Yikes, it’s been a busy week. Already I’ve fallen behind on my intention to post to this every one or two days. Oh well. Always room for improvement, right?

Over the past year I’ve been reading about internet marketing, subscribing to newsletters, collecting electronic books, article packs, software, shortcuts, tips, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.  Because I’m working on a 6 year old laptop, I bought an external drive just so I’d be able to store all this stuff.  If you’ve spent any time at all in the pursuit of internet riches, you understand what I’m talking about. A lot of the stuff I have, I got from marketing “giveaways,” an opportunity for me to get ebooks and software. The marketers get my email address in return, and that generally means I’m added to a new mailing list and presented with more offers, both for free stuff and items for sale.

I have seen many of the items I received for free offered for sale on other sites. That is a big factor in my decision to focus on selling ebooks on ebay. Other reasons are that I can set up an ebay store and get started while I work on building a web site.

Throughout this year of research and procrastination, I’ve looked at a number of different ways that money is being made on the internet. Let me tell you about them.

Affiliate markting was probably the first method I researched after the ebay fiasco I told you about last time. My friend had purchased Rosalind Gardner’s The Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other People’s Stuff Online. Pretty heady stuff. I went through making notes, noting pages, determined to learn it all. I signed up at Clickbank and came face-to-face with indecision. There are thousands of products to choose from to promote, and I was overwhelmed. Then came the realization that I would need to put up a website, figure out advertising, and build a list. Okay, so maybe there’s something else out there that can start me out a little simpler…

I think Google Adword marketing was the next concept. Hmm, spend a couple of nickles to place an ad, send eager buyers to somebody else’s web site, and get paid. Still an affiliate method, but no website. Then another friend told me of her experience with adwords.

She bought a highly-touted how-to book, and then was convinced by the seller to upgrade to a ready-made website selling this same product. She already knew it was going to be a very popular product (all the gurus said so), and all she had to do was follow the instructions in the book and she’d soon be on her way to wealth. She got her domain name, and her site was installed for her on the seller’s recommended server, she signed up with google and placed her ads, and she was ready for business. Long story short, she made one sale, spent a bunch on adwords (the marketer hadn’t told her that she should stick to just having her ads on the search pages, not on individual advertiser’s pages. It turned into a very expensive lesson for her, and she could get no help from the marketer. Lucky for me, she shared the experience, and I have to admit that I’m a little afraid of adwords now. Best move on to something else.

The other side of adwords is adsense. These are the ads that appear on individual pages. The person who owns the website gets paid from google for putting the ads up, and google charges the advertiser for placing the ad on appropriate pages. The web owner must be sure to put useful content on her pages to get folks to visit the site. Nobody knows, but Google, exactly how much they pay for these ads. While I was gaining some knowledge and starting to feel like it might be time to learn this website building stuff, it was apparent that in order to make any significant money doing this, one would have to have a lot of sites going. I just wasn’t ready to commit to buying a whole bunch of domain names and hosting accounts to get started with this business model.

Along the way, in my search, I found a number of other schemes and methods. The problem is that they all come down to getting traffic to your site. An offer of a free, loaded with product web business already built for me does not good if I can’t get people to come to the site and buy stuff.

So here I am, back to ebay. I’m sorting through the ebooks I’ve accumulated, picking out a few to get listed. I need to start an ebay store and figure out the best delivery method for getting the books to the folks who buy them. And, as I said above, I am finally building a web site.

So off I go for today. I’ve downloaded a new free website builder, and my next task is to watch the videos showing me how to use the thing. Actually, I’m excited about this product. It’s from Ewen Chia, one of the top internet marketers. You can look at it here. He does have an offer for sale (that’s called the up-sell), but you don’t have to pay anything for the website builder itself. And it comes with a few bonuses.

About a year ago, a friend and I attended one of those “make a bajillion dollars on the web” seminars. It was advertised in the newspaper, one of those full-paged ads with the eBay logo prominently displayed. Since both of us were looking for a way to make a little extra money, and it was free, it seemed like a good idea to attend.

Patty makes jewelry, and she had sold a few things on eBay. I was recently retired as an attorney specializing in computer law, but had no experience outside that particular aspect of the internet. I’m not sure that I had any idea of internet marketing other than having made a few on-line purchases from retailers like amazon.com. I certainly had no idea of the extent of the on-line marketing world.

We made our reservations, marked our calendars, and eventually set off for our conference. It was all new to me, so I had to rely on my friend to tell me whether there was anything of value. She said there was, in fact, new and good information given along with the sales pitch for the company’s services, so we decided to attend the next day’s class, offered for a mere $45 each. Again, we learned some new stuff, but this time the sales pitch was much stronger. I didn’t listen closely, because I knew I wasn’t going to spend any more money. I think the program cost some $3,ooo-$4,000, for which you’d receive help setting up a web page and get an “exclusive” list of wholesalers and drop shippers who would supply you with wondrous things the buyers at eBay were panting for. There were a number of people waiting with their credit cards in hand at the sales table when we left.

Patty and discussed the offer, but neither of us felt comfortable spending that kind of money. Besides, we figured that being reasonably bright individuals, we would be able to find the information we needed by doing some research and starting our businesses on our own with a much smaller investment. Patty had spent some time looking at on-line business models, and she pointed out that there were lots of folks making lots of money in lots of different ways, and that we could certainly join their ranks.

So I started doing research. And more research. And some more research. Part of the motivation is due to my training as a lawyer; research is what we do. And a big part of it is the sheer amount of information available, particularly in the internet marketing field. It seems there must be thousands, or even millions, of internet marketers developing programs and newsletters to sell their stuff to other internet marketers. I learned that I had to get into the affiliate marketing field. Oh, wait, I need to buy and sell stuff with resale rights. Oops, no, I should learn about adwords. No, no, no, the easiest way to make money is to put up adsense sights.

As is true for so many so-called newbies, I was looking for the quick fix, the fastest way to build my online empire and join the ranks of the millionaires. I was absolutely certain that this latest program/system/ebook would have me throwing money into the bank at any astonishing rate in only a few days, weeks at most. It must be this $297 system, or that $97 ebook, or this other $37 script. Not a bunch of money in the grand scheme of things, certainly not with the prospect of all that cash flowing to me, but my accountant assures me that I have a plenty of cost-of-doing-business expense to put against my first taxable income, once I settle on that big-time revenue generator!

After all this time and research, I am back to the beginning, once again looking to operating an eBay business. I have decided that selling ebooks on eBay is where I’m going to focus my efforts. And it is that decision that led me to starting this blog.

It is my intention to document my journey as I try to reach my goal of becoming an eBay PowerSeller. I will share with you what I learn along the way, what tools and products I find to be the most useful, what actually sells, and what is a waste of time. I still believe there’s a great deal of money to be made on this worldwideweb, and I believe there are many people in my circumstance, trying to figure this all out.

You’ll also see changes to this blog, as I figure out WordPress.

Some of the stuff I recommend will be free, some will require that you spend a few dollars. I still believe there’s money to be made more through work than through spending a bunch of money. And for full disclosure, some of what I recommend will be a product with which I am affiliated, with a possibility that I will be paid for the recommendation, but I’ll tell you that.

So please check back often. And please let me know if the information is helpful to you. If there’s something I haven’t mentioned, be sure to ask about it. I probably have an ebook about it on my hard drive or have subscribed to a newsletter on the subject.

 Judi

P.S. I almost forgot to tell you the ending to the story of that first eBay seminar.

A week or so after the meeting, I received a call from a nice young man, wanting to know how I liked the information presented, wondering if I was going to follow their recommendations about getting into the eBay business. I told him that I was still looking at stuff and deciding what it was I wanted to do. He thanked me and said he’d check back, just in case their company could help. He did call a couple more times, always very polite and conversational, with no heavy sell at all (my radar twitches and then my back goes up when somebody tries to “SELL” me. I’ve been in the business, I know techniques, and I refuse to listen to anyone trying to manipulate me like that). He mentioned that he’d like to have his supervisor talk with me about goals, etc., and I figured, what the heck, I’d see what this was about. Well, the supervisor was all Salesman. I pictured him with oily hair and a shiny suit. He explained that I really needed their help if I was ever going to make anything of myself, that they’d help me open a bunch of credit card accounts so I could pay their $18,000 fee, and then started yelling at me when I told him I was not going to buy anything from him. It was the most obnoxious sales call I’ve ever had leveled at me. What is particularly distressing is that they must be successful at conning people out of that much money. I’d tell you the name of the company, but I threw away everything that had to do with them. The moral here is to be very careful of these kinds of schemes. I can say unequivocally that the cost of getting into any internet business is nowhere near that kind of investment.