eBay Store Set Up and Website Work

A new year and new determination to build my business into a powerhouse! How about you? Are you feeling the energy and putting it to use?

I’m making some progress on getting my eBay store in shape. I was able to add the SmilingPartners logo to it, and I set up some categories for my ebooks. My to-do list for today includes finishing the upload of a bunch of books to the store. I have at least a couple dozen in various stages of being ready. Have to complete things like making the thank you pages and getting them uploaded to the site, adding the books to SmartDD (the digital delivery system), loading the books into TurboLister, uploading to eBay, then sorting them into the categories I’ve set up. All nit-picky work that has to be done.

I had some help in getting the store logo set up. I found a chapter of an ebook called How to Set Up A Successful Automated Ebook Business on EBay. The “leaked” chapter deals specifically with setting up your eBay store, and it was spot-on easy to follow. The book is now on my wish list. I’m not buying it yet, because I’m following Joel Comm’s advice, as posted last time, about using the stuff I have before I go after shiny new things. I don’t think I have anything as thorough as this book seems to be on getting everything set up for complete automation, but I have to look.

I’ve uploaded the leaked chapter, so you can download it here (right click and save as). There are links throughout the book to his sales page, naturally, so go take a look. I’ll add this to the resources page, as well, in case you want to come back for it. If you’re setting up an eBay store, it’s very helpful.

I’ve also been dinking around with www.chefjudi.com and www.smilingpartners.com. Here’s my experience working on ChefJudi:

I used to wonder what online folks meant when they said it “only” took them 5 days to get a site up and running. I mean, how can it take that long? Can’t you just type up some stuff, add some products and upload it?

How silly and naïve was I.

Somehow I had it in my mind that doing web sites was just a little trickier than working on a regular word document, only with pictures and links. Especially with the availability of wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) html editors, it had to be easy, right?

Let me tell you about my day.

I’m using Nvu as my editor (and obviously need to learn more). I have the basic structure of the 4 measly pages I want to start with. I’m not dealing with a header, because I can’t find one I like (I’m going for free here, so that limits things a bit), but I did have an idea of using a font I liked and color and keeping the whole thing pretty simple. My first problem arose with the font. I really like it, but in Nvu it seems I’m limited in how big I can make that particular type. So, I played around with that for awhile. And here’s one of the lovely things about working on web stuff. The way things look in the editor is not necessarily how it’s really going look. So, you save the page, in this case as index.html, then open the saved page in Windows to see how it really looks. This is pretty close to how it’s going to look online, but not exactly the same. Change the file around in Nvu, save it, refresh the open Windows page to see if it’s anywhere close to how I want it to look. Do this several times as I try to figure out how to get my font bigger. Nothing works. Finally decide I’m just going to have to live with it.

Okay, I already have my left column listing my pages and my newsletter signup form in the right column, so I save what I have 4 times: index, contact, cookbooks, and kitchen stuff. Oops, I forgot to link the listing to a poster store on the site. Do that and save the pages again. Okay, we’re going now.

To the contact page and add a note and the contact information. On to the other pages to add a welcome note, asking for the signup, and promising a real web site “soon.” Have enough sense to copy the message to add to the other pages. On a roll and ready to upload the pages. I use FileZilla for my ftp (free and really easy to use), so I open that up, connect to my server, and upload my pages. Close FileZilla.

Now I open my web browser to check on how the site really looks. Click the links to other pages and realize that I’ve changed the name of two of the pages, so the links don’t work. Aarrgh!

Back to Nvu. Open each page and fix the links. Almost forgot to save my work, but caught it. Back to FileZilla, upload the pages, and all’s well. So far. I still need to find stuff to put on the pages and stuff to sell, but at least I now have the framework.

I’ll be lucky if the whole thing only takes a week.

I did finally figure out the problem with the header - I’d been trying to make it using just text instead of using a graphics application (Irfanview is what I use). It is better than it was, but still needs something prettier. I’ll just deal with that later. The important thing is to get it started, not wait for perfection, right?

Well, I guess I can’t avoid the fact that all those books are waiting to be dealt with. I’m keeping a written list of each day’s goals. I hate the idea of moving one on to the next day, because I didn’t get my work done. And there’s a great feeling of accomplishment when I can check a task as done.