog.  Provide quality information and a high number of visitors are likely to click on an active link to your own website or product listing.

‘Guest’ is the operative word here, indicating you normally have to be invited to write the main blog post.  And because this form of marketing can attract massive traffic for the writer it’s also among the most difficult to achieve.  But well worth trying.  The process is typically to write to blog owners, telling them about yourself and giving ideas for a post you will write just for them.

You can increase your chance of being invited to guest blog by providing a killer review of your intended post.  I found a great article revealing fifty-two ways to do just that at:

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2011/09/03/52-types-of-blog-posts-that-are-proven-to-work/

Tip:  Look for blogs with hefty membership levels as well as ranking high in search returns and generating regular new visitors and members.  That way just one good guest post can keep you in traffic for years to come. 

Search for high profile blogs on your subject by keying ‘blog + subject’ into Google’s search box.  The biggest blogs should rank top of search returns and sometimes lead to lists of high profile blogs. 

Also key something like this into Google’s search box:

subject (e.g. acne) +  blogs + that + accept + guest + posts

My search for that term today returned three pages of workable listings.

Footnote: This idea for promoting an acne treatment works just as well for countless different product types.  Just change ‘acne’ to your own product type - such as steps for disabled dogs, pacifiers for crying babies, cream for ageing skin - and expect thousands of visitors and hundreds of buyers to your eBay listings.

Should You Clear Cheques Before Posting Goods?

I wish I had a pound for every time someone has asked me that question and that way I'd probably make more money than I've ever lost by posting goods before cheques clear - or don't clear as the case might be!

Bounced cheques can be a problem, especially for new eBay sellers who don't want to celebrate their first few sales only to find the cheques bounce for goods that have already been sent to winning bidders.

Another problem for newcomers is fearing negative feedback for not delivering goods immediately after payment arrives, even though cheques take up to seven days to clear (or to bounce!)

Thankfully, there are ways round the problem and I can honestly say I invariably send goods before payment clears and I've only ever been let down twice! For tiny amounts!

My view is that most people are honest, few will bounce cheques and for small amounts (less than £20 in my books) I always send the goods without clearing payment first. The same goes for payments awaiting clearance through PayPal.

My philosophy has always been that it's not worth making the honest majority wait for their goods just because a tiny few payments might be dishonoured. You need to keep your good customers happy and tempt them to buy from you again and nothing works better than fulfilling orders fast and trusting them to honour their side of the bargain.

That said, if a lot of money is involved or the buyer looks 'iffy', I break my own rule and let payment clear first.

With experience these are the rules I apply which you are free to copy in your business:

* Check buyer feedback, look for high feedback scores from other sellers, search for comments indicating payment disputes.

* Risk low amounts to new buyers but not if feedback already indicates a problem customer. For example, I would never send goods without clearing payment for anyone with low feedback and several derogatory comments made by sellers.  Be aware, however, no matter how dishonest the buyer and no matter how disgruntled the seller, the seller always has to leave positive feedback or no feedback at all for customers, both criminal and honest.  But you can sometimes spot warning messages made by sellers along with their forced positive feedback.

* Decide a maximum acceptable sum beyond which you will let all monies clear before sending the goods. I use £20 but I will go much higher for buyers with good feedback who have been registered on eBay for more than a few months and for anyone with whom I have already had a trouble-free transaction.

* Bear in mind banks charge you when payment fails, unlike PayPal where you won't be charged. I recommend PayPal for all your transactions.

* There is one time I don’t clear cheques before sending the goods. It's when someone buys and before the cheque arrives that person begins hassling me about delivery times or, worse still, threatens negative feedback if I don't get the product to them fast. In my experience payment from people like that has always failed.

Keyword Masterclass - Proven Ways to Generate Massive Traffic to Your eBay Listings

Your chance of achieving multiple bids and unexpected high finishing prices depends on one main thing - the title you create for your listing.

eBay says 70 per cent of members use the site's search boxes to find items they might want to buy.  But that only returns listings containing actual search keywords in the title and sub-title and ignores keywords in descriptions. The exception is where searchers tick the ‘include description’ box, which very few do.

Few sellers realise this and waste time taking great photographs and writing detailed descriptions and spending little time on keywords. Then titles that don't contain relevant keywords will be missed by 70 per cent of potential buyers.

Your title must include keywords potential buyers use to find products like yours!

This is how to do it:

* Take a pen and paper and brainstorm words potential buyers might use to describe your product.  Make a list of keywords - and phrases - to use in your titles.

* Study completed auctions for similar products, sort 'highest price first', look for common keywords in the top ranking returns.  Add those words to your list.

* Think like a buyer and imagine yourself describing the product to a friend. Add words used to your list.

* Look for sites featuring high in outside eBay search returns for companies selling products similar to yours.  Find them at Google.com where you key in words to describe your product, then click to search.  

Next click to open the first few listings.  Go to 'View' top of your screen and choose 'Source'.  A mass of gobbledegook will appear.  That is html code and somewhere you'll see keywords responsible for those sites appearing high in the rankings.  Add those words to your list.

By now you should have a long list of possible keywords.  Keep it safe because you will be using it often.

Tips

* Where you have several similar products or ongoing same product supplies, you should create different titles for each item, using different keywords each time to attract interest from eBay's search engine.

Study subsequent bidding and sales levels for your various titles to see which work best; cut poorer performing titles and replace with better performing alternatives.

* Use every millimetre of space.  Longer titles attract more interest than short ones.  Fill surplus space with power words like 'Limited Edition', 'Rare', 'Unique', 'One Day Sale', 'Stunning', 'New', 'FREE', 'New', 'Proven', 'Guarantee'. Avoid concocted words like 'Wowee' and 'Yikes' which no one searches for anyway and can make you look unprofessional.

* Spell check your title and throw in a few misspellings of vital words if space allows.  Google says that 33% of all but the most common search keywords are misspelled.  Check possible misspellings of each prime keyword at http://www.fatfingers.com.  Fatfinger listings are mistakes made by sellers but you'll find the similar misspellings used by potential buyers.  Make a separate list of misspelled words to add to your title.

* Use acceptable, commonly used, well-recognised abbreviations, like 'PC' and 'P/C' for postcards, 'nr' and 'n/r' for 'no reserve', 'hb' and 'h/b' for 'hardback’.

So now you know how to get your listings in front of potentially thousands of buyers and you’ve made sure your listings are opened and attract bids that will make you the envy of your competitors.

Well done.