When selling on eBay the most common problem that people run into is what someone wants to sell and is f people on eBay want to buy the items that you have. There are two great ways that eBay will help you with this problem and they are both free. I will also tell you the benefits of paying for tools that will help you break down the eBay world for a different way to look at information.

The first eBay tool that you can use is the “Ideas For What To Sell” page. This page is found in the Sellers Information Center. This page will help you break down your home and point out popular things that people sell on eBay everyday. This tool breaks down your home room by room from your bedroom to the garage. This tool will eventually get you back to the eBay completed listings where you can see what the final cost and possibly sales percentage .

The next free tool that you can use the eBay pulse page. You can simple go to Pulse.eBay.com to find this tool. The eBay pulse page tells you what the top ten most searched words for each category on eBay are. I always suggest that students go down more then two levels with this tool before trying to establish what items they want to sell from around the house or from outside suppliers. Again this tool will get you back to those completed listings on eBay so that you can find the important information like sales price and sales percentage.

The two tools that people and myself us to find things to sell on eBay are either Terepeak.com or Hammertap.com. Both of these tools you will have a minimum of 20 dollars per month to subscribe to each. Both are great tools and can really help the research go much faster. They will tell you what the average sales price is and the sales percentage of each item without you having to do any of the work on your own. I always suggest my students look into tools like this if they can afford it because of the time that it will save you in the long run.

Keyword Research

One of the most important parts of any online business is the research. Specifically keyword research.

Keywords are literally going to be the life blood of your site. The proper keyword research is imperative to your site being successful. This class is designed to teach you how to do keyword research.

When starting this concept the best thing you can do is try to think to yourself, “what would my customers type into a search engine to find my site”. As you answer that question write down all of the keyword phrases you can think of.

Once you have a list of phrases, try to break the phrases down and be more specific. Try to think about where your customer might be in the buying process. Most of the better keywords phrases are probably going to be 2-4 words in length.

Once you have a list of phrases, the next thing you will want to do is check the demand and the competition for those phrases. Remember, it won’t do you any good to build your site around phrases that does not have any demand. Likewise, it also won’t do you any good to build your site around phrases that have too much competition.

First, we will want to start with the demand. In order to check demand for a phrase use the site https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal On this site there is a suggestion tool you can plug each phrase into. When you do, it will bring you back a number reflecting the amount of monthly searches done for that phrase. If that number is more than 1000, it is a phrase you can work with. If not, it tells us there probably isn’t enough demand for that phrase. Make a list of all phrases that surpass the 20 mark.

Next we want to check the competition. To check this, we want to use the Google search engine. Now when you use Google, you have to make sure to search a certain way or your results won’t be accurate. If I were selling hunting gear and that was the phrase I wanted to research, my search in the search box, should look like this….. allintitle:”hunting gear”

When you search Google this way you will find the research numbers located in the upper left hand corner of the site much smaller than probably anything you have ever seen. We want that number to be less that 20k

So remember when you do your keyword research, try to find the phrases that fall somewhere in the ballpark of 20 searches a day but no more than 20k competitive pages.

These Are Some Major Affiliate Networks

? Affiliate Networks
? CJ.com
– LinkShare.com
– ShareASale.com
– ClickBank.com
– MarketLeverage.com
– AzoogleAds.com
– Affiliate.com

? Visit this link to find the top 50 affiliate networks on the internet:
– Top 50 Affiliate Networks

Finding and Evaluating Offers
? Brainstorming Ideas
Start with ideas you’re interested in.
Make a list of friends and family, then identify several products that they purchase regularly
Look for things you know about or have experience with.
Don’t just go for big payouts in areas that
you know nothing about.

? Evaluating Offers
Relevance – Do you know people who would buy the product?
Payout
Popularity of offer – what about competition?
EPC and other metrics

When you want to get started on eBay there are things that you will need to do to insure that you will have the greatest amount of success. The first thing that you will want to do is create an account with eBay. To do so you will need to go to www.eBay.com and click on the register button. You will then have a form to fill out asking for name address and phone number. Towards the bottom of the page eBay will ask you to create a seller id. Don’t be afraid that the name you pick doesn’t reflect the product that you will be selling a year from today. The user ID is something that can be changed every 30 days.

Once you have your eBay account set up, the next step is to create you PayPal account. This is the preferred merchant account used by eBay. You will want to sign up for a premier account. This account is free and will allow you to move money from your PayPal account to your bank account more frequently without risk of penalty. Keep in mind that you can only have one PayPal account per bank account.

Now that you have a PayPal and an eBay account created the next step is to look around the house for things to sell. eBay has a section on the site called the eBay Seller Central. This tool will help you break down your home and see what other people are selling from around their homes. Once you pick the room that you want to sell out of the eBay tool will allow you to look at completed listings. Completed listings show you what happens after auctions close. Completed listings show items with Red and Green prices. Red price means that the item closed with out a sale and a Green price means it has sold. The last step is to list the item you have done the research on, remember that duplicating your competitors listings can be a great way to get an idea of how to create a listing.

When you start with affiliate marketing there are several things you need to know and understand. Below is a step by step layout on how the affiliate marketing concept works.

? You sign up for an affiliate program
? The affiliate program provides you with a coded affiliate link
? You embed that link on your website
? A customer visits your site
? Your customer is directed to the site of your affiliate partner
? They make a purchase
? The affiliate partner compensates the affiliate according to the terms of the program

Once you understand the concept, let’s discuss the true benefits of Affiliate marketing.

? Flexibility – make money while you sleep
? Low start-up costs
? No customer service
? No inventory
? Unlimited products and services to promote

There are some things to understand about affiliate marketing, below is one of the biggest myths about marketing. Although it is easier that other things it does require some work and some time.

? Myth
– Running an affiliate business is easy
? Reality
– It’s easier than some things, but it requires
a lot of work and there is a lot to learn

Last thing that we talk about are the different ways you can make money with the affiliate marketing method. There is no right or wrong way to do this, these are just different ways to be profitable.

? The Four Affiliate Marketing Models
– Pay Per Action
– Pay Per Sale
– Pay Per Lead
– Pay Per Click

Objectives
- What is Twitter
- What are the Benefits of Twitter
- How to Create an Account with Twitter
- How to Create Your Profile in Twitter
- How to Follow and be Followed on Twitter
- Communicating with People on Twitter

What is Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets”.

What are the Benefits of Twitter?
- Building a social network
- Can promote you stuff
- Networking for business purposes

How to Create an Account with Twitter
- Go to Twitter.com
- Fill out your information to sign up

How to Create Your Profile in Twitter
- Click on the drop down menu next to your username and click on settings
- Click on the Profile tab
- Picture, use your logo
- Name, use your company name
- Web, your website address
- Bio, write a couple of sentence about your business
- Design tab allows you to change the background image or create your own image
- save

How to Follow and be Followed on Twitter
- Use the Who to Follow link to get suggestions of who to follow on Twitter. Once you have an idea of who to follow then hit the follow button.
- A general rule of thumb is when you follow people they will tend to follow you back. So make sure you follow people that will follow you back.
- Make sure the people you follow would relate to your target niche.

Communicating with People on Twitter
- @krand mean you are directing a message to someone but other can see it.
- Direct messages makes it to were you only communicate with the one person
- #dance makes it easier for people to be able to the same kind of subjects you like

Once you have completed all the steps involved in setting up an affiliate based website, your final step is to duplicate the process. This is one of the most best parts in using E-commerce to build a business. You may not feel at this point you are ready to build your second site but you will be soon, so plan on it and be thinking about your game plan. Some steps that will help you do this…

• Look for something that goes along well with your first site
• You might even use the same look and feel
• Check to see other affiliates that go along with current niche
• You should already have the hosting for a new site, so all you will need is a domain name
• Design and market site in same fashion as your first site

Remember the McDonalds example we talked about in the class, in order to grow your business and take it to the next level you will want to build as many affiliate sites as you can/want.

Objectives
- What is Wordpress
- What is WP e-Commerce
- Requirements for WP e-Commerce
- Setting up the store options
- Adding Categories
- Adding Products

What is Wordpress?
Wordpress is an open source blogging tool with a content management system. What this mean is that Wordpress is primarily used as a blogging platform but through plugging or small application that can be attached to Wordpress it can be used as an eCommerce platform.

What is WP e-Commerce?
WP e-Commerce is a plugin design to allow users to add products and downloadable services to sell. It has the ability to integrate with Google Checkout, PayPal, PayPal Express and many other trusted payment processors. It also has many built in shipping options to work with.

Requirements to setup the WP e-Commerce
- Having a web host a good option here is Hostgator.com
- Having Wordpress installed which can be done through the Cpanel in Hostgator

Setting up the plugins
- Go to plugins on the left hand side
- Click on add new
- Do a search for WP e-Commerce
- Install and activate the WP e-Commerce plugin

Setting up store options
- On the left hand side click on settings and under setting click on store
- The following video will help you setup the following: presentation, admin, shipping, Paypal, taxes for you WP e-Commerce plugin

Adding Categories
- On the left click on products then under products click on categories
- In the category name type in a category name. Please note you can create as many sub-categories under a major category as you wish you just choose the main category as the parent.
- Once the category has been name scroll to the bottom and update the page to save the changes.

Adding Products
- On the left click on products then under products click on products again
- Give the product a title
- Give the product a description
- On the right choose the category the product will go under
- Just above the shipping options click on manage product images
- A popup window appears
- Click on the tab from computer
- Then click on select file and another popup window appears to the computer.
- Select the image file you want and upload the image to the listing.
- Put in the shipping cost of the product
- In the upper right-hand corner click on Publish to save the products

Assignments
- Setup WP e-Commerce if you are needing a shopping cart with Wordpress
- Setup the shopping cart options ie: presentation, payments, taxes
- Add at least 5 categories to the site
- Add at least 2 products to each of the categories of the site.