Tips to profit from eBay

eBay is one of the most popular website for auction.

A lot of people have leveraged on eBay (due to its popularity) to promote and sell products including computer accessories, jewelries, watches, etc with varying degree of success. Indeed, quite a number of people have become successful working from home using eBay.

So you could possibly use this approach to make money on the Internet.

However, to become successful, you need to learn to know a few tricks and tips.

First, what are the hot products for eBay?
You need to know what products are sellable on eBay. Although nobody may put any limit/constraints on what you can sell on eBay, market forces will. Don't get stucked with products that do not sell on eBay. To find out what's hot on eBay, the easiest way is to punch in "eBay hot products" in Goggle search and start checking out on the latest tips and suggestions from people and various websites. Becareful, though, you will see a lot of websites telling you just buy this ebook, video or audio package and you will learn all the hotest products sellable on eBay. Most of the time, you might end up finding that these are either scams or are just telling you information what you can find on the Internet via Google search without having to spend the money. Remember the rule is: don't lose your money unncessarily before you learn to make them.

Second, what price to sell?
Will your price be attractive enough for people to click and view for more details? Chances are, if you set your starting price = cost+your minimum profit margin, then nobody will be visiting and viewing your products. Why? Chances are people who are visiting eBay come for the purpose of looking for good bargain. What is good bargain? It has to be significantly lower than market price they can get elsewhere from their local country shop outlets. For example, you would typically see that for computer memory storage accessories like SD Card, the seller would start offering from a price of 1.99 dollars. This is even way below the cost price. But the idea is to attract people to view and to start bidding. In marketing terms, this is call prospecting. If they don't start bidding, you don't even stand a chance to earn their money!

How do you make money if you sell below cost?
Well, here is the trick: create multiple accounts on eBay and start bidding using these accounts as soon as you see one or more potential customer start bidding for your products. If the potential customer is willing to raise his bidding price, you use another account to raise the bidding price even higher. Soon, the bidding price will go above your cost. At this moment, if the buyer is not sensitive to market price, he will still continue to bid with you and your profit margin will increase. If the buyer is sensitive to market price, he may stop bidding at around your cost price. If you still want to sell just to clear your stock, you can still contact the bidder and offer him by telling stories that the high bidder decided not to buy and you can offer to him.

I have seen eBay affiliate stores (the product seller) using more than several hundreds of accounts for this purpose. They also use these accounts to provide good feedback about the seller so that the seller has a high score in his trustworthiness and track record. This will increase your confidence in buying from the seller.

So the reality is, you got to work hard to promote your product, and enthise people to buy from you. It is not as simple as one might tell you. In addition, you must offer good email or chat service for people to interact with you and get answers from you for any queries they might have. Responsive answers to customers often increase the confidence level of potential customers and therefore increase your sales.

What some people have done is to employ 1 or 2 full time employee just to help run the time-consuming tasks like managing the multiple accounts, bidding, monitoring, etc. While they just do random monitoring, answer questions from customers and sending off products via postal mail or logistics shippers who can offer cheap prices. There are also automated software products that can help you automate the bidding process. But often, manual check is still the most reliable.

Third, what's the effective ways to ship your products to customers?
DHL, Fedex and local postal mail services are the ways to ship to your customers. However, you certainly want to find out who offer you the best price performance ratio given the weight and size of your product. Also, best is not to include shipping charges in your bidding offer price. Offer to say that depending on quantity and country/locality, will advise the most cost effective shippping price upon successful bidding. Give also an estimated price to common locality like USA, China, UK.

Forth, why would people buy online compare to buying from physical shops?
For example, you might want to sell watches. In a physical shop, people have the chance to view the watch physically until they are satisfied before they pay. For this, they wouldn't mind paying a little more to get that security. Can you afford to offer a 30-day money back guarantee with no questions ask - including baring the freight charges for return goods?This might make you more competitive. Next, do you have a good track record? Has any customer complains that they have paid but did not receive your goods or receive defective goods without properly compensated? How often do you keep to your promise of delivery lead time (3 days? 1 week? 2 weeks?)

Tips to profit from Second Life

Once you have sign in to Second Life, created your virtual self (called Avatar in Second Life), you will soon be overwhelmed and attracted to how many things you can buy including your skins to make yourself look good. There are so many people or virtual stores that can offer so manny things that will attract you to shop until you drop dead. There are also the push for you to upgrade your membership to own lands and do more.

Take a step back.

This is just like your first life. There are just so many opportunities for you to spend money BUT not to make money. So, here is my little advice - Stop. Don't keep buying. Stop your first life bad habbit before you lost all your money in Second Life.

Ok. Now, how to make money?

There are quite a few ways you can make money without loosing your money. Here are some you can explore:

Earn2Life
Earn2Life offer surveys and just forms to fill-up that you can do for just 2 minutes each and gives you from 17L$ to 90L$ EACH! At Earn2Life you earn money by completing free offers. These offers will be to sign up with various companies online. You are only to sign up with those that you are really interested in. You will get paid L$20 - L$100 depending on which country you are from and your membership level for every offer you take.

Slam X
Slam X is a virtual bank that gives 50L$ linden dollars instantly when you sign-up. It’s a bank that offers free lindens through interest rates, sign-up freebie and a referral system that gives 50L$ free lindens for every individual you invite to join Slam X and those who you invited will also receive 50L$ when they sign-up.

Reperes
Reperes is both RL and SL market research agency. They conduct a wide range of projects. To thanks people for their participation, they base the incentive on time spent like quantitative surveys which can range from 100 to 350L$ for 5 to 20 min of time. SL focus groups, usually 2 hours (last time we gave 2000L$).

Linksoapbox
Sandy Holmer is giving away free lindens (100L$) for every person who will answer her ?question of the month? which is just asking for your opinion on a certain topic. The question is changed every month which means you are guaranteed a 100L$ for your opinion on different matters each month.

Market Truths
L$250 will be paid to you, as a token of our appreciation, just for joining and completing the preference form.The Research Panel is made up of Second Life residents who have opted in to receiving invitations from us to participate in surveys and other types of research (e.g., interviews or focus groups) in exchange for some L$ and the opportunity to help improve aspects of Second Life that they care about.

First Opinions Panel
First Opinions Panel is a non-profit organization thet gives 500L$ to 1000L$ per survey or research that you?ll answer. I?ve been earning more than 1000L$ every month just for filling 2 to 4 surveys they release every month. Opinions Panel can help you make your Avatar look very realistic, handsome and have different sets of clothes and hair for different occassions.

Make money in Second Life

Wish you could have had a better life (more money) in your next life?
Now, you can turn that wish into reality right away!
You can give yourself a second life now!
And you can earn a lot of money in your second life - right away!

Joking?

Not quite. Check this out:- Second Life.


Second Life, a virtual world of more than 2 million people, is where virtually anything is possible. You can run your company in Second Life. You can hold meetings. You can hire people. You can work for people to earn an income. You can buy, sell or rent land to make money. You can buy land and build housing estates out of it and sell to people. You can buy house and rent to people. You can create your own clothes, house, or working spaceship to sell or purely for fun. You can buy cloths to design your own fashion clothings. You can setup your own boutiques and sell to people in Second Life whom would naturally like to look good in all kinds of outfits. You can offer a chatting service to make people happy or just not to get bored. You can offer to accompany another person to dance and earn money. Your imagination is your only limitation!

Ok. I know what you are thinking - So what? All money made are not real. What's the use? Right?

Not quite.

In second life, you trade using Linden Dollars. That's the virtual money. But you can actually convert that virtual money into real money through money changers in Second Life (who provide as a service by other Second Life people). Alternatively, you can also convert virtual money with another person directly as long as the other person is willing to exchange in real money with you. For example, you may have earned quite a fair bit of virtual money already, then you can sell it to another person to take over from you.

In fact, in Second Life, you will have more fun then just making money.
You can be who you want to be. You are represented by a virtual self in Second Life. You can choose your sex, your look and outfits. You can do whatever you like. Fun isn't it. Try it today.

Exchange links with me

Hi.

If you would like to exchange links with me to mutually help increase page ranking for Google search, please use this post to add comments giving the following details:

• your name
• your email
  
• your website URL
  
• a brief description about your website
• URL in your website where you have a link back to my blog
  

No garbage links please. I would prefer that your web content is somewhat related to me. For example, you may have new business opportunities that are reliable. You may have found a proven way to make money on the Internet. You have some tips and advices which are reliable. You provide listings or directories of web investment or money making opportunities.

I will verify if you are reliable. If my verification indicates that you are really reliable, I will help to promote your site as well in my blog.

Cheers.

Play games to make money

If you prefer to play hard instead of work hard, you can play games to make money on the Internet! Yes, it's true. You can play and make money.

The most famous game to play and make money is World of Warcarf. You can play this game to obtain an advanced character. Then you sell it to people with no time or patience to play.

The problem of making money here is the selling process. While you can promote your intention to sell using forums or eBay, it is often difficult to ensure that the buyer will pay you without any issue. The reverse fear exist as well: the buyer also finds it difficult to trust that you will not reclaim the account after he has paid you.

To solve this problem, there are retailer out there will act as trusted middle man to buy game accounts and sell game accounts. www.BuyMMOAccounts.com is one such retailer which are trustworthy.

How much can you sell for an account? Well, take a look for yourself. It can range from USD 100 to USD 1,500 depending on the levels of the characters.

This might be a good approach for students or people who have time but not familiar with the intrigacy of businesses.

Related Links:
Online games, flash games

Autosurf – Scam or real?

I have been monitoring Autosurf for quite a while. I have yet to find one Autosurf site that can exist for many years. I have observed so many Autosurfs come and go. So many of them just vanished suddenly, taking away member's money and run. The best Autosurf I have seen is 12DailyPro (which is gone and the most notorious by now). At the time before it turned out to be a scam, it was rated high, good and paying members everywhere. Many members had confessed enjoying good money from them as promised. Some even dropped the idea of having to work hard on eBay to earn a few thousands. Just put in enough money into 12DailyPro and surf 10-20 minutes a day, you can enjoy the same return on investment. Some had bought cars and or various stuff they had always wanted to using the money they had made. It was really easy and good money to make. It was like never before that, you can really have free lunch without having to work hard.

Of course, there were also words of caution somewhere in the Internet that it could be a ponzi scheme and ask everybody to stay away.

Worth taking calculated risk?
No risk no gain, right? Sure, you have to take some chances right? 12DailyPro does seem like a calculated risk to take based on its excellent track record.

What can go wrong with Autosurf?
Hence, I gave it a try. I put in some small money just to test water. It worked. I got a bit of return. I increased that, and it worked again, and I continued. Then there came the issue of fake referrer members cheating them. They took great pains in trying to isolate the cheating members from the genuine ones. It was a great pain for them indeed because there is really a lot of work to do.

In comparison, StudioTraffic, which has been operating for many years simply took the simple way out of blocking all the members from that specific country, confiscating all money of members from the country even though 90% of the members from that country are innocent. For 12DailyPro, payment was delayed for a while but eventually it was paid back. This gave the confidence that they were really serious in the business and not just trying to cheat money from people. They also had several issues of server running out of steam because their member base had increased ten fold and the load on the server became too heavy. They resolved that and really compensated members for the missing days where they cannot surf the site advertisements due to the heavy load on the server. This, again, added confidence that they were serious about the business.

What can go wrong with Payment processor?
Then came the issue of the payment processor - eGold. eGold was raided by FBI. In response to the fear of being dragged into it, 12DailyPro decided to drop eGold and change to another payment processor - Electronic Money Order - EMO (which is now, gone as well). At that time, most members choosen to switch to Stormpay as their alternative payment processor. Stormpay, has been around for many years. It seems to be more prudent. It charges high transaction fee and has very strict charge back scheme. They seemed to be really serious payment processor (Hey, at that time only. Now is an entirely different story. Click here for more information).

Due to the issue with eGold, there were delayed payment for eGold members. To compensate, 12DailyPro attempted to withdraw milliions of dollars from Stormpay to meet the payment obligation which were long delayed. Guess what happen? Stormpay for some reasons play out 12DailyPro. They suddenly frozen 12DailyPro's account! They refuse to allow 12DailyPro to withdraw the money. The official reason they gave was that 12DailyPro is a ponzi and hence violated their terms and conditions. They exercise their rights to freeze 12DailyPro's account. My God! As if they are really professional. In fact, almost every single Autosurf uses Stormpay. And that has been for a long time already. Now then they suddenly say someone is violating their rules? That's obviously the most stupid reason Stormpay is putting up. I would guess that the real reason behind this saga is really that they have spent or invested the money elsewhere and not able to meet the financial obligation! There were also rumours that the government officials (may be the FBI) are investigating their record but not sure.

As a result of Stormpay frozen 12DailyPro's account, 12DailyPro soon finds itself crippled, not being able to meet the financial obligation. Soon, it's buble bursted and the portal just ceased for operation. Some 50 million dollars where now frozen and taken over by the court. No clear procedures on how members or creditors will be issued back their principle amount of money. Nobody knows when such announcement would be made or whether there would be any attempt at all for the court to issue money back to the members who are creditors now. All members would just consider their money completely lost!
In summary, if you are patient enough to read until this point, you have just learnt just everything that can go wrong in the business model of an Autosurf. Lets give a summary of what can go wrong:

1. The Autosurf operator can take away your money and run
2. The Autosurf operator can block your country at anytime claiming members cheating them and confiscates all your money.
3. The Autosurf operator can suddenly close your account or your account's money suddenly gone because their server run out of steam or crash or database record gone haywire.
4. The payment processor can take way your money and run
5. The payment processor can charge back to you claiming all the money from your account
6. Both the Autosurf and the payment processors are not that well regulated by the government as yet due to their new and debatable nature business.

Now with much better understanding what can go wrong, will you still invest in Autosurf?

What is Autosurf?

If you are new to the Internet world, you will probably find it a bit hard to understand what is Autosurf. This is because it is a unique investment scheme that is not found in our day to day life but only in the Internet virtual world.

Here is a simple example to let you understand what is Autosurf:

1. You sign up with an Autosurf operator (e.g. http://www.autosurfoperator.com)
2. You invest an initial amount (e.g. $1006) in your account with the operator.
3. You are then required to view the advertisements in the operator's website. They are supposed to get those advertisements onto their website just like a TV channel would get advertisements from merchants.
4. You will be rewarded N% (e.g. 12%) of your invested amount each day you take the trouble to view the advertisements. The idea is such that they attract people like you to view the advertisements by rewarding people. They also attract advertisers because you will be delligent in viewing the advertisements.
5. After M days (e.g. 12 days), you can take the money out and if you did not missed any day viewing the advertisements, you would get MxN% (144%) of your invested amount (144%x$1006=1448.64). That means, you get a reward of 44% return in investment. Normally, the yield is very quite high - in the range of 1% per day to 5% per day.
6. In addition, because they would hope to have more people to view the advertisements, you will be rewarded handsomely, for example 10%, for each friend you refer to sign up with the operator. Hence, you will get more than 44% return if you refer friends to sign up. For example, if you refer 2 friends over the 12-day period, you will get a return of 44%+24%=68% in total.

You can read up more on Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autosurf

Sounds like greate investment schemes, right?

Make money with HYIP?

Based on my research on past 5 years' statistics, you have a 95% chance of losing your money completely! Hence, you need to be extremely careful with HYIP. In other words, many of these are scams. Once they take your money, you have no way to chase them back for your money.

The interesting thing to note is this: You are likely to start investing small to try them out. They are likely to pay you back in a few days for the small investment you make. This give you confidence. But once you started investing more, that's where they will not return the high yield you are expecting and you have finally become their prey.

Simple recommendation: stay away from HYIP.

If you want to still try your luck, you can take a look at hyip monitor sites like Money Monitor http://www.money-monitor.com/.

You can also learn a lot more in Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-yield_investment_program

What is HYIP?

HYIP stands for High Yield Investment Program. There are different types of schemes and programmes. However, basically, they work like this:

1. You invest some principle amount just like investing in bank's fixed deposit
2. Unlike bank's fixed deposit which typically takes 6 months to a year to mature and you only get a miserable 1% to 10% return, HYIP gives you as high as 60% to 300% within a very very short time like within 3 days to a few weeks.

Sounds like good investment isn't it?

Go ahead and have a look at some of these HYIP sites to get a better idea via this HYIP monitor: http://www.goldpoll.com/.

Warning!

Before you invest in any HYIP, please make sure you read more on my blog on this topic to safeguard your money. Otherwise, you are likely to lose a lot of money!

Sell online without product?

What product can I sell online? I don't know!

Now, it seems that for every problem you have, Internet always has a solution. There are people who run warehouses which stock up thousands of products and expect people like you to setup online stores and sell for them on the Internet! Look at SMC for example: http://www.smcorp.com/.

Best of all, many even offer to deliver to your customers directly from their warehouse under your company name!

This is really great isn't it? You don't have to worry about sourcing, stocking and inventory management, logistics delivery, so on and so forth. All you have to do is to setup an online store and sell and you pocket the profit of the products!

But this is your likely outcome:

You are likely to find many of them are scams whom after receiving your money for the so-called starter kits, you heard no more from them or they will give you all kinds of excuses when you call them.

For those who are genuine, you will realize that there are already many people having similar online stores selling similar set of products from the same company like SMC at similar prices. You are not likely to be able to offer any further price discount to your customers. And the Internet is a very cruel world as people can easily search and do price comparisons. Soon, you will realize that after paying SMC for the starter kits, you make 0 dollars from it and become frustrated.

The key here is, if you want to become successful in this kind of game, the game is similar to any other traditional distributor-retailer relationship business model. You must offer value add other resellers do not have or weaker than you. For example, you can bundle the standard products with some unique products which you get from other sources or your own self-created products. This is called cross sell or up sell technique in the field of sales. In addition, you need to sell with some hypes. Create stories which make people feel unique, precious, jazzy, sexy, classy, lucky, good fortune, ... about your product. This is called motivating or closing the sales.

In a nutshell, brush up your selling skills if you want to engage in this kind of business venture. Don't carry with you a mindset that just create an online store and money will start flowing in. You got to work hard on promoting and adapting your products and marketing strategies. You also need to work extremely hard to make your site rank high in search engines so that more potential customers will come to your site.No easy money. Work hard!

Cheap, reliable web hosting?

A lot of web hosting companies nowadays advertise that it only cost a few (US) dollars (like 5 USD/month) to setup a website. Many come with sweeten deals of an online store, shopping cart and/or content management software included. You may feel that it is really easy and low cost to setup a eCommerce website or online store. What's more, perhaps, you can setup an online store, do your selling online, without having to pay for a physical shop rental till you drop and without quitting your full time job!

Sounds really great, isn't it?
But wait!

You need to be very careful with which web hosting company you sign up with. You have a 95% chance that you will be misled by how good and how cheap they are based on the information on their websites as well as many forums and review websites you visit or referenced by them. In fact, many review websites are own by the hosting company themselves which you cannot tell even if you do a whois investigation on the domain. Alternatively, the review company could be 'paid' to do good review on the web hosting company. Therefore, many reviews cannot be trusted.

The best way to find out if a hosting company is good or not is probably by means of a search in Google using keyword of the company name and the infamous word 'problem' or ‘issue’ or ‘complain’ like this: 'Web hosting company xxx problem".

If you see really a lot of complaints from many places, chances are that's a bad web hosting company. Otherwise, you may give it a try. Note that many comments that you found via Google search, bad or good, from forums could potentially be posted by competitors who want to comment bad about their competitors or by the web hosting company themselves talking something good about themselves. So you need to really exercise your own judgment call before coming to any conclusion.

Alternatively, I can recommend you to checkout http://www.webhostingbluebook.org to select a good web hosting company. From my observations, most websites recommended by this website are pretty descent and not too many complains from a lot of people who have used them.

The quest has begun

The Internet is a fascinating world!

You can spend days and nights on it for whatever you want to do - including making lots of money from it or losing lots of money from it. You got to be really careful as there are just millions of scams and ingenuous cheaters and liars out there.

Having been through many learning sessions - the hard way, I have decided to start this blog to share my experience, studies, and findings about the dream of every living human being today - how to make money on the Internet!

Yes! That's your dream, and my dream too!

I started using Internet since 1990. Those were the days when the Internet has just begun to be commercialized from its pretty academic and military background. In just a few years time, the Internet took the world like a forest fire. Now it has become an essential part of the live of many, including myself, just like what TV has done for us. (By the way, I have more or less thrown away my TV due to the massive junk programmes. I find more useful information on the Internet than the TV programmes nowadays - believe it or not!).

Through the years of using Internet, I have always been fascinated by how some people can really make lots of money from the Internet. And like you, I too tried to follow trails of the many techniques published by the so-called gurus whom had made their pods of gold. Yes! Most of the time, they never worked out quite as effective as the gurus would claim. Till today, I am still trying ... and I am sure I have learn quite a bit to be able to share with many people.

Using this Blog, I will share with you what works, what doesn't, which gurus are liars (there are too many of them) and who are genuine, what more you and me can try, what you and me need to watch out for (both risks and opportunities) and so on ...

I also hope that in my attempts to share my experience, you too, can share with me your experience and feedback, so that we can mutually learn from each other and become more successful together.