More Focus Pays Off

I’ve been allowing myself to get overwhelmed recently with too many projects. I’m working on rebranding my eBay shop, this involves relisting every item, between 250 and 300 products.

I’m using a standard template for all my products so they will look more attractive and contain all the information about the product and terms clearly stated. It also requires me taking new pictures.

This is all a part of my rebranding strategy. I’m also doing some work on my website, keeping my blog going and I’m working on some internet marketing which involves me learning new things about building sites. It’s all so time consuming.

Over the last week, I’ve become a little frustrated because I was trying to do a bit of everything but felt like I was achieving nothing. So, on Friday, I decided to take some decisive action. From now on, I’m only going to concentrate on one project at a time.

I’m going to focus on it totally until it is completed. I will of course, still have to do day to day things, like keep my blog up to date and deal with eBay, but as far as projects go, I’m going to pin them down until they are done, finished, before I move onto another one.

I’ve implemented this new system this weekend and I’m pleased with the results. The hours that I’ve been working I’ve focused totally on one project, forgetting everything else. The project in question involves me building a little site, which has meant I’ve had to do some learning as I’ve been going along. I’ve now reached the position where I’ve almost completed the site. I’m amazed! I’ve done this by focusing for small amounts of time on one thing only. I broke my time down into forty minutes of total focus on the job I was doing. After forty minutes, I took a break then started again.

I now actually feel like I’m accomplishing things. I feel like I’ve achieved a lot this weekend without impinging on my family time. I also took some time out to do some housekeeping on my computer.

I had accumulated over a hundred EBooks on various subjects; I decided to throw them all off along with everything else that was sucking time from me. I’ve unsubscribed from all but a handful of my favourite business and life interest blogs.

So, it’s been a good weekend, I’m writing this post with my feet on the desk after just returning from an hour and half cycle ride. I can feel the sweat running down my neck and my body is encased in a warm glow, one of my dogs is staring at me, wanting to go out, and my wife and son are arguing downstairs.

Life! Love It! Live It! Well better take the dog out then.

Powerseller Status

I’ve taken my eye off eBay over the last six weeks while I’ve been concentrating on website sales and direct marketing. This has resulted in reduced sales from my eBay shop; my two-week trip to France also took me away from eBay as I closed the shop down for the duration of my holiday. The reduction in sales has threatened my power selling standing. I’ve been told that I need to increase my sales or I will lose the status of power seller.

It’s not something that bothers me because my business has progressed to the point where I can make sales through my website and by direct marketing. I have a list of a few thousand names of customers who have purchased from me in the past, many are recurring customers, all I need to do is direct market to a number of them and sales on my website increase to make up for the falling eBay sales.

This is the situation you want to create. When you have been trading for a while, building your own website is an important step in your business development. You can’t do it overnight. It takes time to market a website. Once you have been trading for a year or more on EBay you will have accumulated a list of customers interested in the kind of products you sell. You can use this list to direct market to them.

I offer my products cheaper through direct marketing because I can knock off the eBay fees from the price. It’s always better to sell outside of eBay if you have the structure in place. Without those fees to pay, you get to keep more of the profit.

So losing power seller status is not a worry for me, I don’t live or die by eBay. I’ll regain the status in the autumn when I kick up my eBay sales again. When you first start out online selling, eBay is usually the only venue for new sellers, so all your energy is focused on it. Once you become established however, build your own website, and market it, you will then have a platform to sell outside of eBay. This is the target you should aim for.

EBay will still be important to your strategy. I use eBay to bring new customers to my site and will continue to do so. I’m not however too bothered about maintain a power seller status. Unlike a guy I was reading about on a business forum who sells items on eBay for a pound at a loss so he can call himself a power seller. If he thinks it’s worth paying and working for nothing to be called a power seller, good luck to him. Personally, I’ll stop trading on eBay when I can no longer make a decent profit. My philosophy is “turnover is vanity; profit is sanity”. I’d sooner make a decent profit selling one item a week than lose money selling forty.

Anyway, it’s a nice quiet Sunday. I’ve just been for a few pints and I’m off for my dinner.

Have a nice weekend (what’s left of it)

Holiday Time

I got back from my holidays last week, two weeks touring France with a tent. I had planned to do some work on my business and get some articles ready for my blog but, with the sun shining and a few beers outside of our tent I decided to leave the laptop in the bag and have a complete break.

So I didn’t connect with the internet for two weeks. I closed down my businesses for the duration of the holiday and enjoyed a complete break.

I reopened my website and eBay shop last week for business and I’m pleased to say business has soon picked up again.

My tour around France has recharged my batteries and I’m back full of plans and ideas. I’m going to put some heavy work into my blog, I’ve got lots of plans for the next few months to take the blog up to another level.

I’m also considering opening another eBay shop and selling a different product line alongside my art shop. Having different shops is a well-known strategy of eBay sellers. It has its advantages because you don’t have to dilute your product line.

The product line I’m considering selling has no relation to art so putting it in my art shop would take something from the shop. People visit my shop expecting to find art products and I don’t want to dilute the line by adding unrelated items.

The best solution is another shop devoted solely to the new product line. The disadvantages of course are that you have to start with no feedback. Unfortunately there’s no way round this.

It’s not too much of a problem though but it will take some time to build the feedback. Long-term, however, it’s a good solid strategy and another income stream.

Bit busy At The Moment

I’m busy on a number of fronts at the moment. I’m planning a direct marketing campaign to some of my customers at the end of the month. The campaign is an experiment. I’m going to write a personal letter to a sample of 50 of my customers giving them an offer on my website, I’m thinking of a reduction of 10% but I haven’t decided what to offer.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about copy writing and have got a few books together which I’ve been studying for the past few weeks. Copywriting is a must have skill for selling on the web. It’s something you need to learn to make all your sales copy more effective.

I’m reading how to construct an effective sales letter without making it look like a sales letter. My plan is simple to bring more customers to my site and increase sales. I’m going to do it in blocks of fifty so I can monitor the response from each letter. If the response is good, I will cast the letter wider to incorporate 200 or 300 customers, before making it a regular monthly exercise.

To prepare for this I’m adding more products to my website and generally cleaning it up. I’ve been so preoccupied on EBay over the last few months I’ve neglected my site. I’ve made a strategic decision to concentrate more on my site, including daily marketing and to concentrate less on EBay over the summer.

EBay can be time consuming. I’m not leaving EBay, it’s too good of a marketing tool for that; but I’m putting more time into marketing my website over the coming months.

Another thing that is consuming much of my time at the moment is trying to design a better blog. I’m looking to design a good header for my blog. I’ve contacted a few designers but wasn’t happy with what they came up with so I’ve decided to give it a go myself. This has required me getting to grips with Photoshop. I’m not looking for anything spectacular, just a nice clean header that I can transfer to any blog theme I choose.

I’ve got great plans for my blog. Before I can bring them into being though the first thing I need is a header and theme. The theme has got to be right to accommodate the plans I have for the blog. I’m going to put some effort into designing something over the next week.

Taking Stock

It’s the end of the tax year and time to take stock. I’m pleased to say that I’ve met virtually all of my objectives business for the year and achieved the income I sought from my part-time business. My objective, as I’ve mentioned before, is to build enough money to retire early and comfortably on. Something that it’s getting harder and harder to do if you work in the private sector. At the beginning of the year I raised the bar for my game forcing myself to work smarter in order to achieve it. By setting goals that took me out of the comfort zone I was forced to work out ways to achieve them. Setting goals high is a great driver to achievement. Today my business is chugging along comfortably at a level that a year ago I was operating way below.

I am now in the process of setting higher targets and further goals to drive me along to higher levels of achievement for the comming year. My initial goal of building a retirement income is being achieved little by little but I’m also enjoying a fantastic side effect of a strong feeling of self achievement. Of having a powerful purpose in my life. This is even better than making the money for my retirement which is just becoming a side show to the fun I’m having with my business.

I feel like I’ve decoupled myself from the dependancy of my small private pension, that I’m no longer dependant on what happens to it. I have my financial future in my own hands for once and I’m enjoying the feeling. There’s still a long way to go but I’m looking forward to the journey.

Not everything I’ve done over the year has worked. I attempted to add card making products to my inventory early last year and this has proved to be a bad choice. The items are very slow selling with low profit margins so I’m in the process of discontinuing them. I intend to auction the stock I’ve got on ebay later. On the plus side I introduced models slowly to my hobbies section and these are proving popular so I intend to increase my stock of these and make them regular items bringing in another income source

I’m also considering doing some weekend markets, maybe every other weekend over the summer to generate more income. I have to get the balance right, I’ve got my business running now in such a way that it doesn’t take up much of my time and I have plenty of slack I could take up any time but I don’t want to get to the stage where it’s consuming all my time, that would defeat the objective of building an extra income to enjoy a better lifestyle.

My website has come into play after months of promotion. Getting a website going takes time and effort but it’s the way to go once you are established. I love the feeling of selling from my site because I have no costs to pay. no Ebay grabbing large chunks of my hard earned, it all comes to me. Another advantage of having a website is that people tend to buy multiple items. they will browse the site adding items to their basket so I usually get multiple orders from the site.

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I promote my site with articles, writing articles and submitting them to article directories is a great way to build backlinks and thus traffic to your site. Traffic is king, without it selling is impossible. like having an empty shop. so promoting the website is a daily task. I haven’t been as zealous about this as I should be over the last few months but I’m back on track now, determined to write at least one article a day. Getting a website should be your long term goal because it frees you from Ebay.

I’m still happy on Ebay though. It’s a great way of getting people to your site. They buy one thing off you on Ebay and you have the chance to get another customer to your website and hopefully keep them comming back. I use Ebay not just to sell but to market my business at the same time.

I’ve learned a lot over the last year, gained experience that can only be achieved through throwing yourself into the battle and start trading. I’ve made mistakes and taken the consequences on the chin then brushed myself off and moved on, wiser and stronger. I was talking to a work collegue a few weeks ago. He’s been making plans to start an Ebay business now for narly two years. So far he hasn’t sold an item, there’s always some reason why he’s going to start it later rather than now. his latest excuse is that Ebay is slow in summer. I asked him how he knew that> He said everyone knows that. I told him my best month last year was in September and that it’s not neccessarily true, his products may sell all the year round, it depends on the products.

He shrugged and said he’ll start in winter. He won’t. He’s afraid to take that leap. That leap of faith. You can plan and plan but it’s all pointless unless you take action and start. I’ve never been a great planner. I set goals and have targets but I don’t sit down and write detailed plans. I don’t believe you can predict what the market will do, how your product will fare, there’s too many variables comming into play at any one time. The best plan is to start trading and deal confidently with any situation that arises. Trust in your ability to do this. You are stronger, wiser and tougher than you realise. We all are. So if you’re thinking of joining the thousands of people successfully making another income online then here’s my advice. Set some goals then start the adventure. You won’t regret it.

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