I’ve finally taken my email in hand and started unsubscribing from lists I find annoying or unhepful. I’m surprising myself at feeling a little sad at doing it, especially lists I’ve been on for awhile, but my inbox is simply getting unmanageable. And, no matter how hard I try to find it, so far that magic bit of information I need to make a gajillion dollars on the net has not presented itself. I’m beginning to believe the only way this whole business is going to work is through hard work and attention from me. Oh, well…

The obvious eliminations - marketers only offering the latest launch or package of books I’ve already accumulated through giveaways - wasn’t that hard. I kept track for a couple of weeks of all my email and whether there was any real help or information being offered. If it was only sales, I hit the unsubscribe. Today I also hit that button for just generally being annoyed at the tone.

For example, one marketer told me had a bunch of free stuff for me to download - and then nagged that he really did expect a donation for his time and trouble. Three times before I stopped reading! Hello??? Either give me the stuff or put together a sales package, but don’t whine at me that I should give you money for doing something I did not ask for.

Another list I’ve been on for quite awhile does offer some good information from time to time, but he almost as regularly berates his readers for not taking advantage of an offer or freebie, telling us how hard he’s working on our behalf. I do appreciate the hard work necessary to regularly put out a newsletter, but come on! What am I, twelve years old and in need of nagging? Don’t think so - and I don’t need a mother for this business.

If I have recieved more than one “watch out for my new stuff, I’m sending you an email soon about this next big thing” email, I leave the list. Does that really work? Do people anxiously check their email because they need to see the marketer’s next offering before anyone else? Do I need to hear three or four or five times that it’s coming soon? Not me.

There have been a few “I really need to raise some money” email lists I’ve left. I’m sorry for the circumstance, but I’m on the list because you’ve said you can teach me how to make and grow a business on the internet. When you tell me you can’t come up with a few hundred dollars to pay your rent or your hosting fees or whatever, you just told me you know about as much as I do, and you are not more successful than I am. How can I feel you’re able to give me any good information?

One thing that the gurus tell us is to pay attention to what other marketers are doing and to note both good and bad. These newsletters certainly are providing me with a good list of what not to do.

I’m trying to look at the positive side of things with the ebay changes, but it’s difficult.

 I actually wrote those words a week or so ago. I’d finally figured out how to get a CD burned properly (after a little fiddling on my new computer), and I had put together two packages of ebooks to set up for auction. I have one package of books about making money on eBay and one that’s a package of health and diet books. I decided to check on the auctions before finishing the post here, and found that both of them had sold!

Again, as I started this post, I checked my listings on eBay. One item, again the eBay make money package, has a bid, and so will be sold. The listings I have posted for auction don’t end until tomorrow evening, so I’m still hopeful that the others will sell.

Perhaps eBay isn’t done with my business, after all.

I do admit that I was depressed for some time. When eBay made their announcement about disallowing digital delivery products, my ebook business was starting to pick up, and I was feeling optimistic about getting into a net gain situation. I’m still not sure of the viability of building a powerseller rank with selling these books, but I’m looking for smaller steps. My goal now is to get back to being able to see that my fees will be paid! It does seem more doable today than it did a couple of weeks ago.

I think working on making good packages of related materials is a good way to go. And I need to start playing around with price. The two packages I have up now have a minimum bid of $1.97. A CD with 13 or 25 books on it should be worth more than that. We’ll see.

Putting the packages together is helping me finally sort through all the crud I’ve collected on my hard drive, to say nothing of the 5 or 6 or 7 copies of the same material. And I’m finding that I own quite a number of books that contain exactly the same material, but that have had the titles and graphics changed. Wouldn’t do much for my seller reputation to sell someone 5 seemingly different books that all contain the same content!

I’m also finally working on getting http://www.chefjudi.com into some shape. I slapped some pages up and didn’t do anything else for way too long. So far, there are pages that have video drawn from YouTube, some artwork relating to cooking and food, and an eBay-linked page of kitchenware auction offerings. I’m left with getting recipes, cookbooks for sale, and some pages about gluten-free cooking. Should keep me busy for a good while!

I think that’s it for tonight. Dinner needs to be dealt with - although after researching and writing about food for awhile, what I really want is to go out and have someone else do the cooking.

Be well. Be productive

Well, that was a total waste of my (and most of the other participants’) time. The fellow who was supposed to be answering questions didn’t show up until 9 minutes past the hour, and then he must have been overwhelmed with the questions, because it took a good long time after that to start seeing his responses - or non-responses, I should say.

 The beginning statement was that the policy is a done deal, so there’d be no further discussion of that. Most of the rest of the replies were restatements of what they have listed as policy - not really clear, but I’ve pretty much decided that I’m staying away from ads, at least until I see there are clear guidelines and some rational use for them. I just don’t see much of a service in a potential customer needing to email me to get information on the product, especially when I’m paying a fee for an ad that should include the necessary information. Oh well…

There were many questions about the sellers who are still listing their items for digital delivery, although I am seeing fewer and fewer of those. I don’t really want to be a narc, but if I’m forced to charge more for my product because of the cost of putting it on a CD and into a mail container, it just isn’t fair. I don’t plan to spend a great deal of time at it, but since doing research on how stuff is listed and how much it’s selling for is a part of what I see as good business practice, I am going to attempt to let eBay know about improper listings. This, though, has its own challenge, as eBay hasn’t changed the categories in reporting abuse.

It still seems kind of odd to me that they’d implement these policies waaaay before they’re ready to deal themselves with the changes. But sellers are supposed to suck it up and adapt in minutes.

Must be in a cranky mood. Sorry about the rant. I think it’s best that I go back to getting products ready to list for the weekend.

 Best to you.

I’ve been working on getting set up to start selling my ebooks on CDs and deciding what kinds of packages I can put together so there’s some good value. I just can’t see that it makes sense for someone to pay $.93 in postage to get just one ebook, although I do see there are listings for that. Of course, for higher priced products, it’s okay. But most of my sales were books in the $.99 to $1.99 category. I’ll try all sorts of combinations, of course. Since I’m producing the CDs myself, I can see what sells. Can you tell this is lots of thinking out loud?

There’s a great blog post I want to share with you today. It’s from Mike Enos, a platinum power seller, and he’s written an open letter to eBay about their policy changes, reminding them that it was the mom and pop sellers who really got eBay established. The link is below. Also, if you’re interested in doing anything on eBay, you really should subscribe to his newsletter.

http://208.69.123.136/eBaySellingSuccessSecretsVideoBlogNewsletter/?p=815#respond

eBay is holding a workshop in just a little while that is supposed to be about clarifying their new policies, and I’ll report back on what they have to say. Their initial notice that digitally delivered products were going to be discontinued suggested that we could use eBay ads to replace our listings. Problem is, no one, including eBay, seems to have a clue about their policies on those ads. Some sellers were able to successfully get their ads up and running, but many others had their ads denied or were told they were doing something against policies that were undefined! What a mess!

If you’ve tried to post a comment and were unsuccessful, please forgive me. With all this eBay stuff, I can’t get my head areound trying to figure out where I mucked up the programming. If you’d like to contact me, please email me at admin @ judimehrens.com (sorry about the spaces there, but I don’t need the spammer messages!).

I’m back to figuring out my stuff. I’ll let you know if eBay makes things any clearer. Be sure to read the Enos post.

 Stay well.

I spent a while this morning looking at eBay listings to try to get a sense of how the new rules are being implemented and what sellers are doing. I checked listings for home business and how to make money on eBay and found several hundred in each category - not the thousands that used to come up.

It appears there are only a few sellers using ads for their products. A few are complying with the auction rules and offering CDs to be mailed, but there are a lot of listings that are still up offering digital delivery. (The nine year old in me wanted to report them - they’re not playing by the rules! - but I resisted that urge. EBay will, I’m sure get this all figured out and get rid of the listings.) Interestingly, there are some folks who offer their items for pickup only and offer a telephone number. Hmm, could that call then lead to a digital delivery? Again, not my business, but it is interesting to see the way some folks are trying to get around the new rules.

By the way, can someone tell me how an image of a near-naked woman has anything to do with making money on eBay? I’ve seen the listings before and assumed it was geeky teenage boys selling to other geeky teenage boys, but one seller has over 6000 feedback!

So it looks to be a very good time to jump right in and get those listings going. I’m going through the instructions I told you about last time on how to do the work of getting products on CD and hope to get a bunch listed next week. If you didn’t take a look at that offer through John Thornhill’s report site, you really should. The instructions are very clear and easy to follow. (It isn’t an affiliate link for me, so I don’t tell you this to make money off of you.) There are other products out there, but I haven’t checked them out since I bought this one. Lucky for me, my new computer has the CD burning capability and includes LightScribe disc labeling (although I don’t know yet how to use it).

That’s really all today. I just wanted to share what I found at eBay. It could very well be that the gurus are right - this can be a tremendous opportunity if you’re willing to change direction and start offering your products in a physical form.

 Be well.

Well, today’s the day - the last day for digitally delivered goods to be sold on eBay. I’ll be closing up shop for a bit while I get my head wrapped around a new way of doing business.

The past week has been interesting, to say the least. The big sellers continue to point out that this is really a great opportunity for information product vendors, because there’s a greater perceived value in physical products. The general consensus is that buyers will be willing to pay $10 or $20 for products on CD - the same products they could have downloaded for $1 or $2 before.  We’ll see.

The other great wisdom is that this change will drive a lot of ebook sellers out of the eBay market altogether. This is think is probably true, at least for awhile. If you’ve been selling penny ebooks, it’s probably going to be a bit of a stretch to revamp your business so that you’re producing and selling physical products. And, for technophobes, it’s going to be scary!

As usual, John Thornhill of PlanetSMS has been a great voice of reason through this all. Here’s a link to his blog post with some very good resources:

http://www.planetsmsblog.com/

Both the report and audio have some great information. I particularly appreciate his comments about the various schemes talked about in forums to get around eBay’s prohibitions on digital delivery, and I agree with him wholeheartedly. If you’re trying to build a business by using eBay’s resources, it just doesn’t make sense to try to cheat on their rules. It’s their ballpark, and they WILL pick up the ball and all the bases and take them away if you don’t play the way they say. It might not happen today, but it will happen, and you’ll be left without an account at the worst or without that hard-earned feedback at minimum. I just can’t see where it’s worth it to get a few more sales before they catch up with you. eBay has been reading these posts as well and have answered one of the questions about whether it’s okay to sell the cd and then offer the buyer a download link to the same material:

http://www.ebaychatter.com/the_chatter/2008/03/digital-downloa.html  (look midway down the page)

Another point John makes is that the guidelines for placing ads, eBay’s only option for staying with digital delivery, are completely up in the air. It would seem that this decision wasn’t well thought out by the powers that be over at eBay. I did see a notice that they’d be discussing the changes on April 11th - hello? Eleven days after the change??

Moving on, keeping a positive attitude. Yes I am!

Included with John’s newsletter is an offer for a digital media system, offering instruction and tools for creating the products, including cd covers. I did buy this; Planet Divinity offers great value and good products, in my experience. I haven’t used the product yet, but I’ve already seen a lot of packages (you knew there’d be a lot of marketers jumping on this!), and this seems to be the most complete - and at $27, it is reasonable.

John talks about putting together a whoop-ee-doo package, with the thought that if you dazzle your buyer with the packaging (and great content, of course), you’re more apt to get great feedback and return customers. This has merit when you’re dealing with a comprehensive package of information, but I think I’ll begin with putting my offers in a more reasonably priced package. He estimates that you can do the dazzle for only about 50 cents more than the plain offering, but in my investigation of all this, you’re talking at least a couple of dollars more for packaging and packing materials - and a greater postage/delivery cost. At least I’m hoping there’s a market for the information I have to offer, people who just want the information without bells and whistles. We’ll see.

This change is also pushing me to actually do something with my web site. I can offer all my ebooks for digital delivery, because that system is all set up (the same system used for eBay sales), but the site needs to reflect that.  And, of course, all those products that are specific to setting up an ebook business on eBay now have to go.

Geez, I just discovered that the comments link on this blog are messed up. When it rains… Actually, snow here. In Oregon. On the last day of March. What the???

Guess it’s time to get over to eBay and take down my listings. Stay tuned, though. My goal is to have at least a couple of physical products up by the beginning of next week.

Stay well.

Well, isn’t this just a fine kettle of fish. eBay, in their infinite wisdom, has decided that digital goods being sold on their site offer no value to anyone, digital items are only bought and sold to manipulate feedback, and therefore, they must not be sold - except through eBay ads ($9.95 or so), where there is no participation in the eBay feedback system.

 You can see their announcement here: http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200803241300132.html

As you can see, the announcement was made yesterday afternoon, and it’s effective March 31. Nice notice!

There’s plenty of buzzing in forums about this, with suggestions that digital products be burned to CDs and offered as physical products being, so far, one of primary ways out of this fix for venders of ebooks. This is a viable option for higher priced books, and it may be that someone looking for information would be willing to spend the extra time and money it takes to get their product. It just seems to me, at least from my limited experience selling ebooks, that eBay is doing a disservice to their customers, both sellers and buyers.

The latest forum I visited also had plenty of “make lemonade from the lemons” comments on it. Well, bite me! Sure I’m working on backend and viral products, but the way of building that, of building a list so that I can diversify was all tied up in the ebook on eBay concept - a concept that has made a number of people quite financially comfortable, I might add.

On the upside, I can dump a whole bunch of ebooks from my hard drive that have to with this ebook eBay business.

I know that one of the reasons for this decision is that there are many venders selling their books for a penny, and they are primarily looking to build feedback. Apparently there are venders who will do this, build some good feedback, then move on to expensive product listings, which they don’t fulfill. Couldn’t eBay deal directly with that problem? They already shut down sites with penny books; they have to have the capability of ferreting out all the vendors selling penny books. Make it direct policy that digital products have to be sold for a minimum amount. They can’t honestly believe, in looking at their own site and the statistics of sellers who charge even $.99 that there can be any significant rapid accumulation of feedback. It takes a lot of time and energy to even list the damn books, much less get anyone to buy them. How is that feedback manipulation?

So, just as things are starting to take off in my eBay ebook sales business, it’s being shut down. Back to the drawing board in finding that one marketing method to focus on. Guess I’d better change the name of this blog, as well. But I know I’d better wait until I’m feeling a little less hostile towards eBay.

For now, I have to clean up the recommendations and resources pages to remove all the stuff about selling ebooks on Ebay. Also have to start doing some real work on SmilingPartners, where the entire first page has listings of those kinds of products. Check the site out in a few days to see the changes. Also, you only have a few days to find digital information products on eBay.

I’ve mentioned here a time or ten that I’ve been working on an old (circa 2000) laptop and my frustrations with it. Although it was top of the line when I bought it, the memory compared to today’s machines was abysmal. It was taking forever to do the tasks necessary to get an ebook business going, and I have to admit it cleary affected my enthusiasm for getting things done.

It finally completely overwhelmed me last week. I had entered a bunch of stuff onto Turbo Lister, taking several hours to complete the tedious tasks involved. All done, I hit the upload button, only to have the machine jam up, grind away for a looongg time, and then dump my work. After taking several deep breaths (away from the machine and the temptation to throw it out the window), I consulted with my husband who agreed it was way past time to make the investment in a new computer. Off to the local geek outlet - and home with a beautiful new HP Pavillion (I’m sticking with a laptop because I still have my dreams of traveling off to some exotic place and doing business from the beach!).

There are features on it that are going to take awhile to figure out, but I’m optimistic that I’ll be fully integrated into the new computer age soon!

The tasks are still tedious, but it takes less than half the time to get them done. It’s amazing to me to find myself full of enthusiasm again!

A help with that enthusiasm is that I’m making more sales of my ebooks on eBay. I’ve even started selling items from the store. I’ve sold 6 books this month so far, all at the $1.99 buy it now listing. Doesn’t sound like much, this being the 16th and all, but 4 of those were in the last 4 days, one each day. Again, big hoooo, but I do believe it’s the numbers that are starting to work. Get a bunch of books listed and somebody out of all those millions of folks who check eBay every day will find something they want or need.

I’ve been trying to find the books I have that allow rebranding and links to other books (Clickbank) and memberships, so that I can start working on the viral/backend/residual income part of this business. The dollar or so I make from a $1.99 sale through eBay is not going to pay the rent, obviously. Nor am I building any sort of significant list at this time (my sign up rate is not good, but I don’t have enough sales yet to have any sort of statistical base). And, of course, all the eBay information marketers that are making real money are doing so with their own products and through the back end sales from them or from others. I’m looking forward to the day I start having checks from Clickbank in the mailbox!

Well, I have bunches to do, both with getting more books listed and with learning about this great new computer.

 Stay well.

I wrote last time about the slump I was in for pretty much all of January and a lot of February. While I’m having spurts of activity and have done some real work on getting new listings to eBay and getting work done on the store and about me pages, there are still days of absolutely no progress.

One of the things I recognize as impeding my progress is my email. I’m on a lot of newsletter lists, ande most of them are geared more toward general internet marketing than to making money on eBay. While I’m trying to focus completely on growing the eBay business, other areas of IM certainly come into play if I’m to make this a real business: blogging (here we are!), building my websites (www.smilingpartners.com and www.chefjudi.com), getting traffic to those sites (besides any traffic generated from eBay), list building, etc. It’s also beneficial to know of the giveaways going on; at some point I hope to have products to offer myself, but in the meantime they offer opportunities to pick up products I can turn around and sell.

So, those are all my great rationales for staying on lists and reading the emails. The problem comes in managing my time. The other morning I started my day feeling full of energy and ready to get a lot of work done. For some reason I decided to see if there was something important in my email. Two hours later I was mad at myself for wasting so much time and completely exhausted and unmotivated about spending more time online.

I have found a good system for avoiding a lot of this time-wasting. I wait until evening, preferably after dinner, to look at my email. By then I’m tired and unwilling to spend any more than the absolute minimum time with my subscriptions. I begin with checking the visible subject line. If it references a seminar or call and is not from one of the eBay newsletters, I know I can toss it. I know there is a lot of information available in some of these calls, but frankly the information given is generally a prelude to the pitch for a product providing the rest of the good stuff. And by the time the interviewer gets through all the “how are doing” and “isn’t this marketer wonderful” stuff, I’ve wasted 5 or 10 minutes and been bored to tears.  So I delete those emails.

Then I look at references to “see this video.” Videos consistently jam up my machine, especially since most of them are set to begin as soon as you hit the site. I’m probably missing a bunch of good stuff, but having my machine crash and having to restart does me no good at all. Into the trash folder.

A reference to “get it now before the price goes up” can be a trigger if it doesn’t come from an eBay newsletter - and sometimes even then. I’m trying to stay committed to the plan of not spending any money for products that don’t further the eBay business.

These methods can oftentimes cut in half the emails left to read. If the subject line concerns something I just don’t feel like dealing with, the list gets even shorter.

So that’s how I’m trying to deal with information overload. There certainly are days when reading everything that comes in is appropriate. If I have some sort of niggling problem I can’t get my mind around, more often that not something in an email will directly address what I need or put my mind in the right direction.

And there are marketers whose email I read no matter what, just because I know I don’t hear from them unless they’ve found something of value. Jim Edwards (www.igottatellyou.com and a bunch of other sites) is one who comes to mind. His videos don’t start automatically so they don’t jam me up, and he’s an interesting and fun presenter. Even when he’s promoting a product, there’s a ton of very good information given before he gets to the pitch.

Another marketer I always read is Willie Crawford (http://williecrawford.com/blog/). He’s been incredibly successful online, has authored many, many guides, he hosts an online radio show about IM, and he put together the cookbook giveaway that was my first foray into the giveaway world. He also just seems like a guy you’d want to get to know. One of his projects is a membership called the InnerCircle, which I plan to join as soon as I have enough of a monthly income to support it.

I seem to be wandering a bit here, so it’s probably time to get to more lucrative endeavors. I’m working on getting back on track for my eBay listings. More about that and the eBay changes next time.

Be well.

It’s been a strange past month, and I’m not sure why. I seem to have one foot planted in the dirt and so am going in circles, unable to move forward.

Part of the reason is that I let myself get overwhelmed with all that I needed to do. I’ve written before about the process of actually getting my books listed on eBay: review, look at rights, plug in the thankyou/download page, write the sales page, write the headline, get everything into turbolister, input into both places of the digital delivery system, and make sure everything’s listed in my own databases. I’ve got all the processes in place and listed, and sometimes it’s just too much to think about.

So, instead of following my own good advice about taking each step as it comes and just DOING it, I let myself get overwhelmed by the process. A really stupid thing to do, but there it is, it happens.

I also let myself lose focus on the eBay line. I’ve been working and dinking on my websites, and I have added some good stuff. I’m just not so sure it was necessary right now to get that done. There is a satisfaction with being able to do the techie install stuff and having the web sites look like they’re actually somewhat professional. But I have been doing that stuff instead of buckling down and getting my eBay listings taken care of.

I’m still at the same pathetic 27 books listed. I’m recycling those into active listings, but the sales aren’t so hot, staying at one or two books purchased during the 7-day listing period. Not enough to pay my fees, and a long way off from getting to powerseller!

Even posting here seemed too much to deal with, and isn’t that silly?

I’ve signed up for a few new things - widgets and toys - for the web sites, but then I waited too long to do anything with them. I know they were good ideas and great little applications, but I put them away to do the implementing “later.” It’s later and I have to figure out what they are, how they work, and why I wanted them. More stupidity!

So, now I’m working hard at getting back on track. I am finding that the books about how to make money on eBay are generally the ones being sold (and I finally put together a spread sheet for what sells so I could actually keep track). I have a few new books to look at and get listed, and I’m going to figure out how make a promo box in my eBay store, so I can try listing a higher priced book. We’ll see how that works.

I got sidetracked today because of two new giveaway events, but they are worth it:

FREEPLR Giveaway Round 4, put together by a big who’s who list marketers, and

Odinn Sorenson’s DaddyGiveaway

It’s getting harder for me to find giveaways that offer books and software I haven’t picked up at another giveaway, but I found plenty of stuff to add to my collection (properly filed, of course).

There’s another I want you to know about, as well, although it doesn’t start until March 1. It’s a benefit for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. I’m already hearing a lot about it, so there’s a high probability that it will be a good event as well as a benefit for a cause close to my heart. They’re currently accepting participant signups. You can find out more here:

Gifts for MS Giveaway

That’s it for this time. Be well.