I’m slowly working through getting my eBay store set up. For some reason, I’m having a hard time focusing on all the tasks. I need to set up some categories and get some books into them. Looking at the to-do list is exhausting! Oh well, I’m rolling up my sleeves.

 Take a look at our SmilingPartners Store. It uses one of eBay’s store templates. I’m not sure I’ll need to change it much. The idea is to get people there to look at and buy the books. That’s probably contrary to the guru advice

I did finally take the time to look around TurboLister and found the way to list my items diectly to the store. It’s amazing the information you can find if you just take the time to look.

Oh, almost forgot. I got this link for an eBay guide full of research on the kinds of things to sell you might find in your own house or for cheap at garage/yard sales. It’s free for signup, just go here: http://www.overlookedtreasure.com. The author says he’ll be doing updates, so I think it’s well worth checking out his newsletter. If you’ve tried researching items and trends on eBay, you’ll know how tedious it can be. And if you don’t have a specific category or item, you can spend hours just wandering around the site. Interesting, but not always productive. LOL.

There’s a giveaway starting Dec. 1st, 12 Days of Christmas. Unlike most giveaways, this one adds gifts throughout the giveaway, rather than presenting you with pages of downloads, and I’m pretty sure it lasts more than just the 12 days. I got some excellent stuff from last year’s presentation.

That’s it for today. As always, be sure to take a look at the resources page. I’ve added some new opportunities.

Now I have two tasks checked off my list (a newsletter mailing is the other completed thing). On to those other 8 things. 

Boy, the holidays are here and seriously interfering with the time I have to spend doing business!

Since I work at home, and since I’m “only” at the computer, there shouldn’t be a problem with interruptions, right? Sure, I’ve been saying for a year that I’m working, but since I have nothing tangible to show for that work, well… It is my own fault for taking such a long time to research and play around with what I might want to do.

Hah! They’ll see when I drive up in my new car! Well, one of these days.

So on to the real stuff.

I have been listing on eBay, but not in the quantity I’d hoped. I had a total of 27 items listed, sold six, and relisted the other 21, but they didn’t sell the second time so decided it was time to go ahead and open an eBay store. I can list those books that didn’t sell for 30 days for 6 cents each and I can add featured and fixed price items. Well, I can as soon as I figure out how.

I know millions of people use eBay quite successfully, but I find their instructions beyond the basic “here’s how to sell” and “here’s how to buy” to be confusing and insufficient at times. I’m probably trying to over-complicate things, which seems to be my way.

I did finally get a newsletter out to my cookbook subscribers. Had a few unsubscribe, but I still have 100 or so who stayed with me. I need to get some more messages written and into the autoresponder - and figure out what to try to sell. The ChefJudi web page just won’t come together for me, so that needs a lot of attention, as well.

Focus, roll up my sleeves, perservere…

 Almost forgot. My next stop is the resources page to clean it up and add some new stuff. Be sure to take a look.

Okay, things are starting now! I’ve sold 2 items on eBay and have a bid on 1 more. Doesn’t seem like much, when I have 27 books listed, but I may be able to cover my listing fees. We’ll see.

By the way, if you’re thinking of getting started in the ebook eBay business, now is a good time to start. They’re running a listing price special until December 12th, I think. The special is that you don’t have to pay the normal $.35 fee for a gallery picture, so that brings the cost of listing an ebook down to $.25 for a 7 day listing (eBay US).

I did have a hiccup. I’d uploaded some books onto eBay through Turbolister before I put them into my automatic delivery system (SmartDD). Well, as things will go, the second book to be sold was a buy-it-now purchase from that group. SmartDD did generate an email telling me that the delivery was screwed up so I could go into eBay and send the download information to the buyer. I recognize that I’ve got to be sure not start a listing project when I don’t have the time to finish all the necessary steps!

The cookbook list is growing, by 3 or 5 day, and I spent yesterday diddling around trying to get something up on the chefjudi site. Pretty much a wasted day, as I couldn’t find a template I liked and so messed around trying to create one. Yikes! If you see a nice website that you’re sure a regular person put up, bow your head and recognize the probable nonsense they had to go through to get it on the web.

And I still don’t have any clear idea of what I’m going to write about in the cooking newsletter - or offer for sale. Muddleheaded is what I am right now.

So, it’s late afternoon and I have to find another 5 or 6 books to get processed and up on eBay. Hope my husband isn’t expecting anything special for dinner!

If you’re on any internet marketing lists you’ll have seen a number of new giveaways being offered. Holiday time and all that, making for an excellent time (and advertising hook) to offer all kinds of gifts. As I’ve pointed out before, giveaways are excellent for everyone involved. The givers get new people onto their lists and recipients get a lot of new material (and, sure, some old stuff) for their libraries. There is a lot of great material, both for learning from and to add into your product base for ultimate resale.

I’ve talked before about the importance of keeping all that stuff organized. It’s very helpful to keep products sorted by categories, i.e., folders for ebay, blogging, adsense, adwords, paypal, etc. I also have a folder labeled “look at and sort” for those packages and downloads that aren’t immediately identifiable as belonging to a particular category.

What brings this up again is an email I got today talking about sorting the downloads further into their resales rights categories, something I wish I’d thought about earlier. I am implementing that suggestion now, as well as adding a “rebrandable” folder.

I have roughly a bajillion separate folders that I’m going through and reorganizing into just this system: organized into categories of relevance, then sub-organized by product rights. Besides the “look at folder” I have to go through, I need to to re-organize many of the folders I shoved stuff into when I first started taking advantage of the giveaways.

It is a rainy and stormy day here in Oregon, perfect for hunkering in and getting focused on the business at hand. Maybe that’s part of this new resolve to get better organized. Of course, I still have to stay on top of getting books onto ebay. Ah me, what a great deal of time I could have saved by starting out with a program!

Oh, along with this, I’m redoing the resources page of this site, so be sure to check back. I know there are old giveaway links, there a new ones to post, and new ebooks and courses to help you.

Good intentions, oh well. My scheduled to-do list hasn’t been working out so well. Again.

I’d been planning to spend a little time here and there to get all my tasks done, but technology and disorganization did me in. I wanted to build some more TurboListing pages for the books I wanted to upload, but I couldn’t remember where I’d put the template. Then, when I finally found it, I’d done something screwy with it and couldn’t figure out what! Eventually I gave up and built a new one, this time with Nvu, and now all seems to be in place. I use Nvu to build the ad page for each listing. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) editor, and I can simply paste what I’ve made into the TurboLister. But it does take a bit to build it.

I end up going between a few different pages in my files to be able to put it all together: my database to be sure I have all the right information, the product itself, and any sales material that comes with it. I have to write the title, using as many keywords and sales words as I can, making sure it makes at least a little sense. That exact title has to be copied to the SmartDD program, which takes care of automating the whole delivery system.

Since I’m working on an over-burdened 2001 laptop,  I also spend a lot of time waiting for things to open. I swear, my first revenue from all this is going directly into a new, bells-and-whistles computer!

So, it’s taken me the better part of two days to get 12 books actually listed on eBay. Each one does get a bit easier - and quicker - but I certainly have to revise my expectations and schedule.

On the cookbook side of things, I now have close to 100 people signed up (so far only 1 that unsubscribed as soon as they got the book). I have a few ideas for newsletters, but the monetization is yet to come. There’s a ton of information about cooking and recipes on the web, but finding quality to sell is taking some digging. I’m hoping to get the first of the newsletters done and out next week. We’ll see what happens to that schedule!

One step at a time. Do one thing, do it well, then move on. FOCUS - Follow One Course Until Successful. I need to keep all this in mind!

Good news - I finally got 6 ebooks uploaded to sell on eBay. It’s a start, and now I have the process down, so it shouldn’t seem so intimidating. I’ve put “upload at least 5 books” on each day’s task list (if I don’t have a list in front of me, it’s much easier to find other things to do).

Bad news - it’s taken me this long to finally get that part of the process done. I’ve written before about my propensity to wring my hands and let worry take the place of action. But, no more! I’m calling an end to that behavior right now.

Part of the handwringing this time has been my participation in the Cookbook Giveaway. I haven’t given in to the urge to keep my aweber page open so that I can refresh it every 15 minutes to check the stats, but I do look a couple of times a day. So far, 70 people have signed up to my list and downloaded the book. That means I’ve promised 70 people, so far, that I’d be sending them a newsletter with some tips about cooking. EEKS! Now I have to actually come up with a newsletter! It’s not that I don’t know the topic; I think I may know too much about it.

Sounds odd, doesn’t it. Here’s the thing. I’ve been cooking so long and been trained so well that I don’t have a clue what aspect of cooking might make for an interesting newsletter. Do I start from the beginning (this is the pan, put water in, turn on heat, wait for boil) or go into sophisticated techniques and recipes and hope someone asks for a different level. Oh well, I guess since it’s the holidays I can start by building around edible gifts. Thing is just to start, right?

I’m also working on getting a chefjudi web page going. I need to figure out how I want it to look (web page or blog?) and I need to find things to both give away and to sell. That selling is the whole point, after all.

When I was in the working world, the actual go-to-an-office kind, I had no problem multi-tasking. I have to get back into that mindset. For now, it looks like my best bet is to set aside a block of time that’s exclusively for one project. For example, I need to find cooking-related affiliate programs, so I’ve blocked out 2 hours today to do just that. Then, I have another 2-hour block for working on my ebay listings. 1 hour for working on the chefjudi newsletter, and 1 hour for the ebay newsletter. There’s also a webinar this evening about computer and internet law that I want to attend. Can’t decide whether that’s work or pleasure, but it’s still part of the to-do list.

Who said you can sit at your computer for an hour in your pajamas and make a $million? That’s obviously not the truth, but there are plenty of people out there willing to sell you their $27 or $97 or $497 book/system/course with those claims.

It may be true that in a couple of years I’ll be able to run things without spending a lot of time at it. But for now, for me, there has to be a considerable amount of time spent actually being productive.

On that note, I’d best get back to it.

Today is officially the third day of the cookbook giveaway (although my listing is actually only 2 days working), and I thought you might be interested to follow along.

I’ve only seen one marketer promoting the giveaway to his subscription list, but all the lists I’m on are internet marketing lists, so I guess it’s not that surprising. As we all, know, I don’t have a list to promote to; changing that is what this participation is all about. Guess I’ll have to actually hunt down some cooking forums and see if I can make a post about the giveaway. Which I’m supposed to be doing anyway.

So, I now have a total of 18 subscribers from this giveaway, 14 yesterday and 4 so far today. And I have to figure out what I’m going to do about them. I promised in my 1st email to them, along with giving the book download information, that I’d occasionaly write about interesting cooking ideas and tips. Of course, I also need to figure out what I’m going to be trying to sell. I think I’ll wait until the middle of November to send the first mail, though. See how many folks I have by then!

I spent last night putting together a new look for my site, www.smilingpartners.com, which will be the main ebook site. I decided I didn’t like the original header I’d come up with, so I went searching for a new one. I found one in a package I bought over a year ago for building adsense sites. I’m thinking that perhaps the reason I couldn’t get excited about actually working on and developing that site was because I didn’t much like the way it looked. Now I like it, so I have no excuse. Besides the listing stuff I do for each book to sell on ebay, I’m adding another step to get it posted on the site and offer it for sale there. I’m going to have to figure out a shopping cart system. Oh boy.

Another change, if you’ve been here before, is that I moved the blogrush box to the top of the page. Here’s where knowing at least a little about html and how it works came in handy. I could go into the code for this blog template, figure out where I wanted to insert the code for blogrush, and actually do it. And it  worked! Geekdom again.

With so many wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) site building tools, you might think you don’t really need any html knowledge now, but that’s a wrong idea. I’m not saying you have to be able to build a 40 page website with code, but you do need to be able to recognize a bit what the code is doing. It’s not as hard as you think the first time you look at the stuff - really. Just spend a little time looking through the code, and you’ll begin to see how it works.

For larger projects, or if you simply can’t make sense of what you’re trying to get done, I’ve been told that www.rentacoder.com is an excellent place to find someone who knows what they’re doing. You post a description of what you need done and programmers bid on the job. And that is the way to go if you can’t figure things out. But I must say there is a very nice feeling of accomplishment when you do something geeky and it works!

A word here about BlogRush. It’s a tool to help build readership and links for subscribers’ blogs. It’s free to sign up, and they’re building all kinds of tracking information into the system. If you have a blog that you’d like to publicize, click on the bottom of ad box to find out more. Even though my numbers are in double digits, compared with some of the blogs that have 10s of thousands of readers, it’s pretty exciting to see that there have been people coming to my site and actually reading my posts.

That’s it for today. I’ll let you know again about how the giveaway is going. Now I have to get back to the eBay work.

Another day, another learning experience.

I realized that I didn’t tell you where to find the giveaway. If you’re interested in picking up some cookbooks, go to The Great Cookbook Giveaway.

The giveaway started today, so I excitedly logged on, found my book, and clicked the link. And got an error page. Depressed, was I. I sent an email. Nothing. I finally found a way to open a support ticket and sent that. And waited. Decide I’d best start poking around the site and discovered that I’d entered the link to my page incorrectly. Rather than just entering the url with www, I needed to enter http://, then the rest of it. So, got that fixed, clicked on it, it worked! (I did get a response to the support ticket, but by then had it figured out.)

But I decided my page was ugly and that it really needed to be a squeeze page (where you have to enter your name and email address to get the download link for the book). I originally put the book download on the page and asked for a subscription in order to get the bonus.

I also decided I needed to make an ebook ecover, rather than just showing the picture of the cookies. Another learning experience. I found a number of the ecover-maker programs I’d downloaded wouldn’t really do the trick, especially the ones specific to PhotoShop, which I don’t own and can’t afford right now. I did find one that would give me enough of an image to be able to put it into the IrfanView image editor I have and then figure out how to actually get the title onto the picture. After a couple hours of dinking around with it, I had some success. It probably will make a professional graphics person cringe, but I like it well enough. So, that then had to be uploaded to the giveaway and to my site, so I could use it on my two new pages.

Then I changed the pages. I changed the squeeze page, and I changed the download page. Then I had to change the aweber email. And I had to upload the whole shebang to my server.

It’s now late afternoon, so practically the entire day has been spent on this project. Sure hope I get some subscribers out of it all. Even if I don’t, I now know I can make a cover for an ebook. I also learned a little bit more about working with images. And, I’m getting to be an absolute pro when it comes to uploading files and working with my aweber autoresponder.

All good experience.

I got side-tracked again, but this time it was to do something to actually build the business.

Giveaway events are a big part of the internet marketing world. Most of the ebooks I’m going through and putting into the eBay process are products I got from giveaways. As you know from previous posts, I picked up a lot of junk - and duplicate products - but I have more than enough good stuff to keep me listing on Bay for a good long time. I look at just about every ebook sale offer I get, and I do see that a lot of what I have is actually being sold. That part of it serves as a great reminder that just because I know about these giveaways doesn’t mean that very many online shoppers know they’re getting a product that has been given away somewhere else.

So, enough of that rambling. What’s been keeping me busy for the past several days is my preparation to finally get in on the contributor end of a giveaway. What decided me is a holiday cookbook giveaway being put together by one the big names in internet marketing, Willie Crawford. It’s the fact that it’s a cookbook giveaway that made me feel like I could actually contribute something of value.

 It seems I’ve come full circle with this internet business. When I first decided to look into this, it was with the idea of doing something around cooking. You see, I graduated from culinary school and worked as a professional chef for awhile before deciding to go to law school. And even after practicing law for awhile, I went into catering. Cooking has always been a pleasure and relaxation, the only place I felt like I had some creativity.

I looked around and found that there are at least a bajillion sites on the net devoted to cooking and recipes. How in the world was I supposed to compete? Especially when the whole concept of how to get people to a web site was totally alien. So, I abandoned that path and started looking at the whole IM thing.

Bringing me into a position to hear of Willie Crawford, get on his mailing list, and then hear of this giveaway. I pulled out my files and put together 24 of the most family and friend popular holiday cookie recipes. I particularly wanted my first venture to be totally original. Don’t know if that will make a difference to downloaders, but it will have my name on it (sort of - I’m using Chef Judi, but I want to see if I can make that a brand online).

I was trying to figure out formatting and how I was going to get the book into pdf format when I remembered that a couple of marketers had recommended using open office, an open source (do I sound like a geek or what?) program that works like word but that will allow for links and putting graphics in that will stay where you want them, and will convert documents to pdf. I downloaded the program (it’s big and takes awhile, especially on this old laptop I use).

I’m so excited about this program I’m bouncing off the walls. I can see so many ways to finally use the plr books and articles I’ve collected. One of the things I found is that with the newest Adobe reader (free), a lot of the old pdf files I have can be saved (with the save as function) as text files. Once you have the text file, all you need to do is paste the content into a new open office document, do the editing to change it and give it your own voice, add whatever links and images you want, then save the whole thing as a pdf. Now there’s a new, original document you can claim as your own (that’s what PLR gives you). If you have a PLR that includes the word document, just open it in open office and make your changes. The thing that has stymied me about the PLR downloads I have that don’t have the source documents (i.e., word document) so the changes/editing can be made has been the cost of Adobe. Now that is mostly not a problem. It also means I have a ton of work to do, but that’s a good thing. I’m really excited about being able to get this done!

So, back to the giveaway. It starts tomorrow. My submission has been approved, and I actually got to see it on this list. Here’s the process:

1. Write the book, or edit (changing at least half, if not more). Add links (to your website, at least). Get or make a graphic. For this book, I baked a bunch of the cookies so I could photograph a collection of them. My husband liked this part of it. Upload both (the book and picture, not my husband). Submit both to the giveaway (for this one, they’re actually reviewing the submissions; I’m not sure that’s true for all of them).

2. Find/write/edit something appropriate to offer as an enticement for signing up for my list. Upload the book.

3. Set up a new campaign with my autoresponder (Aweber, in my case). Mine right now is the double opt-in (clients get an initial email that asks them to verify they did actually subscribe) and the follow-up with the download link for the free book for signing up. (Thank you for subscribing, here’s the link to your free book.)

3. Make the thankyou/download page. This includes the link to download the book, an offer of  the free book for signing up. It also includes an ad for an affiliate product. I had to find one that had to do with cooking that is a good product.

4. Wait for tomorrow. Try to figure out what I’m going to do with any list that gets generated. Wait for tomorrow…

I’m back to going through my hard drive, but now looking at all the cookbooks I’ve collected. Again, I’ve picked up a lot of nonsense, but with open office (go to www.openoffice.org) I’m seeing more possibilities. I know I haven’t even come close to finding out all its capabilities. I have found that the help menu is actually helpful. I expect to continue my discovery of this great product, particularly how it’s going to help me grow my business.

 Here is the download to my cookbook thank you page:

Chef Judi’s Cookie Book

More Cookies

 Happy baking.