Monday, November 24, 2008

The Big Mistakes to Avoid When Making Money Online from eBay

After you have successfully setup your eBay business and started to make some money from the eBay auctions, it is a wise idea to keep on reading and learning about eBay selling as much as you can.

There are a few big mistakes that you might be making when doing business on eBay. That can cause you a lost. But, these mistakes aren’t difficult to correct if you know what they are. Below are some samples:

Setting Wrong Timing for Your Auction
The time that most people have a few hours of free time to spend is Sunday evening. Researches show that this is the most popular time for going online and purchasing on the Internet. So, if the timing of your auction has been set to miss Sunday evening, then you could be losing a lot of good sales.

Ignoring the Importance of Photos
If you think the item photo has not much help in your eBay selling, you could be losing many buyers. The eBay buyers often want to see how the item looks like before bidding it. So, it is necessary that you take 2 to 3 photos in different angles for every item, letting the potential buyers see totally your item.

Poor quality of the photos is another mistake. eBay does give advice about the types of photos that work best. For example, the photos need to be in plain background so that the products can be appeared clearly and eliminate confusion on what actually you are selling. Clear photos that show up your products well will certainly attract more and higher bids.

Over Formatting Your Sale Text and Descriptions
Putting too much animation, eye-catching color text and other distractions in your sale description isn't a good idea. This attempt was actually to get the customers' attention and bids. But, it results the opposite way. It provides great distraction and causes the sale message and details difficult to read. If a potential eBay buyer has clicked on your auction, you already have got their attention. The details and description should be clear, easy and simple to read with the aim to get the viewers' bid.

Setting a Reserve Price may be a Bad Idea
Placing a reserve price on your item can scared off your potential eBay buyers. Many of the potential buyers will not place a bid on the listings that have a reserve price because they worry that they are going to pay a lot money if they win the auction. So, it is better not to set a reserve price on your listed item. Low starting bid price is encouraged to get the maximum bids.

Mistakes cause you lose money. But once you have learned and found out what you are doing wrong, you can deal with them easily.

Free Resources Helpful to Make Money Online - 14 November 2008

Here are the latest useful resources I came across:

Blogging Marketing E-course
You'll need advice and practical tips when you just started blogging for making money online. The Blogging Marketing eCourse of Simon Hodgkinson has the useful information you need. Simon realizes that blogging is a wide topic, it is not possible to learn all of them in short period of time. So he divided his blog marketing course into 35 parts and send them out in email every day. When you sign up for the course, you will adsorb new info about blogging every day which will help you success in blogging.

Teenagemarketer.com
James Penn is just a 18 year old teenager, but he already made a living online. He has his own online business and know how to market it to generate profit. James is sharing with others now in his site Teenagemarketer.com on how he build a online business from scratch and the strategies he has applied to make the business generates full-time income for him. If you are interested to learn his strategies, you may go to.

The Social Media Manifesto Report
This report is all about social media marketing. If you believe that social media traffic can be converted well into leads or sales, then this report is for you. The author of this report will show you how to turn social medial traffic into leads or sales and how to take you online business to next level through using the power of social media. Download a copy of this report here.

Google AdSense Tips: Formatting Your Content Looks like AdSense Ads is Disallowed

Last Tuesday morning when I checked my email, I found there was an email from the Google AdSense team sent to me. I quickly opened the email to find out what it is about.

Well, it was a bad news to me. It was a warning from Google AdSense team. They said when they were reviewing my AdSense account they found violations of AdSense policies on my pages such as http://moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com. They then further explained that I cannot implement AdSense ads in a manner that disguises the ads such as formatting neighboring content to look similar to the ads, or by making ads look like games or forum threads. Additionally, images cannot be placed close to the ads. And I was given 3 days to make the necessary changes. If I choose not to make the changes I will no long allowed to display AdSense ads but my account will still remain active.

After finished reading the email, I really feeling worry and confuse. How come I can against so many policies since I have read their policies and add the Adsense ads carefully? This made me headache a while.

I browsed my own pages to find out what really went wrong. I thought back what types of content pages I have created. Fortunately, I managed to figure out and conclude that the violation of AdSense policies is due to some of my content pages formatted to be look similar to AdSense ads.

Once I found out this, I immediately started checking all my pages. I clicked on my own archive pages to review each post and make changes to the posts that disallowed by Google. There are total of 772 posts I have to review and it took about ten hours to review all the blog pages and modify the problem pages. My head is spinning doing all these works.

After three days, I saw my AdSense ads still appear on my pages. So, Google has probably satisfied with the changes I have made and let me continue to make money with AdSense.

Why I'm telling you this?

I hope that you didn't make the same mistake just like I did when implementing AdSense ads on your site and blog to make money online. It is painful to make changes especially if your site have hundreds of pages. It is a tedious work to check back each of your pages.

So, don't format your neighboring content look like AdSense. Google actually spend the time to check AdSense publisher accounts. I think they are checking each publisher account, just don't know whether they are doing the checking manually or automatically.

How to Generate Passive Online Income Using Articles - Part 2

The part 1 of this article has been shared with you two ideas of using articles to earn passive income. Below is another two ideas for you.

Contribute in HubPages
A huge content network that you probably have heard about is Hubpages. Hubpages has articles and information in a wide range of topics. All the content are contributed by HubPages Community of authors around the world. Hubpages is opened to anyone. If you have information or content to share, then you may join Hubpages. Each article page you create is called hub. You can add in your AdSense code to have your AdSense ads automatically displayed on your hubs. If you are also an affiliate of eBay and Amazon, you can choose any product of eBay and Amazon; and feature them in your hub.

The good thing about Hubpages is that it attracts search engine attention because there are loads of content published in Hubpages. So, with some informative and keyword-optimized hubs that you built, you can attract constant traffic from search engines like Google. Part of the traffic may convert into AdSense and if you are lucky, your hubs might generate a few eBay or Amazon sales that will further increase your income.

Hubpages makes no promise on how much the authors can make. The income you can earn is much depending on the volume of content you contribute. The hubs you created, the greater your passive income potential might be.

Build You Own Content Website
This is an ideal option for you if you don’t want to write content for other sites. You can use a website builder such as Xsitepro to build you own niche content website. The topic of your website should be popular or it is the one that you interested. Then write good articles for the chosen topic and publish them on your niche content website. Each of your content pages will be optimized with AdSense ad and link units to generate income.

You have full control when publishing articles on your own site, but you are going to need to market the site yourself. Targeted traffic will generate AdSense revenue. You have to keep on marketing your site to drive targeted traffic to your site in order to make thing works. That certainly will involve a learning curve and a lot of hard work on your part. So, be prepared for that.