Affiliate Marketing finally pays off!

I started using Squidoo back in 2006, and I’ve gradually increased the number of the lenses and the money making approaches I’ve used there to try and increase my earnings. My hard work has finally paid off in one of the most amazing weeks I’ve ever had when it comes to Affiliate Earnings – and it’s all from one lens!

I’ve made 7 sales totalling an amazing $4,556and giving me $406.13in earnings! One of my Squidoo friends blogged once about a lens making $1000 in earnings in one month which seemed just an impossible level to reach – and I’m already 40% there in just 1 week!!

You can do it too – get set up with an affiliate program like Commission Junction, eBay Partner Network, or PepperjamNetwork, and incorporate those affiliate links into your Squidoo lenses. You can use the Squidoo money making modules like Amazon, eBay, and Cafepress as well – but money earned through your own affiliate links aren’t shared with Squidoo – you get 100% of those earnings yourself.

I’ll come back and share with you how my lens ended up doing for the month of December – but I’m one excited Squidooer today!!

Another successful Thankgiving Holiday Knitting Marathon

Annually, I take time off from my day job as an accountant to make a major push in completing my holidays orders. The Thanksgiving holiday works perfectly for this, and I know I wouldn’t be able to get all of the items sold shipped in time otherwise. This is known as my 9 Day Knitting Marathon. This year I completed 26 doll & bear sweaters during my marathon, which is slightly below my goal of 27, but I had several unexpected projects and tasks come up during the 9 day period.

Of course, I’ve continued to sell more sweaters, so I’m knitting as fast as my fingers will let me, and will probably be pulling a couple of all-nighters over the next couple of weekends to get them all done and shipped out. As stressful as this is – I love it, I feel so popular having sales coming through, and some new color combinations and designs to work with are fun too.

To top it all off, basketball season has started, and my March Madness 2009 Squidoo lens is drawing lots of traffic and starting to make affiliate sales already – and it’s only December! I can’t wait to see what happens when we get closer to March.

So all around things are crazy, busy, hectic, and I’m loving every minute of it! Hope your holidays went well, and you’ve got only 22 shopping days left until Christmas – if you’re buying handmade – don’t wait till the last minute!!

What’s ahead for eBay in 2009?

eBay recently held a webinar for the largest eBay sellers, and have provided a link to that webinar and the Q&A session that followed on the Announcement Board. I think all eBay sellers would benefit from listening and following along with the discussion, as now is the time to start putting your 2009 Budget and Business Plan together.

The Webinar link is on the Announcement Board.

The value of an Education to build your business.

This doesn’t necessarily mean a college education or a Business Degree – sometimes it’s as simple as recognizing there are skills you don’t have that you could use, and seeking out someone to teach you how to do it. Today’s entry on Seth Godin’s blog says it better than I could – I suggest you check it out.

So where you can find education to answer those questions for your online business? There are several options out there. If you have questions specifically about eBay, a great resource is the eBay Discussion Boards and Answer Center. If you’re looking to take your existing eCommerce business to the next level, I can’t recommend OSI Rock Stars enough. It will teach you about eBay and so much more.

Discussion boards and forums like Squidu on Squidoo can help you with questions specific that to specific sites, although the regulars on the Squidu forums can answer questions about SEO and other things beyond the world of Squidoo as well.

I’m lucky to have met some of the most amazing people through my online business – and formed a network of acquaintances and friends who are also amazing resources when I need help. I suggest you start looking into forming one of your own.

Time to start your Holiday Marketing!

With only 3 months till Christmas, it’s time to launch your holiday marketing plans. One of the new things I’m participating in this year is Businesses Growing Together (BGT), which is doing a holiday promotion of 2008 Holiday Shopping Discounts with a diversified collection of stores offering holiday sales promotions.

My website, Katiyana’s Handmade Collectibles will be offering a 10% off your order coupon good until 12/31/08. The code to use at checkout is HH2008.

It’s not too late for you to participate as well – just click on the banner below:

Sometimes you grow your business by being at the right place at the right time.

I didn’t post last week because I’ve been hard at work on a new project for a new customer.  Sometimes it pays to be at the right place at the right time, and grow your business in an entire new way.  The owner of Bamboletta Dolls happened to find one of my web stores, and asked me if I could duplicate sweaters to fit her wonderful handmade dolls. I of course said yes and jumped at the chance to have a direct customer who will provide me steady business without the burden of sales fees. I just shipped my first 10 sweaters off to her on Saturday after knitting like mad to get the first batch done in time for a Farmer’s Market she is attending.

This can be a big advantage to running your business across multiple venues and finding the time to develop a presence in multiple place around the internet. You never know when a special person like Christina will find YOU, and change your business around. I am beginning to cultivate a small group of steady, high-volume customers for my doll sweaters like Christina. Given I can only knit so fast, the more of these kind of customers I can get long-term projects with, the less I’ll need to list on sales venues that charge me fees. Another great plus for me is I’m working with 100% wool which is a dream to knit with.

I wanted to share my good fortune with you for this week’s blog post – now I have to get back to knitting

Prostores – Build an off-eBay presence that links to eBay

One of my more recent additions to my sales venues collection is a Prostore that I opened up in July 2007, after eBay Live 2007 in Boston. Katiyana’s Handmade Collectibles has some distinct advantages over my other handbuilt websites.

First, I can upload my product via an Excel spreadsheet, which makes it VERY easy to add categories and products to the site, where on my other two websites I have to add things manually by coding them into the page.

Second, I have both Google and Yahoo feeds turned on so my product feeds are automatically being sent out to the search engines with no extra work on my part.

Third, you can import products from your eBay store (and in fact run a “mirror” site to your eBay store if you wish), and use checkout redirect to collect a customer database.

Fourth, if you have an eBay Store, you get a 30% discount on your monthly subscription cost.  My Business Level would normally cost $29.95, but I only pay $20.95.

A major con to a Prostore – IF you also use the Paypal Shopping Cart at one of your other websites you’ll probably run into a bug where your buyers who pay via Paypal are double charged S/H fees. This is because of the way Prostores reports the order amount to Paypal, Paypal sees it as a shopping cart transaction and applies S/H fees per the table you have set up with Paypal. If you don’t use Paypal’s shopping cart, you don’t run into this problem at all.

If you want to give it a try, you can get a Business Level Prostore (what I have) free for one month using by clicking on the banner below:

There are already third party services developping around Prostores. One examples is Sales In A Click, which is an automatic monthly newsletter that is sent out to your Prostore Database featuring your products, as well as articles based on the categories you select, and you can add custom text as well. This is a service I learned about at eBay Live 2008 in Chicago, and have been running for two months now.

Free venues for building an off-eBay presence

One of the main complaints I hear about eBay from sellers is that it’s so expensive to sell there. One of the options you have as a seller is to open up shops at other venues that are low-cost, but remember that when you don’t have eBay driving traffic for you, you’ll need to be responsible for your own marketing.

Two of these venues that are 100% free to use are Blujay and Ecrater. Yep, they are 100% free to use – no listing fee, no FVF, and no store subscription fees!

To see these venues in action, you can visit my two stores that I have there:

Blujay: Katiyana’s Collectibles at Blujay
Ecrater: Katiyana’s Collectibles at Ecrater

The obvious advantage to using these sites is the lack of expenses associated with them – the only thing you’d have is payment processing costs (both sites support Paypal and Google Checkout as payment methods).

The obvious disadvantage is they are not sales venues the size of eBay bringing a lot of traffic into the site, and into your listings. They do automatically feed your listings into Google Base, so that’s one thing you don’t have to figure out how to do. So once you have your site up, you’ll need to do your own marketing. One excellent way to do this is through blogs, Squidoo lenses, and making sure your listings are SEO ready.

Both sites provide RSS feeds that can be dropped into the RSS module in a Squidoo lens, and then your lens becomes a shopping catalog leading directly to the shopping cart of your store!

Check these examples from my Squidoo lenses and picture how you can do the same with your listings:

Blujay: Blujay lens
Ecrater: One of my Ecrater Lenses

Alternative Selling Venues – Etsy – The eBay of Handmade Merchandise

Today’s article will be the first in a series that I will be doing on alternative selling venues that eBay buyers and sellers might want to look into using. First, I want to show you Etsy, which is fast becoming the eBay for Handmade Merchandise. You see, the site is limited to handmade items, as well as the supplies used to make them, and vintage items. It’s a very narrow range of products, so many sellers might not be able to sell here, but might look to SHOP here. I sell my handmade doll clothes and bear clothes, as well as ACEO trading card sleeves from my Etsy Shop, Katiyana’s Collectibles.

For sellers, the fees are very reasonable. Listing fees are 20 cents for four MONTHS of listing time for a quantity of 1. If you listed an item with a quantity of 3 available it’d be 60 cents for 4 months of listing time. There is a flat 3.5% FVF charged on the sale price of all items sold. There are forums for users to network and interact, as well as Showcases and Alchemy that are creative ways to showcase product, or hire someone to create a product for you!

Please come pay Etsy a visit, I think you’ll be glad you did!

 

The Front Page of Etsy

Some sad news from eBay Live – a friend who could use some help:

As you know, I am a member of OSI Rock Stars, who were very active at eBay Live this year with the Spot the Rock Star contest, as well promoting ourselves and the Rock Star program. One of the most energetic members leading up to eBay Live was Janieruth, who helped organize so many things, and her enthusiasm was contagious to the rest of us who were going to attend the event. Tragically, our Janieruth was critically injured in an accident while sightseeing. In support of our dear friend, Janieruth, a website has been created to share updates with the Rock Stars, as well as to help fundraise for the mounting medical bills the family will be facing. If you would like to leave a prayer or positive thought, or add to our fundraising efforts, you can visit Janieuth’s Fund webpage. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide to get our Janieruth back again.