I’ve been away for the holidays - well, away from posting here except the short one a few days ago. And then I didn’t look at the comments. I don’t get that many, so I forget to pay attention. When I finally looked, there was a comment from Derrek (thanks!) that the sign-up wasn’t working correctly. I’ve fixed it now (after dinking around with it for way too long). Still don’t know what happened, but after copying code a few times, it finally took. If you’ve tried to sign up and have been unable to, my sincere apologies! It is working now, and hopefully will continue to do so!

Now onto penny ebooks and feedback.

I was reminded of this topic in my monthly newsletter from John Thornhill at Planetsms Mentorship Monthly. (I’ve talked about this membership site before; it really is worth checking out.) One of John’s members wrote to say that he’d had his eBay account taken away because he bought and sold some penny ebooks. He has his account back now, but he lost all his feedback. so he has to start all over with that.

I’ve been seeing warnings about penny ebooks for some time now, but I still see recommendations in eBay how-to guides to look for penny books so you can build your feedback score - and that’s exactly what eBay doesn’t want you to do. Don’t do it!

It is important that you, as a seller, build your positive feedback. You may even be able to get some of that with penny books (there certainly are still a lot of them for sale!). I just don’t know how many of these transactions it takes before eBay starts paying attention and penalizes you for it.

I looked through the eBay help section on feedback and the feedback tutorial, but I couldn’t find anything definitive. The policy statement is:

“Feedback left or received where the feedback’s primary value is to artificially enhance a member’s reputation rather than provide commentary on genuine transactional experience is not permitted.”

Apparently, eBay views the buying and selling of penny books as an attempt to manipulate feedback. It still leaves us without any information on how many penny transactions you can do without penalty. Although I have purchased some penny ebooks, I already had some sales. Perhaps a flag is being brand new and only having penny transactions. I just don’t know, but at this point I’m not going to take any more chances.

This brings me to another suggestion for you. Look around your house at what you might be able to sell on eBay. Just about all of us have stuff that might seem a little too good to throw away, or something we know probably has value to someone else but that we don’t use. You’ll need to do a bit of research, but there’s tons of information on eBay to help you. Look at what listings are currently running and look at completed transactions (advanced search option, then tick completed listings). You can see how other folks are doing their listings, what kind of activity/demand there is, ballpark shipping, etc.

Selling physical goods is a great way to get the full experience of eBay. I’ve learned a lot (like it’s better to take a trip to the post office to be sure your shipping costs are correct before you list your item - and they’re very helpful in suggesting the best/easiest/most cost effective way to ship your stuff). I’ve learned there are some really great buyers and some not so great. And I’ve learned how much fun it is to have $$ in your paypal account!

Even better, it is also a perfectly legitimate way to build your feedback. You find someone who wants your, umm, treasures, you make a little bit of money, and you gain some experience. You do want to be absolutely certain you’re doing all you can to make that feedback positive, though. For instance, before I list anything I have it ready to mail. I have packaging from the post office (free), I know exactly what the shipping cost is, and I promise the item will be shipped within 24 hours of receiving payment. Since I only accept paypal payment, the money for shipping is already in my account. I use the eBay/paypal feature to print my label, and then I’m off to the post office or nearest drop box.

That’s it for today. I wish you a great New Year. My goal will be to learn more about building my business and sharing with you what I find. Leave a comment about your goals for 2008. Perhaps we can work together to achieve it all.

I’m up to my neck in Holiday stuff and the pleasure of spending time with my family, so I’m not exactly focused on this biz

 I do keep up with my incoming emails, though, and I wanted to tell you about an offer I got today. If you haven’t started your own blog yet, or have and want to learn more about how to use it to grow your business, you should check out this offer:

I’m evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they’re letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.

It covers:

• The best blogging techniques.
• How to get traffic to your blog.
• How to turn your blog into money.

I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it’s still free.

That’s their message. Posting it to this blog gets me the course for free. I’ve read quite a lot about blogging and how it can help your business. We’ll see if this one is helpful. I do expect it to be; Mark Joyner is one of the big names in the online world and always offers quality.

I have to get back to my cleaning and cooking, but I did want to let you know about this - as well as to qualify for the course.

Hope you have a great Holiday season.

A little bit of a rant today. I’ve spent the last couple of days trying to clear out my email accounts, and I’m getting really annoyed with some marketers.

I susbscribe to a lot of lists. Some of them I should get rid of, but I think it’s important to pay attention to the bad ones as well as the good. I do unsubscribe when it’s clear the marketer only sends me mail about stuff to buy. I already know that’s not an effective way to use a list. If you can’t offer your subscribers anything more than a link to a sales page, and that’s the only mail you ever send, you’re not going to have me, or anyone else, on your list for very long.

All the big names write again and again about the need to offer value and information to your subscribers. It’s the only way to maintain a good list, and it’s the only way to really build your business. If all you do is try to sell stuff, you probably will make a few sales here and there, but you won’t have a sustained relationship with your folks. You’ll have to spend most of your time trying to attract new subscribers. That time is better spent taking care of the folks you already have, giving them good value so they tell their friends what a good list this is to be on.

Of course that’s not to say that you can’t tell your list about products being offered, and make money when they buy from or through you. After all, this is your business. But the sale recommendation should be in the context of the kind of training and information that helps your subscribers.

Because I’m on so many lists, when there’s a big product release, I get a lot of offers for that product. Since some marketers just use the headline and text supplied to them by the seller, I can eliminate a bunch of mails without looking. However, the really good marketers change things around and write their own sales material for their emails. This is where I’m having a problem.

A couple of big launches recently lead to sales pages with a lot of video. Now I know all the gurus have their stats that say adding video to your squeeze page will add loads of orders (they all keep massive statistics about how things work). Problem is, these tech heads don’t understand that some of us may be online with something less than the latest in big memory, quick loading machines. Case in point: I’m working on a circa 2000 lap top. I do have cable, and I have an external hard drive to keep the memory as free as possible, but my machine simply won’t handle some of those videos. My machine freezes. I can’t even access the stop button for the video. So, it’s control/alt/delete. Shut down. Restart. Now I’ve lost 10 or 15 minutes going through  this process. (I told you my machine is slow!)

It’s bad enough when you open a squeeze page and forget to turn down your volume. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve jumped out of my chair!

I know this might seem a strange complaint, but I can’t help wondering what life would be if I combined this with a dial-up access. I’d never get anywhere! Don’t know that there’s a way around this. Video selling seems here to stay. I just wish the marketers would set their videos to require an action on my part to start the darn thing, rather than starting as soon as the page starts loading.

Oh, that reminds me of another product being touted out there. I haven’t looked closely at it, so the information I have comes from the emails I’ve received about it.

I’m hearing about a new way for folks to make money from running ads on their sites. Apparently, you can sign up to have little videos run on your web page, like TV ads, as soon as someone gets to your page. They’re saying the big advertisers like car and soft drink companies will pay big bucks if you allow their ad to run on your page. Maybe I’m too dim to understand, but I can’t see that it would do anything more than drive me to click away from the web page. I mean, if I’m looking for information about selling stuff on eBay, do I really want to see and hear about the new Ford truck line? Don’t think so. Even if they were able to make it load without problems on my machine!

That’s it for now. I’m still cleaning out my emails. Can’t seem to get back into my eBay groove - the list seems really daunting right now. I will get this under control and report back.

I forgot to tell you how my actual selling is going, and that’s supposed to be the point of all this!

I didn’t get all the books listed I wanted to, certainly nowhere near the 100 I thought I was aiming for. I finally figured out why, but more on that later. I did list 27 ebooks, most about making money on eBay or on creating ebooks. They were all listed for 7 days, starting bid $.99 and buy it now $1.99. The ones that didn’t sell were relisted. I made a total of 10 sales of nine of the books. Surprisingly, most of the sales were at the buy-it-now price. And better, out of those 10 sales, I got 2 signups for my list.

I’m holding just about even on the money, I think I’ll end up with a few cents income over fees, so it is list building for free for those two signups. We’ll see at the end of December how it works out with the cost of the eBay store figured in. I will be featuring a couple of higher priced items, so maybe even that will be paid for

I think my initial impression that ebooks about selling on eBay would be sellers is correct. I have more of those on my hard drive, so I need to get them processed and set up for auction. And I’ll be relisting the titles that sold. I need to figure out how to offer more than one copy - well, figure out the costs of that. Books in the store are listed for 30 days and cost $.06 each for the listing, but that still means I have to get people to the store.

And that would be http://stores.ebay.com/smilingpartners.

I finally figured out what was bothering me, preventing me from focusing. My digital delivery system wasn’t working correctly, and I couldn’t figure out why. After poking around, I finally asked the tech people at my hosting service. Naturally, it took them about a second to find and fix the problem. What a dope I am! Anyway, now that that’s taken care of, I can get back to being productive.

Which I’m going to do right now. Be sure to check out the resources page.