eBay Live 2008 has come and gone…

What a crazy week it has been! I have so much to tell you about! I’m going to try to make Monday night “Blog Night” so you can hear from me a little more often.

First of all, I had to finish up the work administering the Squidoo-eBay challenge that I told you about in my last post – it brought me over 140 lenses to review and then pick my favorites from to submit to the judges. The judges ended up picking TWO winners for the contest:

Monkees Merchandise by KimGiancaterino
Scott Barnes Cosmetics by belasboutique03

Congrats to them both for their victory!

Then I had to finish packing up for my trip to eBay Live in Chicago, where in addition to the things I was planning on doing (like attending Seth Godin’s presentation), I was part of the Spot the Rock Star contest. Have you ever wondered what it feels like to be swarmed by paparazzi? Well now I know! Check out the video below to see what I mean:

Isn’t that WILD? That was part of my eBay Live experience because I’m part of the OSI Rock Stars community. We were sharing information about the OSI Rock Stars site with eBayers and got lots of goodies to keep and lots MORE goodies to give away, including business cards for a contest. I know we got some new Rock Stars signed up, and can’t wait to see who won the prizes!

eBay Live is also a chance to interact with eBay staff – not only to talk business, but also to have fun – like this video clip of having a little fun with the staff in the Buyer Central booth:

The finale of eBay Live is the Gala, and you enter the Gala through the Clapping Tunnel of eBay staff. If you’ve never experienced it before, I hope this video gives you just a taste of it.

You will be able to check out my Squidoo Lens about eBay Live for all of my pictures and videos from the event in a few days, I’ve just started downloading them and organizing them. For now I have to get caught up on my orders and emails from being away, and get back to knitting as I had three large doll sweater orders come in while I was away!

eBay Live Contests that I’m participating in for 2008

Gosh, I have so much going on to tell you about!

First, I was asked by Squidoo HQ to administer a special challenge leading up to eBay Live to showcase the synergy between eBay & Squidoo, and how eBayers are using Squidoo to promote their business, talk about their collections, and make more money through affiliate sales. This Squidoo-eBay Challenge will be ending soon, but we’ve had several early submissions and a lot of awesome lenses are in the running for some great prizes.

Learn more about the Squidoo-eBay Challenge from my lens on the subject.

Second, I am one of 35 members of OSI Rock Stars attending eBay Live and helping to get the word out about how great OSI Rock Stars is by participating in the Spot the Rock Star contest. You could learn more about THAT from Janieruth’s awesome Spot the Rock Star Squidoo lens.

I’m so looking forward to eBay Live this year – I’m going to get to hear Seth Godin give a presentation, get to meet Janelle Elms and several of my fellow Rock Stars, and LOTS of eBayers to network with and talk to about eBay and how to build your eBay business.

My overall business (of which eBay is one slice of my sales pie) is having a record year so far – profits are up 158% compared to last year through 5 months – and I attribute a lot of that to Squidoo, and things I’ve learned from Captain Squid about using Squidoo and OSI Rock Stars – which isn’t just limited to eBay, it can apply to things that can be equally used for your websites or other sales venues.

Rock On in 2008 – and I hope to see you at eBay Live! Watch for me!

Sharing my Squidoo knowledge with others

One of my favorite things to do with OSI Rock Stars has been to share my love of Squidoo with them through 3 Webinars and moderating the Squidoo forum there.

Now I’ve helped out the Giant Squid Organizers by writing an article about SquidBids – which is a co-branding site that joins two of my favorite sites: Squidoo and eBay!

I have more Squidoo/eBay related projects on the horizon – so stay turned for more details in the VERY near future!

eBay Live 2008 in Chicago – will you be there?

The biggest party for eBay sellers has to be the eBay Live convention, this year to be held in Chicago, IL. You can learn more about the event from my Squidoo Lens about it. I’m looking forward to making new eBay friends, and spending more time with my friends from the eBay Discussion Boards and OSI Rock Stars!

If you haven’t registered yet, it’s not too late to do so, and there is so much great stuff to see and do there!
* Classes covering a wide range of eBay tools and topics
* Solutions floor with sourcing, tools, and product vendors offering lots of freebies!
* Booths manned by eBay and Paypal staff eager to talk to you about what YOU want to see from eBay
* Guest speakers like Seth Godin from Squidoo
* Keynote address presented by eBay Executives where they usually announce some of the upcoming initiatives and changes to the site you can expect to see
* Closing Gala featuring music by Chris Isaak.

Come check it out in Chicago June 19-21, 2008!

The value of Diversification

One of the key business practices that I employ is Diversification. Diversification basically means the same as the hold adage of “Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket”, but can be applied to your business in a number of ways. I have a Squidoo lens about Diversification How To’s to help open your mind to ways you can diversify in your own business.

One key area of diversification is Venue Diversifications. Many online sellers get their start on eBay, and when starting out, 100% of their sales are coming from eBay. However, given the constant level of changes on the site, it’s become more unstable of a platform in the past couple of years. I’ve been encouraging sellers to explore other venues that fit into their business, whether it is their own independent website or other online sales venues like Etsy.com.

Another key area is Product Diversification. Sellers can get started in a number of ways, whether selling things out of their home in an online garage sale. Those who begin as niche sellers have small, specialized products that they sell. Product diversification can mean expanding to related products or to totally new products that help bring a new buyer base into your business. My main product line is handmade doll and bear clothes. Right now I’m in the middle of adding a new size of sweater to my business for the My Twinn doll. I’ve been selling trading card sleeves for a number of years, dating back to my days selling Pokemon trading cards. I soon found another buyer base for the same product in ACEO and ATC artists. By expanding my marketing of the same product, I have significantly increased my sales.

Another area of diversification is Supplier Diversification. Don’t be afraid to shop around for new suppliers of products or shipping materials, you might find a better deal or better product elsewhere. Establishing a relationship with a supplier is great, and sometimes you can negotiate even better prices if you let them know that you have other options. With shipping supplies, buying in bulk can often reduce your per item cost, but make sure you have space available to hold all of those bubble mailers

Keep in mind that diversification will take some time to develop, but it is an investment that will pay off for our business. I used to be 90% eBay, and now I’m down to 50% eBay as my off-eBay venues are growing in production.

Thanks for reading my article on diversification, and if you have suggestions or questions please leave a comment!

Why I love Squidoo

Squidoo is one of the tools I use to market my online business, and there are two things I love about Squidoo. 

First is the flexibility in the variety of lenses you are able to create about topics ranging so far and wide.  Plus you can have individuals creating lenses on the same main topic, but putting their own spin on them.  Besides lenses to promote my business, I’ve written lenses about OSI Rock Stars and its founder, Janelle Elms, and many of my favorite things:  books, movies, TV shows, actors and actresses, sports, memories from my childhood, even a lens in memorial of my late husband – the list goes on and on!

You can see my complete list of lenses on my main account by visiting my Lensography (which is a lens about my lenses).

The second thing I love about Squidoo is the extra income it has brought into my business. There are five ways of making money through Squidoo lenses.

1) Direct Sales – if you create a Squidoo lens about your eBay store, and drive traffic there who shops from you, you’ve made sales
2) Direct Affiliate Sales – if you have affiliate relationships with companies that are tied to your lens topics, you can insert banners or links into your lens, and if you drive buying traffic to that company, you can get paid a commission or finders fee for the business you send their way.
3) Shared Affiliate Sales – similar to the above option, Squidoo has established affiliate relationships with multiple companies like eBay, Amazon, and Cafepress, and built modules that you can insert into your lenses. As #2 above, any sales those modules generate will create a commission, but that commission is shared with Squidoo.
4) Ad Revenue Sharing – each lens has ads inserted by Squidoo into it – Google Adsense and Glam ads primarily at this time. The revenues from those ads are used to pay for Squidoo’s operating expenses, plus a portion is donated to charity. The remainder is shared with lensmasters on the basis of the Lensranks of their individual lenses. The higher ranked your lens, the higher piece of the pie that one lens will earn. If you have a lot of middle-tiered lenses you can earn a lot as well. I have seen significant increases in my Ad revenue share earnings as I’ve created more lenses across a variety of topics.
5) Squidoo services – the newest way to make money is to use your Squidoo experience and knowledge to provide services to others. I have been building lenses for almost 2 years now, and that experience I have used to start a Lens Building Service primarily targetting eBay sellers, but open to sellers in other venues as well.

Squidoo has gone from being a very small website where I just spent some time to have fun, to a serious tool and profit center for my business. My expectation is that this will continue, and as Squidoo continues to evolve in the future, my use of it will as well.

There are over 500,000 lenses in the Squidoo Community now – and that number continues to grow daily – how many of those lenses are yours?

How OSI Rock Stars inspires users

I’ve been a member of OSI Rock Stars since October 2007, and I’ve learned a number of things that I’ve been able to apply to my online business, and all of its components especially my eBay Store.

One of the most important lessons that I have learned is to think outside of the box to look for ways to expand and improve my business. One of the key components of the marketing aspect of my business is Squidoo, a platform that allows users to create one-page webpages called lenses about almost any topic you’d like. Squidoo lenses are excellent ways to create catalogs and promotional pages for your online stores. I have over 200 lenses myself, and have had the opportunity to each three Squidoo classes at OSI Rock Stars. I also moderate the Squidoo forum in the OSI Rock Stars forums. One of the things that I began to notice is that many Rock Stars had an interest in using Squidoo to market their business, but they don’t have the time to devote to maintaining a lens, or to deal with the learning curve in building good Squidoo lenses. This is knowledge and experience that I already have, and so I decided to expand my business to include Squidoo Lens Building and Marketing for other online sellers. I created a Squdioo Lens about eBay Marketing on Squidoo, and generated a news release which Janelle Elms included in her eBay Success Group and OSI Rock Star newsletters. This gave me an instant customer base, and I’ve already gotten a number of great clients for my new Lens Building service.

I don’t think I would have had the confidence to try and monetize my Squidoo experience in this way if I hadn’t gained confidence and knowledge from Janelle and the other members of OSI Rock Stars. I actually made my first lens for another member of OSI Rock Stars by building a lens for my friend Barbara of Grandpa’s Trading Company. I put the basic lens together and transferred it over to Barbara to continue editing and building. This is one of the options I give to my clients, to get the lens started and then transfer it over to them when it’s finished. My second option is to not only build the lens for them, but to market and promote that lens for them as well. In exchange for this extra work, I maintain the lens on my account, and may use affiliate links in the lens. This way the more sales & traffic I send to their store, the more money I can make – a win-win situation for us both! The third option is what I call “Adopt A Lens”, where you transfer a lens from your account to mine, so I can do some repair work and then market it for you.

If you’re interested in my Squidoo Lens Building Service, please come check out my lens and feel free to email me with any questions.

OSI Rock Stars – A Resource that extends beyond your business

I am a proud member of OSI Rock Stars which is an educational gold mine for online entrepreneurs – whether you sell on eBay, Amazon, or your own website, you will find gems of wisdom that you can apply to YOUR business and to your life. With all of the changes happening on eBay already this year, there has been a lot of great content provided to help eBay sellers like myself prepare for the change, and to use them to our benefit as much as possible. But OSI Rock Stars isn’t just about eBay.

One of the recent podcasts that I listened to was from Linda Leist, the owner of Eliminate Chaos.  She wrote a book called “Eliminate Chaos:  The 10 Step Process to Organize your Home and Life”.  After listening to that podcast, I went right out to purchase the book and began to apply it to MY unorganized life.  My first project was my sewing room, which is a vital component of my online business where I sell handmade doll clothes and handmade bear clothes off of my website as well as an eBay Store.  I have built a Squidoo lens to show the process from beginning to end – you can check it out on Squidoo. I use Squidoo extensively for my business, and there is also tons of great content available about Squidoo to be found on OSI Rock Stars.

This is just one example of the great content available through OSI Rock Stars that will apply not only to your business, but also to your life in general.