I’d guess by now you may have heard quite a few people online talking about how you can make money at home easy with no experience in a matter of days. Well listen up as I tell you the truth is a little bit different.

So, before entering into the unknown and chucking your hard earned dollar down the throat of some online guru promising to change your life for the better take a few minutes to review the opportunity in front of you to be certain you’ve found a legitimate and honest online opportunity

* The opportunity is hidden? I’m being asked to hand over piles of cash without really knowing what it’s all about, is this legit?

There should be no reason to hide what’s on offer if the internet buisness is for real. Yes, you won’t see the whole bag but you should have a fairly good peek inside before paying for it. If it’s all cloak and dagger leave it behind and move on.

* I’m being asked for cash up front – is this normal? or is there a FREE Trial period involved?

Money making online scams often tell you to invest cash up front with no option or you’ll miss the boat, promising massive returns with no effort involved or invested. The truth is these kind of opportunities do not exist anywhere so walk away.
A FREE Trial period is essential. If the buisness is a for real you should have a minimum 30 day money back guarantee on offer and if you’re being asked to jump in without this kind of agreement in place back off and fast.

* This looks way too difficult and I can’t understand a word of it. Will I be able to follow the instructions and start my internet business without having to invest a lot of money like it says?

It takes time and a marketing budget to build a successful online business but most people start with massive ideas and little else. These days any genuine online business worth its salt should have a series of simple step-by-step video tutorials to take help your knowledge and your income grow right alongside one another. If what you’re looking at falls short of this file it away with the rest of your online trash.

There is a lot of money to be earned with an online business and you can be successful if you learn to recognise which are the honest ways to make money on the internet, discover how to spot money making online scams and remember how to avoid disappointment by building your business today, tomorrow and into the future.

With so many opportunities online it’s easy to get pulled in one direction and then another like a kid in a fairground, grinning at the next big thing that shows it’s head and offers to make you a fortune in your underpants. Well, the truth is there are thousands, if not millions of ways to lose money online and if you want to keep chasing the next best thing pretty soon you’ll be joining the long list of failed internet marketers who have travelled that road.

If you want to make money online keep it focused and follow these three simple steps to make money online easy.
Find a Niche

Look for a niche that interests you and then find a product to promote in that niche. The best place to find an affiliate product, that way there is no need to start from scratch and you can let someone else deal with any customer complaints or returns.

Build A Squeeze Page

A squeeze page is a basic web page which will capture details of people who might be interested in receiving more information about your product or products. This is where email marketing kicks in so learn how to set up an autoresponder and how to write compelling sales copy to show your customers the value of your product and to increase online sales through your opt-in list.

Drive Traffic To Your Site

You can have the best website or squeeze page online but if people don’t know it’s there they won’t walk through the door and buy your products. It’s as simple as that.
So, that’s the basic online business model used by the vast majority of successful internet marketers to drive profits through the roof. Forget about the latest marketing software or the latest product of the week, focus on these three simple steps and you will see success with your home based business.

Here’s my list of some of the most useful language you need to know.

(Don’t panic there’s no test involved – you don’t need to memorise it – even the most common jargon is only used rarely)

Words

• Bid: telling eBay’s system the maximum price you are prepared to pay for an item.
• Dutch: an auction where more than one of an item is available.
• Feedback: positive or negative comments left about other users on eBay.
• Mint: in perfect condition.
• Non-paying bidder: a bidder who wins an auction but does not then go on to buy the item.
• PayPal: an electronic payment method accepted by most sellers.
• Rare: used and abused on eBay, now entirely meaningless.
• Reserve: the minimum price the seller will accept for the item.
• Shill bid: a fake bid placed by a seller trying to drive up their auction’s price.
• Snail Mail: the post, which is obviously very slow compared to email.
• Sniping: bidding at the last second to win the item before anyone else can outbid you.

Abbreviations

• AUD: Australian Dollar. Currency.
• BIN: Buy it Now. A fixed price auction.
• BNWT: Brand New With Tags. An item that has never been used and still has its original tags.
• BW: Black and White. Used for films, photos etc.
• CONUS: Continental United States. Generally used by sellers who don’t want to post things to Alaska or Hawaii.
• EUR: Euro. Currency.
• FC: First Class. Type of postage.
• GBP: Great British Pounds. Currency.
• HTF: Hard To Find. Not quite as abused as ‘rare’, but getting there.
• NIB: New in Box. Never opened, still in its original box.
• NR: No Reserve. An item where the seller has not set a reserve price.
• OB: Original Box. An item that has its original box (but might have been opened).
• PM: Priority Mail.
• PP: Parcel Post.
• SH: Shipping and Handling. The fees the buyer will pay you for postage.
• USD: United States Dollars. Currency.
• VGC: Very Good Condition. Not mint, but close.

The chances are that you’ll find more specific jargon related to whatever you’re selling, but it’d be an impossible task to cover it all right here so I won’t try. If you can’t figure one out from your knowledge of the subject, then type the term into Google, followed by the word ‘ebay’. The chances are that someone, somewhere in the world will have seen fit to explain it for the rest of the eBay world.

While it’s good to be able to understand others’ jargon, avoid using yourself it unless you really need to (for example, if you run out of space in an item’s title). Many people on eBay are not experienced buyers and you will lose them if you don’t use plain language.

Remember, there’s a big market out there online for you to sell your products to and eBay is only one way for you to learn how to profit on the internet. There are many more…

If you’ve ever read an articles about eBay, you will have seen the kinds of incomes people are making right now – it isn’t unusual to hear of people making thousands of dollars per month on eBay. In fact, it’s becoming more and more common for charities, small business owners, online entrepreneurs and your average joe  to turn to the internet to learn how to make a living online and eBay is a great place to start.

Next time you’re on eBay, take a look at how many PowerSellers there are: you’ll find quite a few. Now consider that every single one of one of them must be making at least $1,000 per month, as that’s eBay’s requirement for becoming a PowerSeller. Silver PowerSellers make at least $3,000 each month, while Gold PowerSellers make more than $10,000, and the Platinum level is $25,000. The top ranking is Titanium PowerSeller, and to qualify you must make at least $150,000 in sales every month and some people are making that kind of money.

So, if you’re looking to bring in a new income stream and have a few notions towards eBay trading listen up…

The fact that these people exist gives you some idea of the income possibilities available on eBay. Most of these individuals probably never even set out to set up a business on eBay – they simply started selling a few things, and then kept going, and kept going – following a fairly big carrot and taking the occassional nibble so to speak.

Today there are a growing number of people making a pile of money selling things on eBay, simply by following a few steps to ensure they get the right price for the right product.

Just think about it for a minute… you purchase stock at a trade price or lower and prepare a good ad to bring in a few bids and wait to reach your target – everything else is pretty much pure profit – you don’t pay for business premises, staff, transport or incur any other costs associated with running your own business.

And for charities, church groups or small businesses looking to generate extra income this has to be seen as a viable form of online trading and income generation.

There are multi-million pound businesses making less in actual profit than some eBay Powersellers do so take a look if you haven’t done so already and learn how to make money on eBay as part of your funding plan for the year ahead. By doing just a little bit each week you should soon start to see the profits adding up so even if you’re only committing a small amount of your time to eBay it will begin to pay you back on your efforts.

What’s more, eBay doesn’t care who you are, where you live, or what you look like: eBay is a true meritocracy where you get on and are rewarded for your actions whoever you are. Some PowerSellers are in the eighties and some their teens. Some live out in the middle of nowhere where selling on eBay is one of the few alternatives to farming or travelling hours every day to work.

eBay tears down the barriers to earning where the real world constantly puts them up in front of you. There’s no job interview, no commuting and no finger pointing involved – if you can post things, you can do it.

Put it this way: if you know where to get something reasonably cheap that you could sell, then you can sell it on eBay – and since you can always get discounts for bulk at wholesale, that shouldn’t be too difficult. Buy a job lot of something in-demand cheaply, sell it on eBay, and you’re making money, with no set-up costs.

If you want to dip your toe in the water before you commit to actually buying anything, then you can just sell things that you’ve got lying around in the house. Search through that cupboard for stuff you never use, and you’ll probably find you’ve got a few hundred euros, dollars or pounds worth of stuff lying around in there! Pick it up, wrap it up and get ready to move it on.

This is the power of eBay - there is always someone who wants what you’re selling, whatever it might be, and since they’ve come looking for you, you don’t even need to do anything to get them to buy it.

So you want to get started on eBay?

I can answer this question for you right now: the answer is ‘yes’. In fact, the answer is ‘YES!’ – the biggest yes you’ve ever heard – can you hear it? Of the course the customer is always right. If you want learn how to be a successful eBay seller or have any success selling online, you should go miles out of your way to make sure every single one of your customers is 100% satisfied, however much time or money it might cost you, all the time, every time.

A dissatisfied eBay customer will leave negative feedback, and negative feedback is to be avoided at all costs. That one piece of negative feedback will always cost you more than it would have to deal with the complaint, whatever the value of the items you sell. You should consider any positive feedback percentage under 100% to be an absolute disaster, and a personal failure on your part.

But What If…

But nothing! There is no situation where you, as a seller, should get into any dispute with a buyer.

You should always handle customers’ complaints before they complain to eBay – in fact, you should email them pre-emptively to ask if they have any. Going through the dispute process is time consuming, reflects badly on you and is  unnecessary if you get your house in order at the outset.

Still not convinced? Think this would only work with cheap items? Well, you see, the higher the price of the items you sell, the more your reputation is worth to you. Let’s say you were selling €10,000 worth of items each week, for example, and making a €1,000 profit per week overall. You might think that refunding one customer’s €1,000 purchase would be a tragedy, losing you your whole week’s profit. It’s far better to look at it this way: if you don’t give that refund, then not only will you lose the next week’s profit, but you’ll probably lose a few weeks’ profit after that too. Now which option looks better to you?

I can’t emphasise enough the importance of understanding that the customer is always right. It can be a painful lesson for some eBay traders to learn and an easy one for others to avoid. What’s your plan of action?

For every seller who doesn’t like the idea that their item might sell for a far lower price than they intend, there’s another who wants to shift hundreds of the same item quickly. eBay tries to cater to all tastes. So what are the best eBay auctions for you?

• Normal Auctions

These are the bread-and-butter of eBay, the auctions everyone knows: buyers bid, others outbid them, they bid again, and the winner gets the item. Simple.

• Reserve Auctions

Reserve auctions are for sellers who don’t want their items to sell for less than a certain price – a concept you’ll know about if you’re familiar with real auctions. They work just like normal auctions on eBay, except that the buyer will be told if their bid does not meet the reserve price you set, and they’ll need to bid again if they want the item. If no-one is willing to meet your price, then the auction is cancelled, and you keep the item.

• Fixed Price (‘Buy it Now’) Auctions.

Buy it Now auctions can work in one of two ways. You can add a Buy it Now button to a normal auction, meaning that buyers can choose either to bid normally or to simply pay the asking price and avoid the whole bidding process. Some sellers, though, now cut out the auction process altogether and simply list all their items at fixed price. This lets you avoid all the complications of the auction format and simply list your items for how much you want them to sell for.

• Multiple Item (‘Dutch’) Auctions.

These are auctions where you can sell more than one of a certain item. Dutch auctions can be done by bidding. Buyers bid a price and say how many items they want, and then everyone pays the lowest price that was bid by one of the winning bidders. If you have trouble getting your head around that, then don’t worry – everyone else does too! These auctions are very rare.

What is more common is when a seller has a lot of one item, and lists it using a combination of two auction types: a multiple-item fixed price auction. This just means that you can just say how many of the item you they have, and offer them at a fixed price per unit. Buyers can enter how many they want and then just click Buy it Now to get them.

Now that you know about the different types of auctions, you should make sure that the items you plan to sell don’t violate eBay’s listing policies. If you’re serious about making money on eBay you need to know what’s allowed and what is a big no-no.

Here’s one of the elite eBay marketers on the planet.

We have christened this place ‘The Long And Winding Network Marketing Road’ and I’ll explain why…

I take our three dogs here once a week with the family to blow out a few cobwebs, drag myself away from the social media drug I seem increasingly addicted to and give my wife and three children a few hours of family time with dad (whether they want it or not!)…

The dogs love it. It’s wild and rugged with all kinds of distractions along the way and plenty to sniff, smell, roll in and occasionally consume and at the end there is the lake; blue and deep and free for all to take their share.

The dogs know this place well by now of course. They have seen the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and drank from the lake, swam in it and chased geese across it in the Summer and when we take our walk each week they have the same choices to make.

• They can race towards the lake, head down, forcing anyone in their way to either run for cover or follow their frantic lead.

Or..

• They can take their time, enjoy what the journey has to offer them, maybe even see if they can make a few good friends along the way or learn something no other dogs know.

Hey..

• They can think about the size of the lake and wonder if there will be anything left for them to drink when they finally get there, racing headlong towards it.

Or..

• They can tell a few good friends where the lake is and what a great and wonderful place it is. Maybe there are other lakes and rivers they might find along the way, who knows?

If you hadn’t guessed I’ll tell you what they do. They stroll, play, roll in the long grass and meander on and off the road like three old friends returning home after a long night on the black stuff. They enjoy each and every second of their journey along ‘The Long And Winding Network Marketing Road’ and when they reach the lake they take what they need and leave the rest behind, after all there is more than enough to go around.

And every week with every walk I notice how much pleasure they take from the journey. We can all race towards the lake, leaving our family and friends wondering where we have gone and who we are or we can take our time, focus on the end but enjoy the ride along the way. Swim in the ocean when we get there but don’t forget to dip our toes in the river along the way.

]]> http://onlinemarketingcircus.com/2009/03/08/the-long-and-winding-network-marketing-road/feed/ 0 neilashworth http://onlinemarketingcircus.com/2009/03/08/network-marketing-in-the-twenty-first-century/ http://onlinemarketingcircus.com/2009/03/08/network-marketing-in-the-twenty-first-century/#comments Sun, 08 Mar 2009 12:18:06 +0000 neilashworth http://neilashworth.wordpress.com/?p=16 ]]> Network marketing has changed quite a bit over the last fifty years or so from it’s door to door beginnings, through the golden age of hotel meetings, the three foot rule, flyers, posters and newspaper ads to the era of online marketing and the power of the internet all in the hope of finding that elusive creature – the customer!

During those years, networkers have gone from peddling vacuum cleaners, delivering catologues door to door and selling cosmetics to making millions in a matter of months with an effective online marketing system. And when the goldrush began the prospectors followed, and then more followed, and more followed until finally the internet was full of networkers looking for customers.

Time went by and the clever guys (and gals) Mike Dillard, Eben Pagan, Ann Seig, and a few others realised it was time to start selling shovels and stop panning for gold. Teach marketers how to market for customers and stop chasing customers and the world’s your oyster, at least the network marketing world.

So, magnetic sponsoring was born and attraction marketing followed in many different guises and soon the online marketing world was full of people pretending not to be networkers and doing whatever they could do to avoid telling anyone what they did for a living. Why? Because nobody likes to be sold and the salesman was dead in the street. So we began to coach, mentor, provide valuable content to help others grow and build their business.

The result; a sea of online talent unimaginable five years or maybe even three years ago.

But where does it go from here?

Like most things in life I believe it will go full circle in the twenty first century. The old saying ‘customer is king’ will, I believe, return to demand a return to the beginning once again. Only this time the customer will be more educated, informed, experienced and demanding.

So, if you’re to survive in this new era what will you need to know?

• How to target your customers worldwide to build long term, stable income instead of constantly fighting attrition as your team leave to find the next big thing.

• How to market your product to offer real value to those customers month after month

• How to use the internet to reach millions of potential customers in seconds

• How to lead your team to a never ending supply of customers

• How to build a massive organisation while hardly being noticed by your competitors, after all if the cat gets out the dogs will follow.

• How to identify your niche and maintain your market share without breaking the bank

If you’re not able to do these things then you need to learn and if you’re unable to understand what’s going on around you then find yourself a good teacher and listen to what he or she has to say.The business hasn’t changed that much in some ways – it still requires dedication, commitment and consistency.

Either way, stay in the game, learn how to leverage your time, skills and contacts effectively and be consistent. Not for a day or a week but for months and years until you begin to understand the business in the twenty first century and discover the secrets of online customer acquisition.

]]> http://onlinemarketingcircus.com/2009/03/08/network-marketing-in-the-twenty-first-century/feed/ 0 neilashworth http://onlinemarketingcircus.com/2009/03/08/the-power-of-social-media-attraction/ http://onlinemarketingcircus.com/2009/03/08/the-power-of-social-media-attraction/#comments Sun, 08 Mar 2009 12:05:46 +0000 neilashworth http://neilashworth.wordpress.com/?p=12 ]]> My father was fifty eight years old when he died…

He was a big man with a big heart which gave out in the end due to poor exercise, diet and a high level of frustration and the pain of living with unfulfilled dreams.

It’s five years almost and still it feels like yesterday.

One thing he taught me was the power of personality and how you could create a spirit that others would be drawn to like gold.

My father was a hostage negotiator for the prison service. A tough job, as the saying goes, but someone had to do it. In truth, he hated the job although he knew there was a certain appeal to it and realised it was possibly as glamorous as you could get behind fifty feet of stone wall and barbed wire. So every day he put on his work hat and headed through the gate wondering what the day had ahead of him. He worked long hours, travelled to wherever he was needed and spent his working hours trying to secure the safe release of inmates, guards or any unsuspecting prison visitor held as hostage by the prison tribe, selecting his each and every word the way you might select a parachute in a mid air emergency; knowing you had little time but no option other than to make the right decision.

In the evening things were very different…

He would arrive home from work, take off his work gear, wash the smell of incarceration from his skin and put on his best shirt and tie to head out for a few drinks and a little male bonding at the local public drinking house.

This was my father’s chapel. He wore his best clothes, put on a smile that was wide and welcoming and told his greatest tales to a gathering of friends and colleagues who crowded round him in eager anticipation of his next parabel.

And the truth is people loved him for it. He was unique and entertaining. His tales were embelished only to add a little extra life where it was needed but they were always the truth and for that people listened and trusted him. You could argue they learned a little too.

He was a social media leader who knew the power of trust, honesty and adding value to others.

When he died over five hundred came to celebrate his life. They told tales about him, laughed, cried and cursed at the legend he had become, a social legend within his own world; a world now filled with stories he left behind…

Want to leave a social media legacy?

Lead the tribe.

]]> http://onlinemarketingcircus.com/2009/03/08/the-power-of-social-media-attraction/feed/ 0 neilashworth