Ebay Purple Star Baby!!!

Well, we finally received our Purple Star in Ebay last week. We are getting a lot better with our selection of items and we are definitely glad that we decided to stick to our strategy of selling overseas. The key is small, easy to wrap items already in boxes. That makes the work you have to do as easy as it gets. We have also been very successful with purchasing only a few items and then as they sell, get more. It sounds basic, but trust me; you get so caught up in all of the other aspects of running an Ebay store that you completely forget all of the basics.

A few facts: We are noticing that we get about a 33% feedbacks. We have just hit over 500 and we’ve sold over 1500 items. We also have a 7 day 100% gurantee return policy. Yes, this has bitten us in the ass before but we keep money on the side just in case. Here is what our entire Month of March looked like in terms of money coming in, and profit. Not too bad, but we want to get better.

The key to this site is transparency and we want to be completely open and hones with our posts.

WEEK 1 = $16.03

WEEK2= $75.37
WEEK3= $67.65
WEEK4= $74.25
GOING AWAY FOR A FEW DAYS??

Recently I had to go away on business which is always nerve racking because you don’t want to shut down your Ebay store, and we have a 24 hour shipout promise. The key here, is to advertise that you are shipping “Parcel Post”. This way you can make up a day or two by shipping priority. It’s funny it’s always the people who buy the $10 items who make the most noise. During the 3 days I was gone, I sold a digital camera, 2 blood pressure monitors, some wireless headphones, and not one of those customers made a peep. The guy who brought an ankle brace for $9.99 was all over me about shipping.

4 guys spending and average of $70 bucks a pop and not a whisper, the ankle brace guy, “Hey when is my package shipping”. Typically they are from a big city so that explains the aggression.

Now, as soon as they purchase the item, if I can’t ship it the next day, I will send them an email with their expected package arrival date. That satisifieds the need to feel they are being serviced. Then when you get back you can ship the item priority, which is 2-3 business days and you will probably still be better then the date that you provided. Of course if the package is big then kill them with kindess and ship that bad boy parcel Post!!!

Till next time…..there’s money to be made!!!
-FTB Bloggers.
If you are an ebay seller, use Traffic Wave to send mass emails to your customers!!!

ONLINE MONEY DIARY DAY 82!

RE-DESIGN OF BLOG SITE
So as you can see we pulled a reformat. Why, because we are working with a perfectionist a$$hole that’s why.
We got one negative, or “not so positive” comment on LinkReferral and one of us, known as, the Poor Millionaire (From his blog), made us completely revamp the site. So here it is in all of its splendor, but I must say….WE LOVE IT!!!

Now here was the review we received: “Nice blog but you still need to do some work to it to make it really shine through.”

And here is the site that gave us the review: Ten Dollar Clicks

Granted we just gave this guy a ton of traffic, but the nerve of some reviewers. But then again, we thank him for helping us Step UP our Game.

TRAFFIC EXCHANGE STUDY SUCKS!!
Ok, now the bad news! We have been running an experiment to see how many pages you will have to surf on a Traffic Exchange to get just 1 subscription. We have been getting like 4 or 5 every other day until we decide to run this experiment and get zero! Zilch! Nada!!! How the f#$k are we going to make a million dollars if we can’t even build up our downlines – not to mention; we are using one of, if not the best programs in the business.

So after reading through all of the great information in our programs via email etc. we decided that we are not using our Traffic Exchanges enough. We have unique Splash Pages which should get the attention we need. We will now double our searching efforts and hope that pays off.

You know, it’s annoying to see other bloggers and on line money people getting paid. There’s a couple of images of these guys holding up huge checks.
Some notables are Plenty of Fish Founder Marcus, Schoemaker and Joel. It makes it look like these guys just fell into it, but they worked hard and we are working hard to, so our time will come.

USING ONLINE CLASSIFIEDS
We also started posting our Free Report ads on job boards so hopefully that will spark some clicks. We are using an Ad Tracker (That’s free with Traffic Wave) and it tells you how many clicks your ad gets, the average views per day, and average cost if it’s a paid ad. You can’t beat that. We will use this Ad Tracker information to provide our data for the subscribers.

That’s how we Roll!
-The FTB Bloggers

For Inspiration: CPIFM
For Man Talk: TOBB
For MLM: PayPal to Profits

CLICK HERE TO JOIN OUR DOWLINES

Power Bar Club - Not Worth Our Time

Well Well Well, Here is a wrap up of our last week.

Ebay sales were down dramatically, which happens. I used to start worrying, and lowering prices to get a sale or two but now I've learned to just go with the flow and weather the storm. Everything sales eventually.

...but that's not what we want to talk about. We want to talk about The PowerBar Club. We thought this was the Cat's Ass. Why? Well because it takes $0.00 investment. How can you lose when a system doesn't cost you anything.

Well I can tell you, you can lose time. Powerbar Club would like you to download their bar and click on ads. Then get 5 friends to do the same thing. Sound familiar? Yep, it like clixsense and all the other PPC sites. The problem with that is, you sign people up, they click for a few days and see their earnings grow to a whopping $.25. Then they stop clicking and you have to keep recruiting to earn anything. Even the best of the best recruiters only earn chump change.

We can't recommend a program that I already know SUCKS!!! We did some research and actually found a lady who recruited 700 members under her. 700!! She only earned $50 in 3 months. The ads pay $.003, they keep promising $.10 ads but you burn up your recruits while waiting for the big money ads. Once we read $50 from 700 recruits, we were out!! We have concluded that any program that makes you money, is going to require some start up cost, or a good product or both. TEP Profit is still the best of the best. It uses Traffic Wave, which has a forced matrix and tons of support. We've recruited only 2 people and I'm making a steady $16.95 per month, thanks to my upline filling in my empty spots. If you sign under me, and I keep recruiting you will get my recruits because my spots are filled.

So Powerbar Club is dead....but we do need another program. If you have any suggestions please contact us by either emailing us at: ftb.bloggers@gmail.com or leaving a comment. We don't mind spending enrollment fees for a solid program. If it's not solid however....we will let the world know.

....and the saga continues!!

IF THERE IS ANYONE WHO WANTS TO DISPUTE OUR POWERBAR ASSESMENT PLEASE FEEL FREE TO LEAVE A COMMENT.

Read our blogs, join our programs, let's make money together.
-The FTB Bloggers

Ebay - Ship Overseas or Not?

The question for today is overseas or not overseas? Hmmm….with the dollar dropping like it;s hot, overseas sales have been H-U-G-E. Sometimes these guys (or gals) overseas will pay more for shipping then for the item. The issue is, “What do you do if they don’t receive their item?” GULP!

In the US, I get tracking numbers on every shipment and watch everything get delivered right to the person’s doorstep. Overseas we track it to the country and that’s it. Who knows what happens then. In Nigeria, do they have mailmen with little Nigerian mail men suits, with the mail men shorts, driving a Nigerian Mail truck. I don’t know?

Feedback is always the main concern. You ship something overseas and the guy says, “I never received it”. Now what. You risk getting... a negative feedback if you don’t return 100% of his money. I know that’s crazy but the way ebay has the feedback set up now, you as the seller are screwed! These buyers have no idea how severe a negative feedback really is.

Friday, I get an email from this dude in Turkey. He ordered an electronic cheese grater. Either my deal was so sweet, or there are just no cheese graters in Instanbul! I sold this puppy for $18 bucks and he paid $18 in shipping. What happens if he never received it? Well he didn’t. He ordered this thing on Dec. 17th! So boom, I had to give him a full refund. So now I’m out $24 bucks (my real cost plus shipping and ebay fees). I returned his $36 on Saturday. Margins are already razor thin so I was pissed, not pissed because it wasn’t his fault but I was disappointed.

What happens if that’s an Ipod? How do you rectify this? I could have been out a couple of hundred dollars. You can make a claim on the insurance but that is a lot of effort! For a cheese grater? Probaby not, but for an Ipod, you bet your sweet ass I would.

I’m definitely open for suggestions. In the mean time, I stash ½ of the profits to set up a refund fund. If I exceed what’s in the refund fund then I stop overseas shipping. But for now it’s a go. 1 in every 5 sales is global so for now - I got to get that cheese.

Ebayers – are you shipping global? Let the readers know.

-The FTB Blog Team

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ADVANCED EBAY - PRICING YOUR ITEMS

Ebay – Advanced Techniques Only

On this site we are only going to discuss advance Ebay techniques only. The reason being, there are a gazillion (…and that’s a lot) of sites where they give you the basic ebay tutorial. Buy crap at garage sales, clean the stuff, take pictures….zzzzz..zzzz…Oh sorry, I dosed off. None of this information serves the ebay user who is trying to make some real money.

Just to make sure you are at the right place, this site is for people trying to make REAL MONEY!! We are real guys doing real things. We can’t be more honest.

In order to properly tackle such a big topic such as ebay in the detail that’s needed to help our readers it has to be done in bits. Today’s “bit” is regarding how to price your items. No one tells you that you can get burnt, big time by pricing your items the wrong way. We run two eBay sites, and we are PowerSellers on both sites. We will only discuss profits and issues with our gift store: http://stores.ebay.com/Money-Saving-Mikes


Branding is important so we have a cute logo, and we sell a lot of diverse items to help drive traffic from various places. Power Sellers either sell $1000 worth of merchandise per month, or 300 items per month so we kinda sort of know what we are talkin’ bout!

PRICING
In the beginning we used to wonder why after Ebay hit us with the monthly charge, was our PayPal account not swollen the way we needed it to be. The issue was, we were losing money with each sale. Our initial strategy was to just try and sell stuff for a few more dollars then we paid for it. What we didn’t realize was that there are a ridiculous amount of fees associated, and the mark up has to be considerable to make any kind of real profit.
Here are a list of fees that need to be considered with each sale:
1. Sales Tax
2. Listing Fee
3. Pay Pal Fee (approx. 7%)
4. Est. Actual Shipping Cost
5. ebay commission (approx 11%)

The addition of items 1 thru 5 represents your total out of pocket expense. It represents the minimum amount of money that you will have to get out of the buyer just to break even. If you purchased an item for $10 you would have to sell it for approximately $20.03 to cover your costs. That $20.03 can be divided into $15 for the product and $5.03 for shipping, $20.03 with free shipping, or any other creative way that you would like to break up the cost.

Items 1 thru 5 are estimated on the high side, and the more money you have for shipping the lower your ebay fee will be, but higher shipping costs will get you penalized in your buyer ratings so that becomes a delicate dance.

To ease things we created a pretty sweet excel sheet. When we are looking to purchase items from a wholesaler we pop the purchase cost in the sheet and out pops are potential sell price. If it looks like we can sell it to Joe Public for that price, and it’s comparable to other ebay stores, we go for it.

Since we are here to get money together, if you would like a sample of this sheet, send us a comment with your email address and we will email you a copy of this excel file.
There are also a bunch of other calculators available online. We like ours but there is also a pretty sweet free one here: http://www.rolbe.com/ebay.htm

This is an essential tool for the advanced ebayer. If you have any questions post them and hopefully we can get them answered.

Let’s go!
-The FTB Blog Team

Oh yeah we created these bannes to post on our blogs to help drive traffic to our site.

Starting from Zero!!!

19JAN2010 Cash Total = $0.00

Today is the first day that we are re-trying this experiment. When I say "we" I'm referring to a few guys who are just plain tired of working in cubes (well one of us has an office) all day.


We want two things:
1. To be our own boss

2. To be Rich!!!


Who doesn't want these two things Right. The difference is that we are three of the most focused, driven guys that I have ever meant. We have diverse backgrounds and Obama could take lessons from us on how to manage stress. The plan is to use this blog to keep a journal of all the ways we are able to make money online. Daily and Weekly Tallies of our results will be posted to keep our fans updated on our progress.

We are not new to this online money stuff, but we know now what works and what doesn't work.

WHAT WORKS:

ebay- we have an online gift store. We are bronze powersellers. We will talk about how we get merchandise, what are margins are and how much effort it takes to bring in an eBay prfit.

Affiliate Programs - we will attempt to build a following with affiliate programs. We have invested in a few and so far we have learned a lot, meant a lot of nice people and now this is where the rubber hits the road.

Blogging - we have a total of 3 blogs. This one http://www.paypaltoprofits.blogspot.com/, http://www.richornothing.blogspot.com/ and http://www.takeourballsback.blogspot.com/. We will attempt to amass blog followings for all three blogs and earn revenue, if possible for our blog sites.


We will be talking about these 3 ways to make money online. We are our own boss' and we are starting today at $0.00. However - we do have a few things already in place. We are already involved in a few Affiliate programs and we have a substantial amount of Ebay inventory which to sell from. There will be proof of everything that is stated on this blog with no embellishing what so ever.

So that's our introduction.

Visit our blogs, click our advertisements and visit this page often. Prepare to ask questions if you have any, becuase we would like this site to be as interactive as possible. As we get bigger, we want our audience to expand as well. This site will be a narrative, a chronicle of our journey to $1,000,000.00 It's been done before, and we plan to do it again.


Welcome to the True Ups & Downs of On Line Money.