Even if the thought of learning how to build a web page makes you go pale and increases your heart rate, it is something you’re going to have to do. Even if you could afford to pay someone else to do, you’d still need to know the basics so you can take care of your own business (could you afford to wait until your programmer had the time to take care of a broken link, while you’re losing sales?).

Before you get to that, though, you need to get (buy) a domain name (what your website is called, i.e., www.judimehrens.com is my domain name). There are a bunch of companies out there willing to take care of that for you, and you can google “domain names” to find them. I use www.godaddy.com, mainly because it’s one I heard about a lot from marketers. I’m not sure what any major differences would be between the various companies, but it’s easily researched.

Now you need someone to host your website with your domain name. The one I’m using is www.hosting4marketing.com. The price for the basic service ($6.95 per month) is competitive, and their tech service is phenomenal.

I have been told that having your domain name and web hosting all with the same company is not advisable. I’m not sure why, but the advice came from many sources, so I won’t question it.

Another bit of advice is that, if you’re serious about building an online business, you must stay away from free web hosting. You’ll get a jumbled domain name (i.e., www.freehostingcompany.yourname.com or somesuch), and you’ll have advertising on your page that you don’t necessarily want. The big thing is that it looks unprofessional. Anyone who’s been on the web for awhile will see what it is and wonder about your commitment to the business. Think of it as the equivalent of trying to find a brick-an-mortar store and finding that it’s only a mailbox service.

Now, to the actual building of your site. You don’t need to take a course in computer language (html, or hyper-text markup language), although you will need to learn a bit about it to be able to recognize some code and how to insert a few lines here and there. However, that can come a little later. There are now tools that allow you to use the same skills you use when you’re working with Microsoft Word. They’re called wysiwyg (wizzywig) for “what you see is what you get.” One that is free and easy to use is Nvu, and if you google that term you can find the download for it as well as tutorials on how to use it. A nice thing with nvu is that it has its own tool to upload your pages to your site. Otherwise, you’ll need an FTP (file transfer protocol) tool, also available for free and with a lot of free information on how to use it. Filezilla is quite easy to use.

I know there seems to be a lot of stuff here, but it all just takes a bit of using and practice. There are millions of web sites - some good some not - but all of those folks figured it out, so you certainly can! Just work at it a bit, know that you’re not going to get it right the first time and that it’ll take awhile. And know that it is a necessary part of growing your business.

It’s been a very busy few days since my last post as I try to get set up to start my listings on eBay. The tasks are tedious, especially when you’re in a hurry and don’t properly think things out.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen hundreds of emails and promotions promising that selling ebooks on eBay is just about the easiest way to start earning some online money. They obviously mean that it’s easy after you get everything set up; getting to that point isn’t necessarily hard or ultra-technical, but there’s definitely a lot of work.

Let me tell you what I’ve been doing - and what’s still on the list.

First off, I’ve been going through the books I have to be sure that: 1) they’re any good, that they offer some value, and that they’re written by someone with at least a passing knowledge of grammar and spelling; 2) that they include a clear statement that I have the right to sell them, and that I can sell them on eBay; and 3) that there’s an image of the cover of the book, or at least a graphic on the front page I can copy.  After I got my folder set up with my web page, I got them uploaded.

Then, each one needed to have a thank you page. I’ve touched on this before. The primary reason, at this point in my online career, to sell these books on ebay is to gather names and emails to build a list. A list is what eventually will give you an income. So, the thank you letter has the link to download the book, a signup block with an offer of a free book, and an advertisement for an affiliate program.

This also means that I have to have my autoresponder set up with a “thank you for signing up, here’s the link to your gift” message.

I also need to make an images folder, where I copy the pictures of the ebook covers, so I can include those in the eBay listings. They’ll also need to be uploaded to my web server so I can include another photo on the sales page and not have to pay eBay for the extra picture.

I need to build my about me page for ebay, where I’ll have another signup form, with the free book offer. I should be able to use the autoresponder message I already have for this, although many marketers will say it should be different so it can be tracked. Right now I just want the sign-up; when things heat up I’ll worry about tracking.

Now I’ll need to load up everything in eBay’s turbolister product. From there I’ll be able to schedule the auctions to start automatically. Another bunch of tedium to eventually save me time. Then all that will get put into the automated delivery system.

My web page needs a little tweaking, since I’m trying to get people to visit it, again to get the signup. It’s okay, but pretty boring right now. Also, I found some books that have great content about selling on eBay, but my rights don’t include being able to actually sell them on eBay. This is sometimes done to be sure the value of the book doesn’t get diminished. I imagine it’s a bit disconcerting to see a book you’ve worked hard on being sold for a penny! But they are good products, so I’ll want them on my web page, which means the sales letter and paypal button to collect the money. And a thank you page with a signup bonus offer.

And, of course, along the way I’ve found that I need to redo things. My first thank you letter invited customers to sign up, but without the incentive of a free book. Got that fixed (by redoing them all) and decided that with some of the books I was selling, it wasn’t really appropriate to offer a free book on ebook selling, so I have to redo the bonus.

Have to admit, I got a little down in the mouth at the realization that I’d screwed up an afternoon’s work. But you pull yourself up and start over - admittedly, after taking an afternoon off to read something totally unrelated to commerce and to eat some chocolate.

My goal is to have at least a few auctions going by the middle of the week. That will put it at about a month and a half since I started this blog and started getting serious about doing all this. It probably could have been done more quickly, but I do very much want to get it right. I did read somewhere, in what was supposed to be inspirational, that I shouldn’t worry about right, it was the doing that was important. But that doesn’t make any sense to me. I’d much prefer taking a bit more time to get it as right as I can for now than have to re-do even more stuff.

I spent the afternoon Sunday getting my stuff in order, and it made a huge difference to what I was able to get done yesterday. Not only could I be sure I could put my hands on what I needed, but I felt more focused. I believe it’s because that nag in the back of my brain about getting straightened away has finally gone away.

At the end of a long day yesterday, this is what I got done:

Finished a template for my thank you/download page for ebay sales. It includes the download link for the product (with adobe and winzip instructions and links), a link for a bonus gift, a link for a recommended affiliate program, and a subscription box on the page, set up through AWeber.

Gathered my list of potential books to sell and researched them on eBay to see if they’re being offered and how they’re doing (more on eBay research next time).

Checked all the books for resale rights information. When you sell ebooks, eBay requires a statement that you actually own the rights to resell the product. The rights generally include either a .txt file included with the product or a granting of rights in the ebook itself. I have a number of books that don’t have explicit rights included, so those had to be filed away for later research.

Download and set up TurboLister. This is a tool from eBay that allows you to set up all your listings on your own computer before loading them onto eBay. You can set a schedule for your listings, and it gives you the fees for each one. I’m sure there’s a lot more to it, and one of my tasks today is to learn all the ins and outs of the tool.

Zipped all the files and uploaded 40 books to get started with. Checked that the upload worked right and that the books then could be retrieved. Lots of notes, all nicely filed where I can find them.

That all equaled about 10 hours of work; I expect the next few days to require at least that much. There will come a time, when everything’s in place, where a lot of the business will run on autopilot (as promised in so many ads), but for now I have to lay the foundation.

It feels good to finally be making some forward progress!

I’m finding out first hand just how important it is to get - and stay - organized. And how important it is to take the time to make a rational, logical plan using the information I’ve gathered.

A case in point: I spent most of yesterday working on the sales and thank-you pages for a resell rights book I bought as part of a package. The learning part of that is certainly valuable, but if I’d been paying attention to my own program, I would have known that putting that effort into thank you pages for the books I want to put on eBay would be time better spent.

The books in the resale package are books that I plan to sell from my website, not on eBay, and any potential of getting buyers to my web site depends on getting things listed on eBay. So my activities yesterday would have been better scheduled for later this week, after I get some eBay listings going.

Another ‘aha’ moment came when I was looking for a logon password for a membership site. I’m a great one for writing those things down on a scrap of paper, vowing to myself that I’ll put it somewhere I can find it later… Of course, later hasn’t come yet, so I’m pawing through piles of notes trying to find the one I need. I know I spend more time looking for stuff than it would take to organize in the first place.

So, today’s mission is to just plain get organized. I have all the tools - file folders, notebooks, dividers, tabs, etc., sitting in a corner where they got deposited the last time this inspiration struck - and then passed.

Think about how your desk looks, about how quickly you can find that site and password you discovered a couple of weeks ago. If, like me, it takes more than a minute or so to put your hands on it, you really need to get organized, too.

After my last post, I realized that you might wonder why I’d be stressing about getting a web page up when my goal is to sell my ebooks on eBay.

Here’s the thing: for the actual selling of those ebooks, my goal is to cover my listing fees, not to make any significant money from those sales. At some point, further on with more experience under my belt, I may offer higher cost books on my eBay page, but for right now, my book offerings are going to probably be in the $.99 to $1.97 range. And that’s not going to generate a whole lot of cash.

Huh?

You see the whole point in getting people to buy those inexpensive books is to get them to visit my web page. And the most important thing I’ll want them to do when they get there is to sign up for a newsletter. It will be a bonus if they buy something from the page, but the whole point of this exercise is to build a list of subscribers who have already demonstrated that they’re will to buy information.

If you’ve been investigating how to make money on the internet for any length of time, you’ll be absolutely sick of the phrase “the money’s in the list.” This is the mantra of every successful online marketer, no matter what they’re selling. And by internet marketer, I mean people selling in every market you can think of, not just the specific field of internet marketing.

The common wisdom is that a good, targeted list of folks who have already indicated they’re buyers will generate anywhere from $.30 per month or more per subscriber in revenue. If the list owner is able to provide good information to her subscribers and offer products for sale that are helpful, she’ll make money.

That’s a big part of the equation in building an online business. Next post, I’ll tell you about another way to make money outside of the actual eBay sales price.

I am pumped! I’ve spent the last few days working on building a web site, and it’s starting to shape up.

So what, you may ask. Isn’t this a web site we’re on right now? Well, yes and no. This blog is based on a Wordpress template I acquired, and it does quite nicely for blogging. However, it doesn’t quite work for what I want with my eBay ebook business (at least with the skills I have so far). I want to have a nice landing page, where visitors can look around at the products I have to offer and sign up for a newsletter (of course). I need to be able to list a number of pages and have the navigation make sense and be easy. I just think a standard web site fills the bill a bit better, and now that I’m actually learning to put it together, that belief is affirmed.

I have to adimit that I spent quite a bit of time hand-wringing about this particular task. I have loads of information and a few “build-it” pieces of software on my hard drive, but every time I thought I was getting started, I’d run into another hand-wringing opportunity.

What header? What’s that, how do I do it? Better go look at some other stuff to try to find out.

A plan? I need a plan? Off again on another quest.

I finally just made sure that getting started on the actual doing of the work was the only thing on my to-do list for two days. And that seemed to do the trick. I’m still a week or so away from actually wanting to share the site with you, but I am on my way.

I also was able to install a program on my web site that makes me feel pretty accomplished. It’s a system for dealing with delivering ebooks to the buyer once they’ve bought from me at eBay. This was another hand-wringer. I didn’t want to be in a position of delivering by email attachment. Nor can I leave my poor old laptop on all the time to be able to use a delivery system through outlook - which doesn’t provide for payment verification anyway.

I got this program, SmartDD, because I purchased a membership with a program called Easy Auction Profits. SmartDD was offered as a bonus and is really why I looked at the program in the first place. I’m really glad I did, because the program is fantastic! Tons of tools and resources to get started and to build an eBay business, and the most welcoming, friendly, and helpful forum I’ve participated in. Check it out. The sales letter is kind of long, but that’s necessary for all the benefits of joining.

Anyway, back to the installation of the program. It has to be installed on your web site, so that was kind of daunting. Then it has an 18-page installation manual, and that was just plain frightening. But taking it step by step, getting past the slap-my-head-I’m-stupid moments, it is now up and running. Just waiting for me to load up products and get busy selling them on eBay.

Wringing your hands only stops you from rollin’ up your sleeves.

I found this in a mystery I was reading (Black Order by James Rollins), and it resonated so much I wrote it down and am keeping it by my computer. It’s quite appropriate for me; I do tend to wring my hands instead of taking action.

But today I did take action, and it feels pretty good. I worked and worried at a problem, thought and stewed, and then finally just dove in. I probably didn’t do it the way tech folks would, but it worked!

Do you ever feel like you can’t even ask the right question to get you where you need to be? That’s where I was. I ran a number of questions through google, but none of the solutions even came close to being helpful for my immediate problem. I read through a number of my “how to do ebooks” books, but couldn’t find it there either.

My problem was that I have a lot of great books, all with great resale rights, but that have no image folder included to show the cover of the book all by itself. Seems kind of a non-problem until you want to list the book on eBay. I think it’s important to show a potential buyer an interesting image of what they’re getting (and I’m not even going to talk about all the listings that have pictures of busty women rather than the cover of the ebook!).  One of these great books without an image of the cover is the one I wanted to offer as a bonus for signing up for my newsletter. The book is The Complete Newbies Guide to Buying & Selling Ebooks On eBay & the World Wide Web. It’s over 60 pages of great information, and I thought it would be the perfect book for you to have. I also hope to sell it on eBay. But I wanted to be able to show its great cover, and I understand that images are important in selling.

I figured out that by clicking on the image on the first page of the book I could copy it (left click, choose copy). I then opened an image file from another book, clicked file, clicked open bitmap file, pasted what I had in, then used the tools there, and come up with a file to save as a GIF file, and have it done.

It all worked, and if you go to the left side menu and to the page for the sign up form, you’ll see the image. It’s not the best it could be, but there is a picture. Now I know I can do it, and it feels great to have figured it out.

The point isn’t really about being able to work through this one thing (well, not entirely). It really is about just rollin’ up the sleeves and going for it.

You won’t ever see the really crappy images I came up with the first few times. And you don’t know how many images I had to throw in the trash bin. I did make sure to always “save as” so I didn’t mess up the original I was working with. And I did remind myself quite often that I wasn’t doing any permanent damage to the original work. That is one thing I hear often in talking with people about doing work on the net. Unless you’re getting into programs on your computer (which you DO NOT want to do), just about anything is fixable.

I have another domain name, registered, ready on my server, just waiting for me to get myself into some action to build the web pages. It’s going to be the one carrying the ebook store, the one I’ll refer my eBay buyers to, a critical piece of the eBay business. This small triumph has me excited to finally figure out what I need to do to build that site. It’s pretty amazing what these little victories can do.

The important thing is to just roll up those sleeves and do it.