E-BAY SECRET SEMINAR.

Dear Student,

I’m Michael Senoff, founder and CEO of HardToFindSeminars.com.

For the last five years, I’ve interviewed the world’s best business and marketing minds.

And along the way, I’ve created a successful home-based publishing business all from my two-car garage.

When my first child was born, he was very sick, and it was then that I knew I had to have a business that I could operate from home.

Now, my challenge is to build the world’s largest resource for online, downloadable audio business interviews.

I knew that I needed a site that contained strategies, solutions, and inside information to help you operate more efficiently

I’ve learned a lot in the last five years, and today I’m going to show you the skills that you need to survive.

It is my mission, to assist those that are very busy with their careers

And to really make my site different from every other audio content site on the web, I have decided to give you access to this information in a downloadable format.

Now, let’s get going.

Michael Senoff

Founder & CEO: www.hardtofindseminars.com

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How To Dominate On Ebay With These Direct Marketing Tricks

Have you ever wondered why some eBay listings go for a lot more than others when the products seem practically the same? Greg doesn’t. He’s a powerseller on eBay who has figured out how to make more on every auction just by incorporating a few key direct marketing strategies into his listings. And he reveals exactly how he does it in this three-part audio seminar

According to Greg, it’s really all in the marketing. Ebay has already done the hard part for you by bringing you targeted buyers who have searched out your auction. So, like Greg says, “your fish is hooked and your bait is already half-way eaten.” All you have to do is create a description that will close that deal.

And over the next three hours, you’ll not only hear how to create those kinds of descriptions, but you’ll also hear everything else this eBay expert does to turn his auctions into bidding frenzies.

Part One

In Part One, you’ll hear how Greg and his wife use a cell phone and a computer while shopping at garage sales to find big-ticket eBay items at below-bargain prices. You’ll also hear how they set up their listings so that those items are easily found by the people who’ll want them the most.

More Must-Hear Info From Part One Like…  First steps for new eBayers that will really get the ball rolling just the way you want it to  How to conduct research for an item and determine its price point in under 60 seconds  How “telling more to sell more” can be combined with an action step to get that bid button pushed more often  All about eBay’s strict limitations on auctions and some proven strategies for getting around them  How you can develop customer lists from your auctions – and what to do with those lists once you’ve compiled them  Why you’ll want to make sure you “go international” for all of your eBay listings  Tips on shipping that will get rid of the hassle and save you money

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You’ll also hear how Greg and his wife sold an old 10-cent packet of knockoff Kool-aid for more than $100!

Part Two

In Part Two, I ask Greg to reveal the number one tip that will squash the eBay competition – and he gives me an earfull. It’s all about writing lengthy descriptions that sound conversational, paint mental pictures, and create ownership. And Greg tells you exactly how he does that. According to him, most powersellers don’t even know about this tip (or use it) so you could dominate with this one technique alone.

You’ll also hear…  Why you’ll want to load your titles with as many keywords as you can and where to find the best ones for each listing  What the #1 mistake is when making an eBay title and how to make sure you never make it  Why you should always list the benefits in your description instead of the features – and the best ways to do that  Why you should never try to incorporate humor in your listing  How to use guarantees to bring in high bidders

Part Three

In Part Three, Greg reveals the one tip he usually likes to reserve for himself. It’s just a simple sentence that he adds to certain listings, but he finds it works like magic.

You’ll also learn..  Ways to upsell on eBay even though the site isn’t set up to help you do so  How to cross-promote your auctions and make the most on similar items without grouping them into “lots”  Ideas for making commission by directing your eBay customers to other people’s services  Creative ways to promote your eBay auctions outside of eBay  How to know when to use a 10-day, 7-day, 5-day or 3-day listing to your advantage – and when you might want to just list something in your eBay store

By incorporating direct marketing tactics into his eBay listings, Greg estimates that he makes at least 20% more than the average person would selling his same items. And Greg should know. He’s written many books

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about how to sell on eBay and even acts as an eBay consultant, but you’ll get all of his tips and tricks now in this exclusive seminar from Michael Senoff’s www.hardtofindseminars.com

So dust out the garage and get your junk ready for the feeding frenzy that can happen when you incorporate direct marketing into your eBay listings. Enjoy.

START:

Michael: What’s the highest price item you’ve ever sold on eBay?

Greg: I sold an $11,000.00 book. That was really pretty sweet. It was from this collection and it was a book that was a signed limited numbered boxed book. The book was The Gun Slinger by Steven King. It was a special numbered edition. It, I need to qualify, it actually was a trilogy. It was the first three Gun Slinger books inside a boxed set that was numbered. Steven King of all things and why this lady's husband bought this is beyond me but any way, he bought it. She probably paid $50.00 for it whenever it first came out and that was probably considered expensive. But just about, that came out probably in, the mid-80's. '84 maybe, '83, '84', '85 and so less than two decades later, I sold it for $11 for more than $11,000.00.

Michael: Just to set some ground work. When we’re referring to direct marketing in this eBay related interview, what exactly do you mean by direct marketing?

Greg: If you ask three direct marketers, “What is direct marketing?,” you will get four different answers, but, in a nutshell, most people agree that it’s a way to, well, first of all, you can accurately monitor your advertising. You can sell to those people who, they’ve shown an interest in your product. You can ignore, politely, all those others who don’t care about your product.

For example, if a real estate agent may want to mail a sales letter to people that he or she has met while showing houses. If that real estate agent holds an open house and people drop in and, and those people are just looking and they’re not really interested in buying and they don’t have a home up for sale, those people are great opportunities because that real estate agent. If, if she thinks in direct marketing terms, she will collect their name and addresses, their name and e-mail addresses. They’re going to collect that information. May be as a bonus, offer some little tiny gift. Just say, “Hey, if you don’t mind being on my list, I have some, a free little box of candy or something.” Whatever you can do to entice the person that would be, those people would be great candidates later to mail a letter to.

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May be a year later offering her services to sell their homes may be at a discount or, or with a bonus of some kind that others aren’t offering. She has found a targeted audience and that audience is a much better list than a list of every people, every person in the neighborhood or every person in one income group. In a way, they raise their hands and they said, we might some day, may be soon have an interest in your kind of service.

What we look for as direct marketers, are targeted people who have, they’ve kind of raised their hand and said, I am interested. Targeted advertising is a big part of direct marketing. Many direct marketers will place an ad in a newspaper or a magazine but they make sure they, they speak only to their products target audience. One way to do that is to filter out everyone who doesn’t care about what you’re selling. One way to do that is with the headline. The headline might say, “If your diet only makes you fatter, start losing inches instead of losing your mind.” Now, that kind of headline, tells everyone is happy and thin that there is nothing here for you. That’s fine to do.

What that type of headline does though it gives the advertiser a targeted audience so that ever word after that headline now can talk directly to people who have almost giving up losing weight. You have just the people you want in your room and they think they have a possible answer in you so that is mutually beneficial. You’re not wasting everyone’s time talking to everyone. You’re talking to people who have shown an interest in.

Once you get your targeted audience, you can now sell one-on-one. You can explain everything you want about your product. You can say a lot. I mentioned earlier. I like to write a lot in most of my auctions. There are exceptions. I actually have some exceptions currently going now that I’ll tell you about, but in general, I like long wordy ads because I know who ever gets the past the headline, really wants to know more about what I’m telling.

If I don’t sell, or perhaps I can offer a bonus item or some sort of free report or some e-mail newsletter that could send on my all important client list. People are interested in being in learning more about what they’re interested in. So we can follow-up with bonus information reports and, and sure the Internet is just full of that still and most people are tired of all of their in boxes being so cluttered.

Most of those people, there are 10 or 20 lists they would never do without receiving and, and we’re all like that. There are some newsletters we just can’t wait to get each week or each month. Compare all of that to a full page ad from a bank like so many that you’ve have seen, where there is nothing on the whole page but may be, I don’t know, may be a white bird in the center

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and it’s got tiny words that say, you can soar at First National Bank. I mean what does that even mean?

If I were looking for a bank, in other words, if I was their perfect targeted customer, there is absolutely nothing to make me look further into that bank’s services from that ad. It’s, it’s an ad that might help that banks branding and that’s important especially for large companies. It does nothing else for me. The bank spends thousands of dollars but has no idea how many customers they got from that ad. A direct marketer says I don’t want that. I want to be efficient. I want to write to a targeted audience. I want to offer a lot of information for those who are interested and I also want to offer an action step – like call now, right now, send your name now for a free report. In an eBay world, place your bid now. Those are all elements of a cost efficient direct marketing ad.

Michael: Where did you get your direct marketing experience?

Greg: Oh, I’ll tell you my direct marketing and marketing experience. I consider myself a salesman more than anything now. I believe any field that I were in, I would think that if I were a doctor, I've got to sell the customers. If I worked for a corporation as an accountant, I would have to sell my services to my boss every week in order to promote myself and get a better job.

I tell you, Michael, I hated marketing. I hated it my entire life. After I got my undergraduate in computers, I got a Master's Degree. It was an MBA and it was an emphasis in Corporate Finance. The only courses I routinely hated were marketing courses. I was a good student. I made almost straight A's but those marketing courses were the ones that would routinely bring my 4.0 GPA down a few tenths with some B's in there.

As much as I hated those marketing classes and as little as I cared about them, I was really fortunate to get the B's instead of C's or worse. Imagine my surprise if I look forward seeing that I am routinely interviewed and I write books about marketing now. I would have said there is no way. The big problem that I think, if I think it through was I really had an inherent disdain for soft subjects. I don't like psychology and philosophy because all of the - there is no one right answer or stuff that's just not the way I'm wired.

I truly believe there is such a thing as absolute truth and, and the soft subjects have always really bugged me. Even in business classes, management, that those classes were a problem for me for the same reason. Given the way I am wired and how much I love direct marketing techniques now, I become a direct marketing junkie. I am sure a lot of your listeners and hard to find seminars are also like, I can't get my hands on enough material.

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Even those that don't even pertain to me like, you offer some hard to find seminar recordings that have absolutely no direct bearing on what I do in life and never will and yet, I still learn little juicy tips from those. How I really got started in my direct marketing background to become this passionate guru who can't enough of it now is really happenstance. I listened to a guy named Gary North. He writes a lot about economics. Once he told a guy about a man who he went and trained under named Jay Abraham and how anybody could sell anything if they learned some of Jay's technique. I had an invested interest in selling, , especially, well, this was later on. Late 1990's, that was when I was just starting eBay. I just happened to be in a used book store that week after reading Dr. North's advice about Jay Abraham and low and behold I found a Jay Abraham, his X-Factor Seminar, all of his tapes for $5.00 bucks.

Michael: There you go.

Greg: That's like a thousand times less than it sold for new. I grabbed it and I thought well, for $5.00 bucks. As I began listening, I was really hooked. It's funny. The X-Factor recordings, they're super. They may not be Jay's very best but there is something about them that really talked directly to me very quickly. I since have gotten virtually everything he's done. I've always considered him the best. It struck just the right chord that, that if I happened to get some of his other material before the X-Factor, may be that wouldn't even, happened. But something about that really turned me on and I began getting other names that I learned about, Dan Kennedy and all the others. I just made the tour through all the tapes, books and videos that probably a lot of our listeners have done the same thing to, the giants of the direct marketing industry.

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Greg: It's a wonderful thing, Michael. Our listeners, they don't have to spend a small fortune because you offer a tremendous amount of Abraham material that just a fraction of what they sell for elsewhere. Eventually, as much as I hated marketing concepts, I fell in love with direct marketing because it offers the benefits that traditional marketing doesn't and you have feedback systems in place and you measure exactly what works and so.

Even before I learned the power of direct marketing, I was already doing some of it on eBay. I would cross reference auctions to promote other auctions and if I was selling a rare Hemingway book, I would be sure and tell in each listing all about the other Hemingway books if I had at the same time. I'm basically lazy. I would always write very long listings. The reason I did that is because I'm lazy, because I figured if I didn't do that, these buyers are going write me and ask me - well, what does the front cover look like? Is it damaged? Is it? What's the copy right date? Is there a mark on it? Has

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someone written in it? If I just told all of that up front, I never got, you know, just an over abundance of questions about that.

I started just naturally because of my tendency to want to lower the clutter of work that I have. I started just telling all that I could in an auction. That's a very strong direct marketing technique. As it turns out that the more you tell, the more you sell. I was kind of a natural to soak up all of these techniques and but I do want to point out one thing important. Although, I am an author, a writer, I've written thousands of eBay auctions among our numerous eBay accounts. We're getting up to about 8,000 auctions now that, that I've written up. I do not consider myself a good copywriter.

If I had an information product that I was selling, well, actually, I have several. I would always hire a good copywriter such as Ben Settle to write the copy or at least give me some feedback on it, because the great, that's the great thing. You can implement a lot of direct marketing techniques and maximize yourselves no matter what you sell. Whether you're really an expert or not, just knowing about them helps leverage what you do sell and separate you from the competition especially on eBay.

Michael: Can you just tell the listeners a story in a nutshell how eBay got started?

Greg: There is some controversy although, the story that is known the best is that the founder of eBay had some, actually his wife, had some pez dispensers, those candy dispensers and he wanted or she wanted a way to sell those and he started up a site called - I believe it was called, the story escapes me but I think he called it East Bay Computers or EastBay.com and he had worked on it.

He was a computer guy and he worked on the frame work of putting up an auction site. When he went to buy the domain East Bay, or what it was it was similar to that -- I think that was it. It was taken by someone else. He settled for eBay probably thinking this is a stupid name. It will never fly. The rest is history. He sold those Pez dispensers. As I say, that’s the one story most people know the best. Far more than they expected and they immediately built up a little community and started selling beanie babies and they just went on. He just thought, well, why are we limiting ourselves to little collectible items. Let's sell everything on eBay. It just, it just grew tremendously over night.

Michael: Don't some people consider eBay to be too structured to utilize direct marketing techniques?

Greg: They certainly do. That's why if you and our listeners begin implementing even a few direct marketing techniques, everyone will blow away any competitor selling against them. If you look at the typical sales letter, web

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page on the internet, a lot more people today are direct marketing savvy at least in some respects then, then ever before and there's a long way to go.

The eBay listing is the perfect sales letter given you a screen with as, as much length as you need and any formatting that you want. There are very few limitations that eBay imposes that eBay's the perfect tool to implement many successful direct marketing techniques but few do it. I want to make it my personal passion to show people how well direct marketing techniques work on eBay. I like to see it this way.

Critics will tell you that direct marketing techniques do not and cannot work on eBay but direct marketers say critics make far less money than direct marketers make. Direct marketers understand that and this might sound funny at first, the medium is not the message. Direct marketing works whether it's a newspaper ad, a magazine ad, a television ad, a telephone call an eBay auction listing. I mean to say that direct marketing doesn't work on eBay is an admission that you don't understand direct marketing.

A group of concepts completely unrelated to what ever medium you use to sell your line. Albeit, I'll admit that at first, eBay does seem limited for the direct marketer but those limitations; they melt away as you look further as we'll learn today. EBay is an incredible tool and it allows you to do traditional direct marketing techniques. You can test. You can generate leads with lost leaders. You can up sell. You can do follow-up sales letters. You can do so much more. We're going to get into a lot of those specifics.

The big example of the fallacy just one obvious one that direct marketing doesn't work they say is that a 55-character limit that eBay puts on auction titles. With every auction, you put up a title and that's what people search for and once they click on your auction title, if they're interested in your stereo receiver or your laser printer or what ever you're selling, then it takes you to your listing where you have as much room as you want to describe that item. The title only allows 55-characters. That's the max you can put in a title. The naysayers say that 55-characters that's not, that's not long enough to write an effective sales headline.

So direct marketing never works on eBay but they completely don't understand when they say that, that the auction title is not your headline. A headline is always nice in an auction but actually with some eBay auctions and this goes against everything that you've ever heard about direct marketing, sometimes you don't even need a headline - believe it or not. We'll talk about that, but in general, if you use a headline and, and it always helps, you have all the room in the world because your title is not there to be a headline. Your title is there to get found in the eBay search engine. The top line in your actual eBay auction is where your headline should go. An eBayer with the name JPOKLA for short for Oklahoma.

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One of my favorite studies that has been written up in at least one book and on several websites and I know JPOKLA very well and I know her success story. It shows just how powerful these direct marketing techniques can be. She has a Kool-aid story. Her Kool-aid story shows how sweet eBay is in many ways. I once asked her to help my mother clean out some cupboards above my mother's oven. My mother needed some help and I knew her very well because at the time, well, she's my wife. She gladly helped. When she got up there and saw all those things in my mom's cabinets, she was really taken aback. It was obvious that there were things there that have been up there 30 years ago when my mom and dad moved into their home and most of these things hadn't seen the light of day. One item that Janey pulled out was an unopened pack of funny face power Kool-aid drink mix. Surprised? They were, I think, a competitor during the 60's, but they were just like the little Kool-aid drink mixes that, you know, you loved as a kid.

These cost a dime back in the '60's and I don't believe they have been sold for, you know, 30 years may be 40 but when Janey saw that drink packet, she saved it and brought it to me and showed look how long your mom has kept things in these cabinets. She brought, she had bought items on eBay but never sold anything. After she left my mother's home, she greeted me with that - you won't believe what I found today and showed me that, that funny face Kool-aid packet. I said, “That's great. You should sell that on eBay.” She told me nobody in the world would look at an auction for a 10¢ pack of Kool-aid from the '60's. I told her, well, you need to do some, some research just, just to make sure. Her curiosity was peaked.

She went to eBay like she was buying some and did a search and she found funny face items. Some went for like $20.00. None of them were exactly like the one we had but she thought more research was called for so she searched Google and she found that exact packet somewhere not for sale but described. She put some of that information. Wrote it up for me and she wrote up a description and then I said that's a great a first auction. Let's, let's add to it a little bit and I modified it some with some direct marketing nuisances that we'll learn about today and some little action calls. We took pictures and we got that drink mix listed and Janey was thrilled when she got her first bid because she doubted anyone would even look at the auction. She watched and watched. I think she went in there every hour for the next seven days. That auction ended with a winning bid of $126.00.

Michael: Wow, $100.00 bucks for a 10¢ packet of little Kool-aid funny face. That's incredible. These are the stories I love about eBay.

Greg: Yeah, I agree. Don't listen to the naysayers that say eBay is old technology or the market is saturated and especially that direct marketing doesn't work. Just don't let the nay sayers tell you there is nothing new under the sun on

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eBay. There is a gigantic powerful monster called direct marketing that your, your competitors on eBay certainly should use but they don't. Even though eBay offers a few minor limitations to the direct marketer, they're negligible. They're not really a major factor.

Michael: What are some of those minor limitations that make people believe eBay can't be used for direct marketing?

Greg: EBay is relatively open to anything as far as formatting and text goes, but eBay does have strict limitations on what you can include on an auction page. For example, you can not put a website up on your web page. You can't put a link to your own web page in an auction. That's a pretty serious limitation. They don't even like you putting e-mail links in your auction like click here and ask me a question. Although they really don't seem to mind too much that you do that but they prefer that you don't.

Having no web address just makes it difficult to route them off eBay, but that's an understandable limitation. If I owned eBay, I would probably require that also that someone can't easily send someone from my site to another where they can buy something. The lack of an e-mail link that's real obvious makes it difficult to add people to a mailing list, who wants to join a newsletter or that you want to send more information too. There are easy ways around both of those.

Even though the lack of web addresses means that you can't have affiliate links in auctions to entice people to click on them, and just all of the things that, that a lot of direct marketers really like to spice up their listings with, it turns out that eBay offers a way to do all of that though. It's one step removed but it's a way. EBay allows you to have what many people call an about me page. There you are free to include a lot more information.

On an auction page, eBay says, look, you're there to sell one item. We don't want you to confuse our buyers with lots of other things, just one item, but we will allow you to put a link to your about me page. There you can tell about yourself. You don't have to sell anything. You can have a link to your store website or anything else you want. You cannot have a link to one specific product sell page but other than that, we're pretty free with what you can link too. You should encourage people to read about you, learn more about you, and maybe entice them with a free download of an eBook or something. A sentence here about me page and there you can tell them all about yourself. Offer a newsletter link if you have, an informative. I'm really big on.

If you send out an e-mail newsletter, really pack it with information. Make it information heavy. You can try to get them on that list. That’s the only big problem with all of the eBay rules, a lot of them are cloudy that you'll find. Some of that cloudiness might be intentional, maybe they can please who

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they want to please when they want to please it. As long as you don't really abuse any of the privileges, you'll generally be fine. EBay is real good about warning you, saying we don't like that link. We're going to pull that auction by the way and refund your listing fees but don't do it again but all is well. You know, you're forgiven, as long as you don't do that too many times, eBay.

You can accidentally break the rules. You may learn things without even realizing that you're going to learn it, but in general, your listings are to sell one thing and you can route people to about me page where you can do a whole lot more. EBay has just started offering what they call classified ads that show up in the search engine and they act a lot like an auction listing. As an auction listing ad, except there's no auction. It's not even a sale. EBay has kept the rules really open. So far, they've allowed e-mail links, multiple, even newsletter sign ups.

You can send people to a web page from that page and, so the classified ads are giving the direct marketer a little more freedom to try some things they couldn't try before, but one thing I really recommend is that direct marketers know how important your customer list is. EBay provides you with all the data you need when an auction ends. You can capture your buyer's name and email and address and for eBay store fronts and those were a fee base group of web pages that you can have on eBay that you can keep all of your auctions and fixed price items under one general, , web page store front. It's still eBay but it's more organized.

You have more freedom of what you can do. EBay store owners can even have a newsletters and an e-mail tool that eBay manages. Where eBay encourages people to sign up for a newsletter and you can send them all you want or sell flyers. The problem with that is that the eBay managed newsletters severely limit you. You cannot easily include web addresses and links and it's not a huge drawback but you should really be managing your own mailing lists anyway. As long as you have done business with someone, as long as someone bids and won and item, eBay considers that your customer, you can send that person e-mail. You should be collecting all of those names and emails from past buyers for certain.

EBay doesn't mind you contacting as long as you have done business with them and have a relationship with those buyers. You aren't limited to selling eBay items only after that. You can put what ever you want in your e-mail list but the general e-mail courtesy rules apply. You, you never spam someone who hasn't done business with you before. You always provide an easy to remove link where anybody can get off your list immediately.

You never use their names and addresses for anything other than that one purpose. If you go the e-mail route and you should, just make sure that you send buyers information first. As I said before, if you want to sell something

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in there, that's fine. You can pepper it a little bit. But I'm on several lists of direct marketers. Many are now promoting eBay things and their newsletters have gone.

Oh, Michael, from about 90% of information to about 90% promotion of items and sales and affiliates, and I rarely even read them anymore. I just subscribe to them just because I like to monitor what others are doing. I really want to encourage people that when they have customers really, really give them as you do, Michael, you're the king of this. Overload your customers with helpful information, advice, tips, and services. Make them really value what you're doing for them because then they trust you. The few times that you do offer something that, that they can use, that is valuable. That is worth the money to them, that is an important item, then they will trust you.

In order to have your own mailing list, they're very easy. There are newsletters sites like NewsletterEase.com that will even help you create your newsletter. Other responders like SendFree.com or Awebber.com which is one of my favorites. Just look in Google for auto responders and you'll find, you'll find websites that help you manage e-mail lists. I have found them except in certain circumstance I'll tell you about later. In general, those are wonderful for managing your lists and so direct marketers, they have a wonderful opportunity on eBay.

Michael: Well, let's say we've got a listener and you've really got his juices going and he's looked up in the attic and he's got some antiques. He's got some things that, hey, I think I may want to try and sell this on eBay. What's the most important first step you would tell that person, , before he implements it direct marketing produce for eBay?

Greg: Now, the first step. Well, okay. You found an antique. The first step is to search and research. Remember that 10¢ pack of funny face that we were talking about?

Michael: Right.

Greg: We have many old antique items that we bought in a garage sale that was only - maybe they were only $20.00 and that we're just going to make a killing on eBay. We get home and there is a thousand of them up there and they're not getting any bids for what ever reason. Unless you're an antique dealer or you know a certain market, I know their rare book market very well. When I spot a rare book on site, well, I know it and I can tell but most things I can't do that too. I have to research and I have to look at past sales of items. I have to look at past price points.

What should I expect at the range of income? Always throughout the top and always throughout the bottom because you are going to be somewhere in that

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range of in between. I look for other people who have sold an item successfully that I have. I look for hints in their titles and in their descriptions. May be some things that actually trigger a buy or a sale, that that others didn't have. All of those just get my juices flowing to decide whether I'm going to sell that item on eBay or how to approach it. Sometimes you use a little spy craft. Every once in a while, my wife will be at a garage sale and see something and she'll call me and ask me -- what do you think about this item that's $17.00? I'll just look it up real fast if the computers on and, and say yes or no. I think that's a possibility. If it's very inexpensive, it's a buck or two, I would say don't even do that. Just buy it because, you know, what's the risk? If it's much money to you, you need to do some research. Always remember when you are searching that eBay searches only auction titles and not be the descriptions by default.

If, say a seller didn't predict what you would search for, then an item for sale that you're looking for might not even appear on the search results. Let's say you searched, you, you have an iPod and you want to protect it with a case. You, you search for iPod case on eBay. If you do that, you’re going to find hundreds but if someone is selling the very case you want to buy or may be the very case you want to sell and the auction says the title says, protect your iPod with this great item. Well, that auction is not going to appear on your search because the title is being misused. If you, however, if you can keep that in mind when you’re looking up items, if you search both idle, ah, titles and descriptions which there’s a little click mark you can do that, then that auction would have shown up. You’ll get a lot more search results but you’ll also get a lot more results. Sometimes we look for some old antique item and never find it. But when we search for item and description, it comes up because the buyer may have called it, a wood stove and we called it a cook stove. So it just never came up.

Michael: Do you know what the stats are on the eBay community? What percentage or clicking on just, they’re clicking on and when they’re doing their searches for - its title and description compared to just title only?

Greg: I do know that. It is. As a couple of years ago and there’s no doubt it’s the same – under 1%.

Michael: Under 1% are clicking for descriptions?

Greg: Yes.

Michael: Wow.

Greg: Because that’s the default. You search for something and it only searches description. EBay does that I think to keep their service down where they don’t have to have all their servers looking through every word or every

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auction. But only less than 1% and, I tell you, Michael, if I think of all the times I’ve searched on eBay, I would say I do it one out of every couple of hundred times.

Michael: Right.

Greg: Because most of the time I find what I want from the title only most of the times. But when I don’t, oh man, I click that description also because I know that eBay is too huge not to have sold what I have to sell. I mean that’s extremely rare that something that you are selling hasn’t sold for the past 3045 days on eBay. Extremely rare.

Michael: All right. I want you to do this. Tell the listeners specifically what to do. Let’s say your wife is at a garage sale and she sees a Nokia 220 cell phone and she calls you and says, “Greg, I’ve got this Nokia 220 cell phone. Can you go through the research on, on this phone on the eBay market?” Tell me what you’re going to do when you sit down in front of your computer. How are you going to conduct your research and under 60 seconds? What are you going to tell your wife once you’ve done that?

Greg: Very good. First of all, my wife and if I’m doing the opposite and I’m at the sale, we’re not real obvious about what we’re doing. We’ll go off to the side and say, you know, this, this is something you were looking for and we don’t tell the garage sale, the yard sale owner, we’re going to look this up on eBay and see if we want it. So use a little discretion.

She’ll call. If it is a cell phone, a Nokia 220, she may just say it’s a Nokia cell phone or I may tell her that. The first thing we need to ask to the other is what is the model number? Because that’s very important. We would get thousands of Nokia cell phones but we want to know about the 220 cell phone. I would go to eBay.com and I would type in the search box that is on every single eBay page. There is no excuse not to find it. On every page, there is a search here box. I would type Nokia 220 and I would hit enter. I wouldn’t even search for the letters cell phone. Because probably Nokia 220 is going to find all, most of the listings. If I put cell phone in the title, may be some of the buyers or sellers, put cell phone as all one word and others put them as two words. I may just not hit all those. If I just keep it as simple as possible, Nokia 220 and I am searching only the titles to begin with. I get a much quicker response that way and I’ll get a good thumb nail view as to whether it’s worth it. I then will click completed items.

Michael: Why are you going to look on the existing auctions first? What information are you looking when you see the results from the search there? Why are you going to go to the completed and tell me what new information you’ll find there that you won’t see on your first search of existing auctions that have not completed?

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Greg: Of course. If I find a thousand auctions that are currently going and most of them have zero bids that tells me all I need to know. Probably that’s not worth buying even for $5.00.

Michael: Can you sort that page?

Greg You can sort that page by auctions ending first. Auctions ending last. The highest selling price. Current bidding price. Lowest current winning bidding price.

Michael: What do you? How do you do it?

Greg: Well, you search for highest bidding price first. First of all, I’ll just get an overview. Thumbnail overview and if it’s all zero, I often times don’t even go further. I don’t know. May be I should but it’s just a gut reaction. If the first page which will be may be a 150 items are not going for much, I just say don’t mess with it. It’s not worth the risk. If there’s some activity there, then I will sort by price and I want to know what they’re really going for.

If several of them and by several, if there are a thousand of them for sale, and 25 are selling for $20 or $30 or $40 or higher, that’s going to interest me. At that point, I’m going to click on completed items to see what they routinely sell for. It’s just another option on that same page that you click and then click search again or just click search and it will search again. It will tell you what they have actually sold for because before I was looking at the current auctions.

Now, I am looking at the completed auctions. That will help verify. I don’t even sort them first. I just look and see is $20, $30, $40 and I’m just saying assuming she can buy it for say $5.00 that would be a pretty good profit. Is that reasonable to expect? Do those prices appear even on the first results page of the ones that I had most recently sold? If so or if they are close or even half that, then I will start searching by price. All of this, by the way, you can do in seconds. May be not the first time you do it but the fifth time you do it; you can just in seconds have all this information. It’s just a glance and a glance and a click and a sort and a glance and that tells me what I need to know. As the less than one percent, I probably in that case wouldn’t search the descriptions.

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Michael: So what you’re searching for is action. You are searching to see is there a market for this Nokia 220 cell phone and by looking at the completed auctions, you see that they are selling. By the time your wife buys that cell

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phone, you’ve got a pretty good evidence and statistically that’s money in the bank even before you put that listing up.

Greg: That is all I want.

Michael: You’re reducing your risk by doing the research.

Greg: Reducing the risk. I want to know if there’s a market out there. I like a large market. I like a fluid market or they say a liquid market. I like a market where things buy and sell often and in large quantities. Now I don’t care for the salt and pepper commodity types of things but otherwise, I want my item to sell or Michael, if she found a lamp that is some old flowery lamp in very good condition and she finds the maker and sees that it’s from the Victorian age and I look that up and I find nothing. That also peaks my interest. It is a higher risk but if those haven’t sold on eBay. If there are not 50 or even 20 of those lamps for sale, they might be extremely rare. That’s possible. EBay is so large it’s not always probable but there have been many things we sold that we were the only ones selling them at that time, and I again I told you I sell a lot of rare books and my rare books have sometimes done that, where I’ll be the only selling a certain title that is considered a, a classic or a limited edition. Having no hits and it’s an item that’s not just a run of the mill everyday item, that interests me enough may be even to search Google just to see what I can find about it. I might find some other web site just by searching Google that sales that item for $100 or a $1,000 or $10,000. Zero hits on eBay should also peak your interest.

Michael: How about when you do your search in the completed auctions? Tell the listeners what this number is on the number of bids and how that information can also determine some important things about the market?

Greg: Yeah. If an item ends, whether there are a lot of them or not very many of them every Tuesday, the movie industry releases new DVDs, new movies on DVD, every Tuesday. That’s the only day they release DVDs every Tuesday, you’ll see scores of DVDs. There the same titles. This week - Fantastic Four. Second, number two and there were DVDs galore out there. If you looked at them, most of them have bids and some of them have a lot of bids. It makes you wonder what are people thinking because there are several that don’t have any bids. Why not go down there and start bidding on that at a lower price?

People get into a frenzy sometimes, if they sold before, and it had a lot of bidders. A lot of bidders is relative depending on the product. The DVDs usually have 20 or 30 or 40 bidders every time they sell for new DVDs. If I see that and versus another DVD, I’m kind of an eclectic and we buy new DVD’s every once in a while and watch them and take care of them and sell them on eBay that. Try to get them up there that same week that they are brand new.

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Sometimes I can’t find other people wanting that DVD. I can find completed auctions where may be there was one bidder and it went for the minimum bid. That is bad. That tells me I do not want to put that DVD up there for auction. I want to put it at a fixed price of $9.99 or $14.77. If it gets very little activity, even if many have sold but for just one or two bidders each, I want to, to raise that price. I don’t want two bids to win my item and they get it for 99 or $1.50 or something because I like to start my bidding low.

One or two bidders tell me this is not a heavy item but people do want it. I’m going to offer them a deal over Amazon. It has been open. It’s in mint condition but it has been open and I’ll probably undercut Amazon 70% and just put it up as a fixed price item not an auction. I got that information just by what you just said Michael. I am looking at the number of bidders per item on the average. This isn’t something I run through an Excel worksheet. I mean this isn’t high mathematics. It’s just a glance through to kind of determine this information.

Michael: Should sellers open their auctions to the international eBay community foreign bidders or should they stick to the simpler sell to your own country practice? What is your opinion and advice on that?

Greg: Well, it kind of goes hand in hand with advice I have about timing your auctions. You get conflicting advice. Sometimes people will say be sure and time your auction when everybody is going to be on eBay. Sunday nights are the best this is what the general consensus bids. Certainly, Sunday nights has a lot of eBay activity but the problem is this is a global economy. Everyone in the world now has access to a computer. There are Internet cafes in third world countries, actually, quite a few of them in third world countries, new timers to eBay.

Whether you had a lot of experience or not, you should open your market to foreign buyers, every time you list something on eBay, you can click list only to my country or sell to the world. You can even select countries. To say I want to ship to Europe and Canada and that’s all other than America if you’re selling from America. You can limit that but America buys and sells about a third of all products on eBay. That’s a huge market share but that means there are two-thirds of the world left to sell too. Why wouldn’t, why would you just limit your customer base to one-third of its potential.

People worry about shipping overseas. They worry about timing. Well, at any given time, someone is asleep somewhere in the world. You really cannot end your auction where it’s good for everybody. You can kind of time it where it’s best for your country and may be Europe – if you’re an English speaking country, England and Australia. You want to time it where may be they are still awake but you can’t always do that. It’s just difficult. Timing isn’t

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as much of an issue if you’re an international seller as it used to be. Because you can’t time it for everyone but I do want to say shipping overseas to mail things. It’s very, very simple now, almost as easy as shipping to another state.

Currently as we speak, the dollar has been weaker and weaker and weaker and that’s an advantage in a way when you are seller because our products, the thing we sell on eBay are very cheap for international buyers. The extra shipping they have to pay, well, that’s more than made up for it by the money exchange. The money they saved due to the dollar weakness against all world currencies. Shipping is not a big cost factor for international buyers. It is very simple. I used an electronic shipping service. I use Indicia.com. There’s also Stamps.com that I used to use. It’s a little bit more limited.

You can even print international mailing labels from PayPal if your buyer pays with PayPal. PayPal fills in everything. You just click a few clicks and it prints a label. If you don’t have a label, it prints it on a white piece of paper that you tape to your box. The package is ready to go. It’s got the postage and everything. It’s really unbelievable.

Michael: Have you shipped from the post offices web site, the online post office?

Greg: Yes, I have. We ship from there. We ship from PayPal and we ship from Indicia depending on the circumstances.

Michael: What advantages are you seeing through Indicia compared to Stamps.com, just in a nutshell compared to the post office?

Greg: Well, compared to the post office, you have either of those programs Stamps.com or Indicia.com. First of all, you have all of your customers that you’ve mailed to right there in your address book. I don’t on the online postal service website, where it keeps track of your names and addresses.

Any time that I need to contact a customer, I just go to that data base. I always keep my Indicia.com program. It’s actually a program that runs on your computer even though there are websites. I keep that open at all times. If a buyer asks me a question about something that we sold to him or her, we will look up the buyers name and e-mail and see when we shipped it, when it arrived and just kind of get a feel for that shipping item.

I like the data that’s always there. Another thing that I really like about Indicia is it is great for direct marketing because not only does it keep track of all that name and address and then print reports that are just amazing that you can export to, Excel and data base programs, but Indicia is a blast because you can print your own custom messages on the envelope or on the packages mailing label.

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You can choose fonts and colors and, and outlines and you can promote a website. You can promote a sale you are currently offering. I promote the insurance service that I use which is DS Insurance. It’s a great shipping insurance company for eBayers and very, very cheap. Your post office will charge you $2.30 I think to insure a package up to $100 and with DSI Insurance; I think it costs you 45 cents something like that. It’s just an amazing.

Michael: Let’s say I’m selling my pre-owned Jay Abraham stuff or my home products. I can use Indicia.com that’s intergraded with software, database management and you can export the files into text style, CSV files in all in one, just like an Excel type program?

Greg: All in one. The only drawback that some people think there is – is there’s a charge for that. There’s a monthly fee of $15.95 is what I pay. There’s a toned down service for $9.95 but we send far more packages that every month. That $15.95 buys you some things that actually now the post office has beginning to offer too.

You get free delivery confirmations. You don’t have to pay the extra 40 cents or whatever that cost. Then you always need to ship with delivery confirmation now. I am convinced because you get buyers that say I never received something. We get this a lot more often than you would think that people say you never sent this. I never received it. We go to Indicia.com. It’s very easy to just say give me a status and it says this package arrived was delivered at 4:00 P.M. three weeks. We write to the people and say, “Well, the post office says it was delivered and I don’t think any of them at least so far are trying to pull something over our eyes.”

They have always 100% of the time now this is probably 45 times now have written back and said, oh, my daughter brought in the box or my wife brought in the box or my husband or they’re in a store and they didn’t see it. That, that’s great to be able to get that feed back.

I really love the being able to customize my own mailing labels to put the as long as I don’t violate the postal services address requirements, I can move my messages around. I can move my return address. I can make it larger, smaller. You don’t have all of that freedom on the postal website and you certainly don’t have that freedom if you just put stamps on what you mail or, or take it to the post office and have them do it there.

Michael: Are you printing on a mailing label or do you have a choice of mailing label you can print a post card on an actual card stock 8½x11 piece of paper? What other, what options do they have that you are printing your address on?

Greg: Yes, to all of the above.

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Michael: That you can do post card mailings with it?

Greg: Or mailing all of that.

Michael: When are they charging you standard U.S. postal card rates or are you paying a little bit more?

Greg: No. No. You pay the exact rates unless your shipping overseas and they give you a discount really.

Michael: And how do you pay for your postage up front?

Greg: You put it in chunks. You can buy $10 a head or a $100 a head or $200 a head and we always just max it out because we ship so many boxes through eBay that we just buy, keep $200 in there and it just deducts from our credit card. When it gets down to it I can even print envelopes with it. It will print the whole envelope with postage on the envelope. I just put the envelope in my printer. I never fill out an envelope any more. I even hate it when I get an envelope that’s preprinted because I have to write my name and address on the thing, you know, that’s more trouble than it’s worth these days and I have to lick a stamp and put it on there. Put a stamp on. It does all of that.

By the way, both Stamps.com and Indicia are I find them far easier to use than USPS.com than the postal website, the postage generating system. First of all, I already have the names and addresses and in Indicia, the program I use if you highlight on through the eBay, you’ll get an e-mail after an auction ends with the buyers name and address. If I copy that name and address to my windows clip board, Indicia is always looking for names and addresses. Any time I copy a name and address to my windows clip board, Indicia pastes it in the middle of whatever label I currently have open or whatever envelope is currently open. So it just, I don’t even have to do insert paste, it just does it automatically.

Michael: What if you copy and paste multiple?

Greg: Well, in that case you want to export. You want to put those in Excel or some sort of a program and export them to a comma separated data base or a text file. Then import those into Indicia. Anybody who sells a lot on eBay really owes it to themselves to reduce their, their efforts by this. You can also take all of these packages to the post office, walk up in front of the line, get the postman’s eye, get the clerk’s eye and just put them on the counter and walk away.

We do that because we know the postal clerks. If you don’t them, it may take a while for them to get too used to you doing that but now they just see us

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walk in the door and they say, put them over here. As long as we caught their eye because we want them to know that those boxes are there. We don’t want someone else walking off with them. But it is so much better than standing in line.

We ship overseas all the time. That’s another huge advantage that Indicia gives you that the postal website doesn’t. That Stamps.com at least up until a year ago, I haven’t checked since then. Indicia even does all of the custom forms for you. They, they just says okay now that you’ve put the name and address, put in item description. Put what it weighs and put whether you’re all those little custom clicks. You click whether it was sold as merchandise or as a gift. I state legally that this is not dangerous goods and you just click that. It prints all of your custom forms for you too.

Michael: Let’s say you’re shipping a package over a pound and it’s going overseas, an original and will print out three copies of the custom form that you got to put in a clear envelope like with the post office site?

Greg: It will do that and we don’t do that because there are new forms now that Indicia.com is legally allowed to use. I want to state again. It would be wonderful if Stamps.com can now do this but they couldn’t before. That in one form, it has both customs and the postage and the address and return address all on one little form.

Michael: One form that you tape to the box?

Greg: If you have labels, you just slap the label on otherwise you print it on. One piece of paper; cut it in half because it is small. You don’t have all of those forms anymore.

Michael: Oh, wow, so I can eliminate all my clear pouches and the multiple forms.

Greg: Almost. If it’s over four pounds, then you got that problem. So Indicia says, I’ll just print all those four forms for you.

Michael: Okay.

Greg: So it’s so nice. So you have to get the little plastic pouch to put them in and that’s it. You just print them out, stick them in and you can legally even put an invoice in there. We often will wrap a box and forget to put an invoice in it if it’s overseas and that’s very important. We have some standard things that we put in boxes a lot of times that we’re shipping to buyers here in our own country, but for overseas, a lot of that doesn’t apply. It’s good always to put an invoice in your box and sometimes I’ll have to forget and I’ll have to open the tape but in those pouch forms if you’re mailing a heavy box, you can put mailing lists infor. I mean you can put sales letters in there and invoices as

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long as it is behind the custom forms information. You can legally pack that full of stuff and they don’t care.

Michael: Well, are you taping your postage information to your package or is it a peel and stick label?

Greg: Okay. We taped for the first several thousand and just got tired of it and so now we buy labels and we buy them from Uline.com which is I think the cheapest place on earth for that type of thing. But we buy them in boxes of thousands. We buy about 2,000 labels at one time.

Michael: How big of a label?

Greg: The label is one-half sheet of an 8½x11 piece of paper.

Michael: Does it go in your ink or laser jet printer?

Greg: It goes in our laser jet printer and we also have an ink jet printer we work in if we color for some reason and they’re great and that the standard label. If you go to UPS.com and print a label, it prints on those labels. If you go to FedEx.com, it prints on those labels.

Michael: So are there two per a page or one per a page?

Greg: Two per a page. We load it and it prints it and then I put it back in the printer facing the other direction for the next label.

Michael: Okay. And then you just peel it off?

Greg: Then I peel it off and stick. It is so much better than cutting and pasting.

Michael: So you don’t need scissors and you don’t need the tape?

Greg: No.

Michael: Great.

Greg: But if you’re just starting off, don’t buy a bunch of labels. Make sure it works well for you. Go ahead and scissor and tape it for a while.

Michael: Greg – how can you use direct marketing’s traditional one-on-one selling techniques to sell to all the eBayers looking at your auctions? Greg: There is a lady that lives in another town who hired us, actually, two years ago to sell thousands of books that she has in her home library. Her husband was a book collector of 50 years and she has about, she had about 12,000,

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13,000 books. Many of which are rare, old valuable books. We took on the job of selling those books. Here it is almost three years later, and we still have about 3,000 to go. I know that a used book buyer wants to know very few things. He or she wants to know the title, the exact condition of the book and whether it’s a First Edition and first printing or not. Those buyers don’t want a lot of extra bells and whistles.

Dan Kennedy is famous for pointing out the fallacy of sellers who say, our customers are different from everyone else. They, they don’t fall for this direct marketing stuff and I don’t want to fall into that trap. The thing is I don’t believe I am because rare book buyers are no different in that they have passions. They have trigger mechanisms that cause them to buy. At the same time, Dan Kennedy and others would point out that you must know your product and you must know your audience so that you can give those people what they want. I think that’s important as an eBayer.

I know my used book audience very well because I used to collect rare books. I know what I wanted as a collector. I know their triggers. I know I use those triggers in my auction especially in primarily when the book is very valuable. I also know that, that these buyers have, they want a bulleted list of, of what the books condition is about. They don’t want a bunch of flowery language in order to make a decision. When they click on First Edition – The Godfather by Mario Puzo, they want to know the condition and the printing – right away.

I do think I’m following the principles of direct marketing in that category when I sell to that audience because I know that audience. I know how to sell to them. I want to talk the way they want to be talked to. If I was selling a car, I would approach an eBay auction far differently from these rare books that we’re mostly selling right now because I’m talking to a huge range of buyers, who might be a teenager’s first car. It might be my mother wanting a used car, all these different ranges of people. I have to address that differently but as long as you’re targeting your buying market, you have to determine who probably wants this item? Then, you are using direct marketing principles.

I once had an eBay seminar that I was giving. A student, whose name also happened to be Michael, by the way, this Michael insisted, here we go, his customers were different and that all these techniques were far too sophisticated for his buyers. The sad thing was he was so fortunate and he didn’t even realize it because he sold the same items over and over and over. He sold nicotine gum packets for people that want to quit smoking. He sold them in extremely good competitive prices. I think too low actually. He had a tremendous item that he could resell over and over and over to the same buyers as they weaned themselves off cigarettes.

I begged him to create a mailing list. I asked him why did you even come to my seminar because, you know, all this valuable information send out sales

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reminders to people who bought a month ago and offer them, say it’s time to recoup your product. Here’s a two for one special this month, include a bounce back coupon in each box so that they get free shipping the next time that you that they buy from you.

Michael: And he wasn’t doing any of it?

Greg: He wasn’t doing any of it. He thought that was way too much work. He slaved to get every single sell waiting for one auction to end before he started another. He just wouldn’t let me show him how to grow that business. In doing this, it would make his job far simpler. Michael: How was he doing with that market?

Greg: He was selling $20,000.00 dollars of this gum every three months.

Michael: How much was he making on that?

Greg: He was probably paying one-fifth of 20. He was probably paying $4,000.00 to make that, to turn it into $20,000.00 through a bunch of eBay auctions.

Michael: He’s making about. You can estimate he could have been profiting around 15 grand a month?

Greg: Yes, Sir.

Michael: Wow.

Greg: Doing everything wrong. Making his job harder, he was putting up one day auctions. He would start some before the next ones ended. He had all this former audience who still needed his product. After I finally insisted, Michael was to send out an e-mail to his past buyers to humor me. He was a little bit put out that he had to enter all their names and addresses. I mean this guy’s amazing. He’s a brilliant man. He’s really is a pretty wealthy guy.

I kind of got to know him afterwards and he, he’s really sharp. But he just didn’t think his buyers would fall in line. His e-mail did fail. He said, “See there’s proof that my buyers are different.” I asked him if I could see his email. It was just horrible. I rewrote it for him as a favor and I used a fantastic headline and action words all throughout. He never sent it.

Michael: Wow.

Greg: That is such a shame. I am no copywriter and I don’t do much very well, Michael, but I did a very good job on this letter. I should not have done that

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for him because if I had charged him for it, he would have sent it out. I shouldn’t have done it as a gift. But I thought, “You know, I want you to have value from all of this that I have taught you.” It’s a shame when he sells the same item over and over as opposed to what I do which is mostly sell unique items.

Michael: That’s frustrating to you as a consultant because that’s one thing you don’t ever want to work with someone who’s just not jazzed the way you are. You know at the same level you are because that could be discouraging and it’s a pain.

Greg: It is pain. I would hate to be one of his customers and be thought of as, as just not worth the effort. That’s the one he just, you may not ever hear from him again. I’ve walked into so many places and we bought things and gotten to know the people and never heard from him again, bought things on line and that I really enjoyed. I never heard from them again. The big direct marketing doesn’t use a billboard approach. This is what we are talking about here. This is what people don’t understand.

Your auction in order to grab that buyer, you’re not talking to the world; you’re talking to one person. A billboard is like thousands of people are passing by and you might get one-half and one percent of the audience looking at it who even cares about what you’re selling. eBay does work like a billboard in one respect. I guess people create auctions that do poorly but eBay is the world’s largest garage sale as I like to say. Millions of buyers are looking for millions of millions of things. It seems at first like that might be a hard audience to target in on. To write a specific product for a specific person but everything that is sold on eBay is for a specific audience. Even something like, I don’t know deodorant. If you sell, deodorant, its lots of people use it. So that doesn’t seem like a targeted audience but you need to talk to that buyer who, who wants that item right at that moment.

EBay brings you targeted buyers. That’s the really big cornerstone over everything we said so far that you must assume that 99% of everybody who reads your auctions are targeted buyers. You must assume they have already raised their hand to show an interest in your product if they’re looking at your page. Think about that, Michael. That’s a marketers dream.

Michael: That saves you a lot of money because most direct marketers, they have to do a lot of marketing, a lot of direct mail, a lot of e-mails and 99% of the people are not your targeted buyers and you have to spend all that money to find that one or two percent. EBay hands it to you on a silver platter.

Greg: Hands it to you. You can count on it with almost 100% certainty that if anyone looks at your auction and I’m going to prove that here in a second. They have an interest in what you’re selling. It might be a slight interest but

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they have one. This is an opportunity. Think for a moment whenever you bought or sold on eBay, how does someone get to one of your auctions? What’s the, what’s the most popular way, Michael?

Michael: They search.

Greg: They search. If you understand that, you understand the most important concept because here’s the bottom line, people who click to see. Let’s say you sell camera tripods, you know, little tripods that you put cameras on.

Michael: Right.

Greg: People who click to see your latest tripod auction, the one that you just wrote and put up there last night to sell, they’re interested in something about tripods because the battle has already been done for you. They arrived there because they searched on it. They searched for tripod or photo tripod or photography tripod or camera tripod. They somehow raised their hand and said, “I want to find someone who is selling a tripod.”

You’re going, “This is wonderful.” Your auction has made its way into their search results and other than luck and by searching by categories which really isn’t done all that often, really. There’s basically no way for someone to stumble onto your auction randomly. They’re looking at your auction almost always as a result of wanting something about what you’re selling. Your fish is hooked. Your bait has been halfway eaten. Your fish wants to bite or they would be doing something better with their time.

Michael: It’s kind of like the Yellow Pages.

Greg: It is very much like the Yellow Pages which is another huge area that has totally done wrong. I am sure you would agree with in almost case because we just recently needed a plumber and it was amazing. Every single plumber at is exactly the same. They have a picture of a plumber and they all say we do great work. Well, how do I know that? You know. We just called the one that seemed to be closest. I mean there was no other reason to call any other plumber in that whole ad, in that whole Yellow Pages.

Your auction title is what people search on. Don’t worry about grammar. Load it up with key words. If I was selling a track ball, I’ve got the track ball that I use. I just love Kensington Track Balls. I just really love them. I’ve got one in front of me that I’ve always used Kensington Track Balls instead of a mouse, because I have a cluttered desk and I never have room for a mouse, so a track ball just needs one little tiny place on your desk.

If I were selling a track ball, I would not put in my title. Fantastic Track Ball look here scroll to success. I would never say that. Instead, I would load up

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with key words that people might use in a search. Like, like, Cain’s Kensington Track Ball, USB Port, Wireless, 2 inch ball. I would load up on these very key words. You know if it were a USB Port Track Ball, I think USB is important because a lot of people want a USB mouse or they want a wireless now. I wouldn’t say there is nothing else like it on eBay. I would be putting these key words and that’s not where my head line would go. So that everyone who looks at my auction probably wants a Track Ball and probably is interested in a Kensington Track Ball. I’ve got a big buying audience every time they look at my eBay listing.

Now, I have a big tip for our listeners now, Michael. An eBay seminar student once named Terry will concur this advice is gold. This Terry actually spent time, effort and money to sit through the same seminar that I once gave a second time. She came a second time just because of the following tip I am about to tell you.

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Greg: This is just an amazing thing. Maybe as a direct marketer, you already know about this. You probably sense that there are tools like this out there but it’s called Wordtracker. You can go out there to Wordtracker.com and I have it on. You can hear me typing. I’m going there now just to make sure. Actually, Wordtracker takes you to their pay site and I like to use their free ones. They have a free trial. I’m going to give you that web address. Let me tell you why it’s even worth messing with. Well, by the way, the web address where you can go to is called FreeKeyWords.Wordtracker.com.

Okay. This free tool holds the key to improving every title everyone uses on this recording from this point forward on eBay. If you craft your title very well even, you’ll still benefit from this tool. Let’s suppose that you have a video camera to sell and it’s made by JVC. They make a lot of video cameras. You’ve looked at the manuals long list of features and you don’t know what works best in the auctions title. It’s got so many features you don’t know what to put up there. All the good features sound good but you’ve only got 55 characters to work with. You want to find the words that will really get hit in a search result. What I would do is go to Free Key Words.Wordtracker.com and I would enter video camera because that’s the most basic, generic description I can think of of what I have to sell.

What Wordtracker does is tell you related words used for searches with video camera over the past 30 or 60 days. We also see digital video cameras as you look through it of a hidden video camera. If you happen to be selling that video camera that is real tiny that might be some sort of surveillance camera. Make sure you put the word hidden in there. Don’t put surveillance. Put “hidden” because it brings so many more hits than just video camera or

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surveillance camera. In these results, I’m going to find these amazing words like digital, DVD, JVC. May be I would’ve forgot probably not but maybe I would have forgotten to put the, the Company name. Features that seem to be important to other people like - CCD that’s a type of lens, I believe.

They have lenses that are you might be more up on then than I am. CC TV or something like that lenses. There are all these special lenses and high def lenses. Well, I don’t really know that that’s important to someone but if you look at your search for video cameras, you’re going to see CCD is in several of the searches. That’s important. If that’s one of my features, that’s a word I want in my title even if I’m not savvy enough to really know all about it. This is the tool that you use. Just go to Wordtracker and type in just the most basic description. Just scroll through. Find these key words that maybe you would have overlooked and then right your title. This takes really when you do it a few times, may be 3 seconds.

Michael: Then, but you got to keep it. You got attack as many of these key words at the highest levels under 55 characters.

Greg: As possible. Because people might search for hidden cameras and come to your site as long as you realize that’s a real popular search or CCD camera. This gives you extra key words. It allows you to get rid of fluff like fantastic camera. It allows you to put words that people actually search on when they want a video camera.

Michael: This one tip. Imagine you’re, you’re the guy selling the, , nicotine gum.

Greg: Yes.

Michael: Quit smoking gum. He’s not utilizing this tool. If you could have that intelligence and be able to pack your title with, , the proper key words that people are looking for. He could literally just double his sales just by that alone.

Greg: Just by that alone. Because he would double the number of searches that he would be found in. I think it’s great. I just did smoking gum by the way. Smoking gum. May be I should have done non-smoking gum. I have a feeling that Wordtracker only gives you a total from the last day, the current day. Overture gave you about 30 days worth because there are only a 113 searches that are just like. At the time, I do smoking gum. I see that the second most popular. Well, actually, in the first hit, the words quit smoking is all throughout here. The word quit I would have never thought about putting that in a search title because it’s not a feature. This tells me people looking for gum to help you stop smoking use the word quit a lot. I better put that in my title and I bet that Michael didn’t use it in his title. I’m, I’m pretty sure he never did.

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Michael: Right.

Greg: That one word alone would put you in more search engines because people looking for the word quit smoking. Your smoking gum never has the word quit in your title; you would not end up in those searches on eBay. The reason Terry came back is she said, she had lost this link to Wordtracker. I thought you could have just used Google and found it. You know. May be she really wanted to get some of the other advice too. But this one tip alone was worth her coming back to my seminar a second time. I agree. I think its gold.

Michael: Yeah. Now that’s very valuable. I mean. You can look at markets on eBay and you know, where there is may be just two or three sellers and look at what their titles are. Kind of look at their history, see if they’re changing them. You could really compete just with this intelligence.

Greg: You can dominant. Because most power sellers don’t even know about this. If they knew about it, they wouldn’t use it.

Michael: Very good. Well, it’s kind of we’re on the topic of research. It kind of brings me back to the last question I asked. How to get started and you talk a lot about of a good headline in writing an ad like you’re talking to your best friend. You’re an experienced writer. I mean. You’re a pro but for a lot of people who aren’t professional writers and aren’t as confident, can you give some research tips that would allow me to may be find descriptions that I can use and modify that would make my writing an ad easier. May be where someone has written one before. Any ideas on, if I’m not as confident as you are as writing to a friend, how can I get the copy from my eBay auction on there in a simpler way? You know. Ethically?

Greg: Right. Well, you should do research and look at what other people do because it will give you ideas. You never want to steal a copy. You never want to copy and paste what others write. Not only is it just cheap even if you get away with it a few times. EBay will take down your listing if someone complains. If you think about it, buyers and sellers are looking at lots of auctions related to your item. If you’re selling something, even if you take your copy from what someone sold in an auction that ended a week ago, there might still be bidders looking for that same item who saw that auction and they might turn you in. Because eBay puts on every single auction a little link at the bottom that says report this item if there is something wrong about it violating eBay’s rules. At first and I’ll tell you, we sellers, were a little bit worried about that link. Not that any of us on the whole did anything wrong but that buyer, sometimes just out of spite, or just may be malicious people that just want to get a bunch of people in trouble just start reporting a bunch of auctions that may or may not be true. I can tell you personally that’s been up for probably our last 3 or 4,000 auctions that we’ve done under several

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eBay accounts. We’ve never had a problem with it. And, so, we don’t have people just and plus eBay is pretty smart too. They know whether an auction violates something or not. You don’t want to steal just because you don’t want to get in trouble but, gosh, I hope that you don’t want to steal because it’s wrong to do that and because you can do so much better. Most people listening on our call right now. Most people can do far better than their competitors in writing. Here’s a tip that really helps. I have a feeling very few people that I teach this to do it and I don’t know why. If I couldn’t write, I would do it in a heartbeat. I would get a recorder and the first few items that I sold on eBay, I would sit down with a tape recorder or an electronic on your computer recorder, wave recorder or something and I would act like I am sitting next to Joe, my neighbor, who I know really well and telling him all about this laser printer that I’m selling. I’d say, “Joe, and look here, it’s got this and it’s got this. Here’s what you are really going to like.” I would really try my best. If that doesn’t work and you are truly serious about wanting to be able to get into the mode into the practice mode of writing as though you were talking to your best friend. Then, what you want to do is actually bring Joe over and just record you describing a few things to him. Try to be natural. Try not to think about the recording. Tell him ahead of time what’s happening. You’re just doing this to practice. I promise you if you do that and then transcribe and then listen later and type what you wrote. I promise you, you’re going to see phrases that you would have never thought about typing that you can stick in your auctions.

Michael: Tell the listeners why it is so important to write like you talk? Why not, why not hype the headlines of that traditional copy that a lot of people see that, that you and I know is to be bad. Why normal talk?

Greg: Well, once the all important title is crafted and you are in your description, the most important key in reaching buyers is to talk to the buyers in their language is the most important thing. If someone tries to sell you something and they’re aloof, or if you’re, if you’re buying a computer and you’re not real computer savvy and they’re talking bits and bytes and megahertz and gigahertz, or if you are buying a car, and, and the car sales person is, is talking about all sorts of weird options that you don’t care about. You just want a car that saves you gas. He doesn’t seem interested in what you want. You’re not going to buy that item. I, as the seller, I want to talk to not down and not up. I want to talk to my buyer. One way that I do that is I use what I call the most important key. I use my buyer’s favorite word which is their name but I don’t know their names. I use the word “you” constantly. Think about what I’m telling you right now. I mean. Does it feel as though I am talking directly to you? I am. I mean and that’s my intent. I want you to know that I have something to tell you that will help you. If I spoke in third person, Michael, if I never use the word “I” or “you”. If I said, “ if I wrote, eBay sellers and, I write an auction that said, a lot of people looking at this auction will feel that it’s, or will like the fact that it’s.” I am not talking to anyone. I’m just

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talking to myself. I’m just talking to a generic third person. If I keep using the word “you”, and I haven’t used it in these real stogy rare book buyers sometime, I’ll say, “you will just love the fact that it’s got this.” I write a newspaper column about eBay. a syndicated column that I write regularly. One of my readers wrote to me one time. A lady named Sally. She said, “she never wanted to sell again on eBay. That everything that I was selling sounded good.” I kept the news. I keep the newspaper column fairly simple because I’m always talking to people who are new to eBay. They are not ready for some of these real advanced techniques. She was tired of listing things and getting no bids. I told Sally. I was trying to be friendly and encouraging but I said, millions of people don’t buy and sell successfully every day if, if it’s a failure, if it is hard to do. If there is some other reason you are not selling these items, because she told what she was selling. Those are reasonable things that are just used items around her home that should sell. I looked at a couple of her auctions and I called her up and her auctions were horribly boring. At first, Michael, it took me a moment to realize why. I mean I didn’t even catch this. She would use really literally use the term “the buyer” all the time. She would be describing a colorful plate that she wanted to sell and she would actually write – when the buyer bids on this item, the buyer will be bidding on a lovely dish that someone gave to me. It was all third person. When I asked her, she told me that in school, she was told never use the word “I” and never use the word “you” when you are writing.

Do you remember that? When she said that, I remember that too. I was told that.

Michael: I don’t remember that.

Greg: Well, I mean. No, it doesn’t make your writing sound cheap using you when talking to someone makes that person feels special. I mean at least far more than referring to a third person. I made her break that habit. I said, “you must try just a few more auctions and let me look at your auctions. I won’t change any of the wordings except I want you to use ‘you’ and ‘I’.” She relisted, she relisted that the two auctions that had not gotten any bits before and both of those sold. She was just thrilled. I was on pins and needles because it may have been something that wasn’t even worth buying. I mean I didn’t know anything about these dishes. Fortunately they sold. I asked her, she told me that after telling me about what she learned in school that she’ll never follow that rule again. The plates didn’t change only the direction of words. Now, I like that term direction under your word. The bitter thought that she was talking to them. There was interaction. They felt that Sally was right there talking to them and it really did sound so much better. She wrote last week again. She’s written with a few questions over the last couple of months. She’s currently got more than 30 items listed for sale right now. She just loves eBay. That was the only thing she changed.

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Michael: What’s the number one mistake when crafting title?

Greg: In the scores of rare and used books that I’ve become known for selling quite a time. I made a startling discovery a couple of years ago that increased our bids. It seemed so obvious to me now, Michael. Why it took so long to figure it out just astounds. It embarrasses me but it’s a good lesson for our listeners to see. How the obvious can be staring at us. We were writing key word intense auction titles. I was using Wordtracker and Overture, and, and if we were selling a book like Sherlock Holmes the First Edition, I would put Sherlock and I would put Holmes and I would put the author, Arthur Conan Doyle and mystery and detective in our title. I would load that thing up with as many key words as possible. Michael, and again, it’s embarrassing. I omitted the word book in every title and that means that when someone searched for Sherlock Holmes book, they never saw my title. Never. What a horrible mistake that the word book. It’s a 1,000 pound gorilla sitting on top of me and I didn’t even notice it. Before doing anything else, I strongly encourage you not to make the number one mistake of titles at least and that is make sure your title tells exactly what you’re selling. People look for Sherlock Holmes books but they also look for Sherlock Holmes movies. Sherlock Holmes DVD’s. Sherlock Holmes movie posters. Sherlock Holmes games. The people that want the book, those are, those are the people I want to see my auction. Include the most obvious word in your title sometimes you forget to do that.

Let me give you one more example The Hunt for Red October.

Michael: Okay.

Greg: Everyone has heard of the book The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy?

Michael: Sure.

Greg: Okay. Here’s a real boring title. Tom Clancy book. Okay. That’s kind of boring. It doesn’t use any words. There’s no real grammar there. The Hunt for Red October Tom Clancy book. Here’s a far better sounding title. The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy great story. That’s a lot better sounding title but it’s a horrible title because The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy great story doesn’t have the word book in it. So don’t worry about grammar. I know I’ve stressed this before but the number one mistake is always, is the number one mistake is to not state the obvious. Make sure in all of those key words that you really look for and use Wordtracker for that you also put exactly what you’re selling. That’s even more important than all those other related items.

Michael: Does humor in a listing help things sell better?

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Greg: Well, once you develop a writing rapport that, that lets you write listings, once you learn how to write listings that sound as though you’re talking to your buyers, you, you will occasionally think of something funny to put in your listing. Surprisingly, humor is really often times ineffective as a selling technique. There are lots of reasons for it but the most obvious is your buyer might think it’s funny but humor is a taste that differs greatly among us. It is difficult to pull off humor to a large audience. Even to an audience who has raised their hand looking for your item. The problem is that it is difficult to write something that makes most of your readers smile. Some will think your attempt at humor is dumb, even it is not. Some will think it is truly funny but it’s the richest buyer looking at your auction. If that buyer doesn’t like your joke, then that buyer is going to go somewhere else. That humor may cost you a bid. If you’re attempted to say something funny, really analyze your auctions tone and the item you’re selling and read through your listing. Read through it without the humor to see if it makes your selling more effective. It often will. Even read it out loud without the humor and then read that same paragraph with it and see if it helps. Of all the humor possible using real subtle dry humor very lightly and sparingly, that’s okay. That’s effective at times. It kind of puts you in, kind of as an inside joke with the buyer. As long as you can keep it dry and subtle, that’s fine. But don’t overdo it. Because even those two would think it is funny will often be the ones who get it and the rest who don’t think it’s funny, may not even realize its humor. As long as it is dry, then those who don’t even realize you’re trying to be funny, they won’t be put off by it, if that makes any sense?

Michael: What are some more money making tips that you don’t see in most of the eBay books or videos or seminars that teach people how to buy and sell on eBay?

Greg: Michael, I don’t know how much you’ve studied the books and seminars about how to sell on eBay. But most give absolutely none of this material that really matters. They spend all their time. I mean. You mention things that aren’t in the books and seminars. They spend a lot of time on how to take good pictures and how to register as buyer or seller and all that’s fine. But the ones that do go further and tell their students about the title should be full of key words even. Even they don’t give you tools like Wordtracker. If you really want a tip that will squash your competitors bid, well, I’ve got one. If you might recall, my Land’s End t-shirt example that I told you about? If you write your description properly, your buyers, they will want to bid on your auction. Armed with that knowledge that people really have a level of interest, you need to move into a selling mode immediately. Now, remember how important it is to write as though you’re selling your best friend. That also allows you to write more words. You can write longer auctions. Don’t be sic sync. Tell everything that you can about that item. Tell everything your best friend wants to know about that item but here’s the gem. Too many sellers

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rely on, on features for the actual selling. You need a features list. For instance, if you’re selling electronic equipment or computers, your buyers need to know the speed and how much disc space it has and all of that. But save those features for the bottom of the auction. You want to give the benefits. This is nothing new in the world of direct marketing. This is Direct Marketing 101 but for some reason, it’s advanced, advanced, super advanced eBay. I don’t know why people don’t promote this.

Let me think the. For instance, your cell phone, I just got a new wireless blue tooth head set the other day and, you know, if I were selling a blue tooth enabled head set for a cell phone, I would not put blue tooth enabled in the title -- I don’t think. Depends on Wordtracker might show me differently but I wouldn’t even put in the description blue tooth enabled. Instead of that, I would write something like, no more getting down on your knees to plug a cable in the back of your computer. With this phone, when you want to download your computer’s address book to your cell phone, you just put the phone next to your computer and let the phone do all the work from there. I mean, that’s a lot better than saying blue tooth enabled. Because I am describing the benefit of being blue tooth enabled. No one really cares. The reader when, when he or she sees no more getting down on your hands and knees to plug a cable in the back of your computer from your cell phone, that’s gold. I mean who wants to do that? No one wants to do that. No one in their right mind wants to do that. The funny thing is almost all cell phones now are blue tooth enabled but that doesn’t matter. You still want to put that benefit not the feature that says, blue tooth wireless enabled but the benefit that that gives you.

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Michael: Give me a couple of examples or the benefits.

Greg: Well, then, the blue tooth was one. Let’s say that you buy a computer that has a DVD. Most computers are now sold and they will have a DVD player that reads and writes DVDs. If you look in an ad for that lap top in the newspaper, it will say DVD +/- RW. Instead of that – in my auction where I’ve got lots of words, I might have +/- RW down at the bottom where someone searching through all of the things, the technical specs about that lap top will know. But up in the auction itself, even though probably every lap top sold new, right now today, has that I’m going to say this lap top lets you write your own DVDs. You can create your own family movies on your DVD. Not only can you play movies that buy at the store, but you can actually create your own movies. Write them on a DVD and send them to your grandmother and she can watch her children’s videos 200 mile away on her own TV. You can do it all from this lap top. See I’m giving the results of DVD +/- RW. I’m now

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saying, I don’t care about DVD +/- RW neither do my readers. I’m giving the results. The features of what’s possible.

Michael: Very good.

Greg: Now, if you really to know how to leverage that tip. Here’s how you do it. You lead with your biggest benefit. Now, direct marketers have known this for years. But it is rarely done in eBay. I have to force myself to do it sometimes. Because I like to save the best for last. I write a lot of nonfiction items where I am building to teaching my readers something at the very end. When you’re selling something, you want to start with the cookies and milk at the very beginning. You want to lead with your biggest benefit. You should, as you’re writing your auction, you’re going to not do a bunch of features. May be at the end but you want to tell all about what they can do with your item that’s the benefit. What I can do with this. What you can do with this. You want to tell the strength, the benefits and then you want to look through that list and put the most important one first. Put the sexiest one first. Put the one most people are really going to like first. If I have a blue tooth enabled cell phone and it is a special kind that allows me to be twice as far away from the computer as all other blue tooth, then that’s a pretty important feature. If, not all phones have that. I’m going to put that closer to the top of the list. To leverage using features over benefits always, I mean, benefits over features. Always lead with your biggest benefit.

Michael: The hardest part is automatic. You have a targeted buyer looking at your auction. You have a buyer who feels as though you’re sitting there next to them telling them as their friend all about the item. What do you do to turn that interest into real action? How do you convince the buyer to click that all important bid now button?

Greg: I’ll tell you what I do and I strongly recommend every one listening to our conversation that they do the same. I just tell them to bid right now because I learned a long time ago that if someone isn’t told what to do, they often don’t do anything. There’s a classic selling movie. Maybe you’ve seen it. Probably you have or you have heard of it called Glengarry Glen Ross. It had this famous line where Alec Baldwin.

Michael: A-B-C.

Greg: Exactly.

Michael: Always Be Closing.

Greg: Always Be Closing. I’m not a big fan of the movie in general. I’m not a big fan of Alec Baldwin actually. But, oh, what an amazing line that if you really understand and you will here in just a second if you don’t now? Pay attention

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to those infomercials that are at 3:00 a.m. in the morning that no one likes. That no one will admit to liking too or to watching. The next time one comes on and listen to how many times an infomercial says “call now”. They might even say – so dial the number and you will hear them say – pick up the phone and call 1-800 and they are saying that over and over and over and what they’re doing, is closing the sale. They believe in A-B-C- Always Be Closing. There are closing, closing, closing. They are putting into the heads of their viewers what we call a call to action. They’re implying – look instead of just sitting there, I’m letting you know what you should do. Call right now. You can be closing the sale throughout an auction. This is one I don’t do often enough myself. I often forget to do this. It is so important to get that buyer who is interested to click the bid now button. I sometimes must make myself. I put a little post-it note to remind myself. I sprinkle the phrases – place your bid now. Click the bid now button. Bid now for this item. Bid now to get your place in line. Certainly, your final paragraph in your auction should begin in and end with these types of calls to action. It is subtle but it is effective. It moves some of your lookers into action to click that all important bid now button. It moves some of them who might otherwise think maybe I’ll look at others. I do need this but maybe I’ll look at other auctions. It will cause some of those people to actually click. If all you do, Michael, that one thing, if all you do, is add the words “bid now” or perhaps the phrase click the bid button right now to your auction, you will see an increase in activity. Your bidders will increase. You will make more money. I mean that’s the kind of tip I really like because I’m lazy. It doesn’t require research. It doesn’t require writing skills. It doesn’t require anything except I just tell my bidder what to do next. It is a powerful technique that will make you a lot of money.

Michael: Any other little secrets that can make our listeners a lot of money?

Greg: Here is what you do. Paint a mental picture for your bidder. That mental picture is the sole purpose will be to place your item into your bidder’s hands mentally and that’s it. It sounds kind of weird but let me explain it. All of the great catalogs do this. J. Peterman, Land’s End all of those do it for rare and expensive items. That is really when this technique works the best. Painting a mental picture that puts that rare item into the hands of your bidder, it works very well. I’ve been told by people. I’ve sold this; I’ve sold this technique to by the way. I mean this is one of my gems that I just don’t like to give away. I’ve been told that painting a pic, mental picture sounds too difficult. Let me tell you – it is so easy. It doesn’t matter how you do it as long as somewhere in your auction, you somehow guide your bidders through the idea of actually holding the item. That’s it. Here’s one of the many things you can say. You can say "imagine how anxious you’ll be when your postal carrier rings your doorbell and asks you to sign for a box." A box that you know contains precious black pearl necklaces. Once you close that door, you’ll take your pearl box to the nearest table and carefully unwrap it. As to get a peek inside

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of your new black pearls that you’ve wanted for so long. There they are -beautiful in your box. Just imagine how they’ll look around your neck?

Michael: How do you do it with your rare books?

Greg: Okay. I don’t go that overboard. Okay. That is something that I would say that type of talk is something I would say for something really special. For my books, here is what I say. Imagine how anxious you will be to get this rare book whenever the postman rings the doorbell or postal carrier rings the doorbell or even something very simple. Like when you open this package, you will see your book has not only a mint condition dust jacket but inside the author has signed his or her name in it. I just want to say briefly even one sentence. I want to start with – when you open the box or when you hold this book or we, we often sell, we actually a lot of times we sell on consignment for people who hire us to sell their items on eBay. If we’re selling clothing, we’ll say – as you feel the cloth. As you feel the corduroy pants, this will be the softest corduroy you’ve ever felt. All of that is kind of borrowing from the Land’s End technique of making your buyer picture him or her, he or she actually feeling the material. You want that picture. Here’s what you’re doing. You are for a brief moment in time creating ownership. That buyer, that bidder, that potential bidder actually owns the item for that split second that he or she is there opening the box or lifting the material or feeling the pearl necklace or whatever. This painting of a mental picture it, it comes from a couple of fields not really related to selling but to, they are used a lot in selling. One is called Neuro-Linguistic Programming – NLP. You might have heard of that. Um. There’s also another called Cycle Cybernetics. If you knew me, you’d know that cycle babble types of things are the last things I really ever like to promote but these two topics – NLP. It does sound kind of new agey by Neuro-Linguistic Programming and Cycle Cybernetics in spite of their weird names; were both developed separately but the overlap in many ways. One of the things that they really stress is the importance of painting a mental picture. By doing that; you put a different result in a person’s hand. If the person has some sort of anxiety that, that he or she suffers from or needs help focusing on a job or what of that. You give them exercises that actually paint a picture of them actually overcoming this in different steps. We can use this in selling to temporarily transfer ownership of this item that is so dramatic. That is so important to do. You can do it with anything with rare books. If I have a rare book buyer who is stogy and only wants the facts man, just the facts, I’ll still try to get in there something about just wait until you see this book. Even, even that is showing that buyer that he or she is going to actually with his own eyes see that book in their own home. That is so dramatically important.

Michael: That’s great. Do some people consider these advanced selling techniques coercive?

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Greg: May be some people consider them coercive but those people are wrong. If you paint a mental picture. If you feel that that’s a little more than coercion in your auctions, you really may not understand your job. I don’t mean this in a bad way. First of all, well, you have to have confidence in what you sell. Otherwise, don’t sell it. You have to be convinced that everything you say is accurate and truthful. It’s okay if you hype up certain things but that hype be better accurate. It better have some truth to it. Don’t waste these precious gifts like the mental picture technique on an item if you just don’t believe in it because it doesn’t make any sense to it. You’re wasting a gift. Your bidders will know you aren’t thrilled about what you’re selling. Just stick to a basic description and hope for the best or even better, don’t sell something until you’re really ready to sell it. Only when you are convinced that an item is worth selling, only then that you are, convinced that you’re not overcharging on shipping. That you confidently tell the complete truth about the item even if it has some places that are broken on it or has some flaws. Only when you are ready to tell the complete truth, then you’re really ready to sell it. If you really believe that someone can benefit from your item, it is your obligation to sell that item. It’s your obligation to convince bidders that they need to place a bid. You need to sell it with all your might. It doesn’t matter if it’s a broken coffee pot. If you have an old Mister Coffee maker from the 1980’s that you couldn’t sell for 50¢ at your last garage sell because it doesn’t heat up anymore. I promise you someone on earth still uses an identical pot and they recently broken the carafe on it. The glass is broken. All they need is that, is that handle on that pot or something. They miss their morning Mister Coffee and they’ll bid on it. I mean somewhere in the world someone probably wants this thing. You, it is your obligation once you are convinced someone can use it and that you’re not taking advantage of them, you must call to action. You must be ruthless. I don’t mean you should be a ruth, ruthless person. I do mean you should be a ruthless seller. You should truly. You owe it to your buyer. If you really care about your buyers and if you’re telling the strict truth, you owe it to your buyer to do everything possible to convince that buyer to take action and to buy your product.

Michael: How about the guarantees? How do you use guarantees to increase your sales?

Greg: Guarantees are one of the draw backs of eBay. This is one area that the director marketers are correct. EBay does not do enough for the guarantees. EBay recently rolled out a big guarantee. I say recently now. It’s been actually a year or two or more but they started allowing you to put guarantees on auctions. At first, they only allowed you to have a 1 day or a 3 day, a 5 day and 7-day guarantee. If someone didn’t like your item, they needed to ship it back in 3 days or 5 days or 7 days. You click whether you want to pay return shipping or not. You click whether you’ll give a full return or may be an 80% return with a restocking fee. Well, what direct marketers know is that the longer the period you give someone to return something; it is far less likely it

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is they’ll ever return it. And I like to give people a year to return something. Fortunately, eBay got slightly better at that and that they finally gave, allowed us to click a 30-day guarantee which is better than a 7-day guarantee. Because again, whether it logically makes sense or not, the longer a guarantee that there is, the less likely a buyer will return it to you. Every single item we sell, whether it is used, whether it’s broken and we sell broken things. We just make sure we tell the buyer where it is broken. Whether it is in mint condition, crystal, glass. I don’t care what it is. We always check. We actually have it in our template, auction template. We don’t even check it anymore. Everything has a 30-day, money back, postage paid guarantee. We will take back anything that we sell if that buyer is not happy.

Michael: What can you write in the description of the auction that you’ll even go beyond eBay’s guarantee and put in writing that you’ll take it back within a year?

Greg: I have often done that. I have often done that for a year. One slight problem I have is that when I sell items on consignment for other people; like these books and such.

Michael: Okay.

Greg: It is my duty to pay these people as soon as possible because they’re my clients. I like to have my money in hand before I pay them and they understand that.

Michael: Right. So you are on consignment I can understand that.

Greg: It’s difficult for me to offer a 1-year guarantee. However, on things that we sell of our own or things that we find and sell, I often will write in forget the money and I like saying that. Forget the money back guarantee because a lot of people will go, you’re not even going to guarantee 30 days. I’ll go; I’ll give you a year – 365 days. I don’t care if it is midnight on the 365th day; I currently have an eBook up for sale on eBay on eBay auctions. I actually say I don’t care if it’s midnight on the 365th day. If you don’t want this book, I will buy it back from you. I prefer to give much longer but above all else, offer the 30-day money back guarantee. If you don’t feel comfortable doing that, then, qualify it this way. If I, you can put this at the bottom of every auction. If I have misrepresented this item in any way, if it has a flaw that I did not see, did not take a picture of or did not tell you about, then, please let me know and I will be glad to refund your shipping even your return shipping and send this back to you. I think that’s fair. I think that actually I think you have an obligation to do that or else you’re not treating your buyers in an ethical way. Will some buyers take advantage of that and they have buyer’s remorse and they don’t want your item when they get it, may be some will. We’ve had a couple of people return things. Write us and say they don’t want something.

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But it’s always been because they didn’t like something about it that may be I didn’t describe well enough. Even if I didn’t put that, if I don’t describe this well enough, whatever reason I am going to allow them to return it. I do want to say that I recently sold some extremely rare comic books from the 1940’s. Human Torch and all those old rare Marvel comic books. They went for about $250.00 a piece. I was very concerned about those being returned, swapped for one that wasn’t in the same condition. Does that make sense?

Michael: Yeah. Return merchandise fraud.

Greg: Return fraud and it really did concern me and that’s odd. Because I never worry about that sort of thing no matter what we sell. But there was something about these. As a kid, I used to collect comics. I actually had a pretty good collection. So I know the value of these. I don’t know that kind of bothered me. I made sure that our pictures were crystal clear. I made, but even then, pictures of the comic book cover. They could take the cover off and put on a comic book that was missing pages of the same issue and sends it back and says this thing is missing pages. It is difficult for me now. They couldn’t see the mark. I couldn’t see the mark. But under the UV light, you can see it and if they returned, we do this on the last page, the first page and the middle where it opens, where the fold is. So that way we can make sure at the least. Our first page, the last page and the center page, the last two pages. The center page was what we sent if they returned them. All that was for not because we never had the problem but if, if we had that, that would allow me to prove that that wasn’t the comic that I sent them.

Michael: Greg you shared some incredible ideas for our listeners. Especially ideas that can really multiple anyone's sales. Ongoing sales especially if they choose a consumable idea going back to the example like the guy selling the nicotine gum. But I'm going to push you for one more. I want one more technique. One so powerful that it blows every other tip that you have ever divulged in any of your seminars or even in your books for my listeners. Give me the supreme selling tip.

Greg: There's one I would like to save for myself and it's one of the most powerful gems that just revolutionizes options and it works not just on eBay but in classified ads and online websites where ever you want to sell something. But for some reason, I found it really improves eBay sales far better than the one-year money back guarantee and all the rest. This technique is not for amateurs. What I mean by that is that it's for eBay sellers who really want to leap frog their competition but it's not for the saint of heart. In spite of its almost limitless selling power, the best thing about it is that it's only simple sentence that you can add to every option or everything you ever sell anywhere. This is a sentence that you can put in every option that you list. I don't really care what you sell and you won't have to change a word in this

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sentence ever again for any other option. It's just so much more powerful than call to action. Putting the item into your buyer's minds and all of that. I really have a warning about this though before you use the sentence I am about to tell everyone, you need to be warn. If you fail to deliver on this one sentence, your credibility will forever be shot. I mean if one buyer gives you feedback that says you did not fulfill the following promise, you really might as well change eBay I.D.'s if you ever want to use the techniques again. You got to make sure you stand behind this technique promise. If there is any doubt, don't use this technique. We save it. My wife and I for all of our eBay business. We save it for those times we can fully stand behind it. We know in advance that we can. We cannot always stand behind it so we don't always use it. When we are going out of town or when holidays are upon us or company's coming in, we never use this technique because of the risk of failing on it. If we fail to mail this item within 24 hours of receiving payment, we will refund 100% of your money and ship this item to you absolutely free of charge.

Now, this promise is going to frighten some sellers. I am going to tell you why it works. Again, here's that sentence. If we fail to mail this item within 24 hours of receiving payment, we will refund 100% of your money and ship this item to you absolutely free of charge.

Michael: My that's great.

Greg: You want to make sure that your options are so tempting. Remember that buyers will think they're taking advantage of you if they win your option. This sentence is one of those that seals the deal. I mean even Ross Pereau would be impressed that this sentence is giant sucking sound that one hears when they pull so many betters into your options.

Michael: Where do you put it in the auction?

Greg: If I have a headline, I put it directly under that headline in bold print. You can put it other places. I would recommend you put it twice. Directly under the headline or if you just state the auctions items at the top in large letters. Put it right under that and it wouldn't hurt to put it one more time after you said everything else in bold print in a sentence paragraph all by itself. If we fail to mail this item to you within 24 hours of receiving proper, I say proper payment. I'll tell you what that means in a minute but that kind plows it hear. If we fail to mail this item within 24 hours of receiving payment, we will refund 100% of your money and ship this item to you absolutely free of charge.

Now, the buyer first of all knows many things now. He or she knows that it is certain you will ship that item quickly because who couldn't afford not to. In addition, your buyers know it's entirely possible, they might get it for free. I

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mean that's an offer that's 100% irresistible. Now, does it work for items where bidders don't really care if they get prompt shipment? Yes. It works because it adds tremendous security for those buyers.

It says you mean what you say. It's a no risk gamble. Because everyone of your high bidders knows it's possible that they'll get it for free whether they want it quickly or not. The technique will only be a week if you are brand new to eBay and have a low feedback score. Once you have 45 or so more feedbacks and a high positive percentage, everyone really shows that you do what you say. You're established enough to make this promise really means something to your bidders. Now, I like to say proper payment. Because that implies your buyer has to follow your rules of payment. In other words, if you say that if you receive checks, you hold the item until the check clears or something like that. If you've got some sort of check clearing or money, even these days, money orders for the most part should, should wait to clear before. Because money order fraud is on the rise. Unless you can, unless you get a postal money order or a money order that you can take to the, to the issuing institution and verify. Even a money order sometimes should require a hold before you send something.

Now, if a buyer has a high feed back, we don't really do that. But there are times when you may want to hold the check. Assuming that your payment terms are not ridiculous, that, I say that proper payment is completely acceptable. It's a good expectation on your part that, that means as long as you follow my payment policy. You pay through eBay or if I require a confirmed eBay. I'm sorry you pay through PayPal possibly and maybe I require a confirmed mailing address on your PayPal account or something like that. As long as you pay me the way my payment policies are and my payment policies are extremely flexible, I take just about anything. This will be a powerful guarantee and you can stick to it. If your buyer sends you a check and you've made it clear, you're going to hold the check for 10 days and you do that and then mail it to that person on the 11th day, you have to fill this promise. If they complain you didn't, they're really wrong about that but I don't think that's going to happen.

Michael: Not only is there eBay. I mean, you can do that on your own website.

Greg: Anything. And if you happen to feel that 24 hours is to constraining, well extend it to 36 or 48 hours but every time you extend it, you weaken the offer. In addition, if it's an extremely expensive item such as over $500.00, it would also work to change the wording. If you want to refund just $50.00 or $75.00 or $100.00 but the higher the promise of the refund, the more powerful your offer is. Because of that cut off time and really if your item goes for an extremely high bid, that complete 100% refund plus shipping guarantee really

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makes your auction one of the most magnetic auctions on eBay. That's the killer tip. Michael: Why do you divulge these secrets so freely? Why are you telling me all this right now? Aren't you afraid to let your competition know about all of these secrets where there may be, may be a threat to you?

Greg: I'm really not. I don't just give this out to everyone. I've given it in seminars before some of these things. I don't talk about it in my newspaper column actually and I write some reports on an eBay site actually I've written several reports that readers can read. I don't put them there. I think they're too important for that. But in many ways, I've just handed our listeners a whole bunch of money. I mean. These are proved techniques that are hardly used at all. I never read or heard anyone teaching. I say all of these or most of them. I hope our listeners have tax problems because of how much money they make. Am I afraid of my competition? I am absolutely not for several reasons. I don't say that to be pupas. But it is sad but true that hardly anyone who hears this will actually implicate most of the ideas. Most people just are like that. Even when they agree that something they learned is a great technique, they just don't change easily. They don't adopt easily. Those few who do, hey, the world's a huge place. I mean there's plenty of room for several successful eBayer's, who understand how to get into the buyers minds and the chance that anyone listening will ever directly complete with me, with all the sellers on eBay, that's extremely small. But if that ever happens, I have it on good authority actually that iron sharpens iron. If I have to work harder to compete, if I must keep finding new ways to remain profitable, that makes me better. I want everyone who reads my books or attends a seminar to profit from what I say because I practice what I preach.

I mean if I didn't believe in what I'm teaching, then I have no right to promote it as a good thing. I truly believe in these techniques and I truly believe they'll change our listener’s income for the better. So competition, Michael, I welcome the challenge.

Michael: That testimonial you found that testimonials work for you on eBay auctions?

Greg: With eBay, you get testimonials whether you want them or not. Most people don't see right away and you should want testimonials by the way but eBay testimonials are eBay's feedback. There's nothing wrong with picking out the best of the feedbacks that you've gotten and scattering a few of them throughout an auction of yours. Now, other eBayer's can always look at every single feedback other people have given you since Day One. At any point, they can go to your feedback pages and read through all of them but I like to make it even easier. I like to cherry pick the best of the best for my feedback and I will actually copy that and put that feedback scatter it throughout my auction wherever I want them. However, I want to list them. You can even

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use the person's eBay I.D. because it's all public information available anyway on eBay to everyone. But I don't like, if, and I actually have fairly extraordinarily feedbacks right now. Many, many thousands. Really they get lost in the shuffle. I pull them out and put some of the ones on my auction page. I monitor them and I pull out, I replace them as the day goes on. I mean as time goes on. Your about me pages also a great place to put testimonials but there, you want to put people who have sent you e-mails about, you know, thank you so much. I am so happy about what you did. About the extra mile you took. About upgrading my shipping or whatever you happen to do. You should ask their permission if you do that. But if they let you and they don't mind, you should put their name and even their city and state. However, much they will let you put about themselves up and including full name, city and state or at the least, first name and state. The more you can tell about them the better if they've written you a longer testimonial. On your about me page, you have room to do that. What you're doing is showing buyers that you are not tooting your own horn. Instead, you're just a messenger. You're just passing along a message that some stranger wrote about you and it truly enhances your eBay credibility.

Michael: People in direct marketing understand what an up sell is but may be for someone who doesn't understand, why are you explaining? What is an up sell is? How can we use up sells in eBay after a buyer buys something from you? How can that work for us in making more money?

Greg: Got it. The easiest time to sell someone something is right after they purchase something else from you. Everyone has been up sold even if they don't know the term; it's the old razors by the cash register trick. Let's be clear. I don't want to confuse the honorable up sell with may be a dishonorable bait and switch type of tactic. Where you promise a certain prize to a description that's too good to be true and then once the buyer accepts that, you kind of swap on them. That's not what we're saying. We're saying that once someone has bought something for you, one way of. Well, there's three ways to make a lot more money. One is to get more customers. One is to have your current customers buy more of what they already buy from you and one is to, oh another reason. I said three. Those are the primary two. But another one is to get customers to bring you other customers but let me talk about the second. One is up sell. If you can get a buyer whose bought from you to buy more, there actually in a buying mode as soon as they buy something from you. Sadly, eBay is not great about helping you up sell. There check out process is, it starts to do that but it's not really effective the way a direct marketer would really like. I always look for ways to up sell through eBay. Here's how you can do it. But first of all, you want to ask yourself -- what does my buyer want next? Once my buyer buys this item, is there something I have that the buyer might want next? I've been selling all these used and rare books for over a year now. There's really very little I can up sell. At first, that seems to be the case. It turns out, that's not

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really true. One up sell technique though. The up sell technique that works best for you, is I'm going to move to when you have a fairly predictable set of goods that you sell over and over, I'm going to get back to the eBayer like myself who sells individual items. But when you sell the same item over and over, such as DVD's that you buy and sell in large quantities or something like that or when you sell in basically in a general category like truck parts or engine fluids or something like. When you have related items, you need to ask yourself -- what do my buyer's immediately following this item? You need to tell your buyer that in the auction, whenever they are looking at, I don't know, I'm thinking of truck parts right now, whenever they look at a steering wheel for a Dodge pick-up, you should be selling steering wheel covers if you sell a lot of steering wheels. You should be selling vinyl cleaners for the inside of the truck. You should be selling items that that buyers kind of thinking of when they're there at the steering wheel looking over the rest of the truck. When you do that. Let's say that you have an MP3 player that you were given as a gift and you don't use it often enough to keep it. Now, that's just a one item sell. You you don't sell an MP3 player so how can you do the same thing? Well, do you have a spare pack of new batteries that will fit the player? If you do, don't include the batteries with the MP3 player but instead send an e-mail to your buyer whenever they win and say you'll toss in a brand new set of batteries for $4.00 extra or whatever. To save the buyer all the time and effort and trouble at purchasing them at a retail store. Now that $3.00 or $4.00 isn't much but it's just like your MP3 player got an extra boost in income and you weren't going to use those batteries any way maybe. Now, consider what you might do if you have a lap top to sell. Before the listing the lap top, find a deal on a good lap top carrying case. May be at your local Kmart or Wal-Mart. Even if you don't already have one for sale, just, just find a good bag and price it. Add a slight mark up to it. You don't even have to buy it. If your buyer got a good deal on the lap top, he or she may very well pay you a premium to buy a carrying case that you sell them also. You call tell them all about it. Because it saves the buyer the time and trouble of finding one you can ship it all together. You can ship the lap top in their new carrying case. If there’s a lot of competition for that lap top, well, you might even offer the bag as a free bonus instead of using that as an up sell. Just to make yourself different from your competition to get the higher bid and you might get more than enough to pay for that lap top.

Michael: Tell me exactly how you do that?

Greg: I do that in several ways. First of all, I always offer combined shipping discounts. I want my buyer and this is all related up sells. I want my buyers to know that if they happen to buy more than one thing from me, I'm really going to please them on their shipping charges. Because if I can sell three things and mailed them all in one box, not only does that mean I don't have to wrap three items three times and do three stamps.com. It also means that I can save money and so I just pass it on to my buyers because I'm not trying

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to profit. Once I pay for shipping and my boxes and things, we primarily use new boxing and new tape and all that. Once I pay for all that, I don't want to profit off my shipping. If I'm going to save money sending three items in one box, my buyer should save money too. Number One, I always offer combined shipping discounts to get them in the mode of maybe I ought to look at other things this guy sells. I tell my buyers in every single auction, I don't care whether it's, I don't care, no excuse, in every auction, that we greatly reduce combined shipping costs when they win more than one item. Only I don't tell them that one. I don't tell them that twice and I don't tell them that three times. I often state that in four or five places. When I do that, I will, even though eBay doesn't like links in your auction. eBay doesn't really care if you link to other eBay auctions. I mean. EBay is thrilled about that. I will even turn that statement that I will dramatically give you a combined shipping discount if you buy more than one item within a week's period and I underline that with a link and it's. It says see my other auctions -- click here. I send them to a list of all my other auctions on eBay. I never take them off eBay and that would be against the rules. I do that four or five (excuse me) I do that four or five times an auction. I found this helps tremendously especially for the all important international buyer. Because the international buyer as of the time we're speaking, the dollar is weak. So they really want to buy a lot from us right now. They really save a lot of money. But even when the dollar is strong again, there shipping is so expensive that if they can buy three or four, five things from the same seller, then they're far better off and their price per item is dramatically lower than if they were to buy it from several different places. Often in America, our prices are far cheaper than European prices and other prices anyway. We have more, still a free market in our society; not as much as we should or did. We have such a free market mentality skill that we can offer lower prices.

There's a caveat on that. On some items, we can't combine with other things and that would be, we recently finished selling five vintage Christmas ornaments for a lady who had to sell some of her more decorative items. These were extremely old and extremely fragile. They required an extraordinary amount of wrapping and protection. I just couldn't safely mail those with books or anything else. I had to state in that auction, I cannot combine shipping on these because and you mentioned these words while they go. I gave them a reason why. It's always important to tell why you have to do something. Buyers approve of limitations as long as you're telling them why and I said these are so fragile that we wanted to ensure they arrived in the same precious condition that we mail them. If we combine them with a book or something else, they might break. You don't want a broken ornament. We don't want you to get a broken ornament. We want you to be happy with this. Even though I said that, I still put four or five times in that auction, that we combine shipping on most items. I went ahead and modified it a little bit and said most items. It's okay to have some exceptions like that. But to really take advantage of the savings from a buyer, I not only tell them

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that but I cross promote a lot. The key is to look at the inventory of what you're selling and list in groups. Like right now, we happen to be selling a whole bunch of books on World War II. I don't know why but I'm putting a bunch up to my end. That just happens to be the next batch of books that the lady gave us to sell. Even though I have four or five boxes of other subjects, I will finish listing all of these World War II books before I list another book because I want to start generating a frenzy around our auction. I want World War II collectors to annoy each other to say, hey, did you see all those World War II books up there? They're all by the same guy. Everyone of them says, I will greatly discount your shipping if you buy more than one item. In everyone of those auctions, I refer to the others as my study. This is just one of several World War II book auctions we have right now. If you want to, if you want to take a look at our rare World War II books, click here and you'll see all of our books.

Actually, what I do then is I give them a list of all of our auctions so they can find the World War II books and actually see everything else as well.

Michael: Do you send them to your store?

Greg: Oh, yes. Well, I actually don't. I just send them to a search that I've saved that just lists in a format that I like all of our current auctions. The store is great but I still prefer just, this other format. I'll give you the link here in a minute that I use. But, if you have, say even vintage dolls, it doesn't matter. If you have five of one thing, you'll put them all in one auction in general. But be sure and list them all on the same day and refer to the other if you sell vintage dolls. Refer to the other dolls in every doll option. I think you'll find. Let me give you a number. Sorry, I'm looking for it here because I wrote it down. I did the math last night. Eighteen percent of our buyers are repeat buyers. I wish that were higher but that's not bad for strangers on eBay. You just find my items just by searching. Eighteen percent have bought from us before that buy. One out of five approximately of every buyer is someone that we dealt with before a reader of my a syndicated eBay newspaper column wrote to me just recently and she said, this was a brilliant idea that she never thought of and Michael, she sold these little glass paper weights and other kinds of items. She thought eBay search tool was getting all the business possible. But her biggest increase when she began cross promoting. Just by saying, I've got others of these. I will be glad to reduce shipping. She started using a cross promotion tool that eBay has built in. It works okay but if you have an eBay store, it works better than if you don't. But I still like to tell them in my auction. Now, once an auction is over, do you want to tell them in the in the sell e-mail about your other items, well, of course, but let me tell one little problem with eBay when it comes to doing that. A lot of times someone will win something, click pay now, pay through PayPal and within about 10 seconds, they not only won your item but they paid for it also. It's kind of difficult to get an e-mail to them before they do that. You can go ahead and

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send an e-mail that says, thanks for your payment. By the way, I have these other items, I will be glad to combine shipping if you would like. You lose a little bit of the excitement factor when you do that because they now consider the matter closed and they're moving onto something else. It is awkward for you to kind of figure out a way to invoice that through eBay and get them to lower shipping if they buy three more items. It's really a lot of book work for you. I wish there were a better way to do that bills in to eBay but in PayPal but there's really not.

After, I try to get them during the sell, which is not as good as right after the sell but about the best you can do. Even if you sell a car on eBay motors, and by the way, the largest used car dealer in the world is eBay motors which is just eBay selling used cars. More cars are sold there than any place in the world. This is just an idea. I don't think that you're going to do exactly what I'm about to tell you. But it kind of wets the appetite for other things you can do. Strike a deal for example with the local finance company to give your buyer an interest rate discount. Even if it's only a fraction of a point and may be a finder's fee to you for sending that buyer to that finance company. You can do the same with your insurance agent. As long as you truly get your buyer a deal on those extra services, may be your agent is able to give one of your buyers, if you offer this and you sell more than one car over a period of time, may be your insurance agent can do some sort of a bonus system for these people or some sort of a reduced rate. You should get a little commission for your leg work. The finance company, the insurance agent, they didn't have to advertise to get the business. Once everyone wins. Your buyer gets cheaper insurance or whatever. You shouldn't feel any guilt about that type of finder's fee or about profiting from the extra sell because you might be giving that buyer a discount over what they paid anywhere else. Perhaps, you offered a service that protects them. Some sort of a warranty service on a used car that no one else has offered or that they hadn't thought about. Perhaps, you've gone to the trouble to obtain this service and you should get paid for your trouble and everyone wins. In every successful business in the world, uses up sell techniques. Once you have a customer who has just purchased, that's when you want to sell something else. A spiel would you like fries with your hamburger type of up sale.

Michael: Is it possible to promote auctions outside of eBay?

Greg: Michael, I'm always promoting auctions. I'll tell you how to do it. The reason I do that is, is to actually I want consignment customers. I want people to come to me, to think of me first whenever they need to buy, to sell something that they have. I don't want them to open up the garage sell. I want them to have me sell it. I charge a very low 20% of whatever I sell their item for which is lower than most consignment sellers and I almost always get at least 20% more than they would get if they were selling the item themselves. It works for them, it works for me and I'm always selling. One way that I do that is

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through, I actually bought some eBay t-shirts one time. EBay has all sorts of logo wear. I'll wear our t-shirts out lots of places and people think of the millions of people who use eBay, they're always asking us about eBay. Oh, do you sell on eBay? I just bought something on eBay. They'll tell their story to us and it's great. Then, they'll say, so, do you work for eBay? That's the common question and I'll say, no. But we have found that we can make people a lot of money by selling their things a lot more that they can make themselves because of the history that we have on eBay and because we are power sellers and we have an eBay store. I just have a little selling skill that I can tell them in about 25 second right there.

Michael: Tell me what is it?

Greg: All they did is look at my t-shirt. Well, I started. The main catch phrase is we have found that we can make people a lot of money selling their items on eBay that will not make nearly as much in a garage sale or even if they list them themselves because we are power sellers. We know a lot of selling techniques and we have a history on eBay that is fantastic.

Michael: Are you and your wife doing all of your auctions yourself or do you have help?

Greg: We do them all ourselves.

Michael: How many auctions are you running a month?

Greg: A month? Since it's getting closer to the Christmas season. Now, we will start running about 800 to a 1,000 a month. During the months January, well February through August or September, we run about 400 auctions a month. About a hundred a week.

Michael: Now, do you use a standard template for your auctions?

Greg: Most of our auctions do look the same. I do modify that regularly. I'm always adding and tweaking it probably more than I should but I always think of things and try things and I'm always promoting. The t-shirt idea I did get to meet clients but I also promote our auctions everywhere. There's a really simple way for everyone listening to us today. There's a simple way to promote their auctions that really requires no work on their part once they set it up. If someone routinely sells on eBay, they should use an e-mail signature and that's just text which often has a hyperlink to their web, to their e-mail. I'm sorry to their eBay page that appears on the bottom of every e-mail they send. Microsoft Outlook and online Google's G-mail and most e-mail programs allow you to create a signature. Every time you send an e-mail, that recipient automatically get a description and a link to your auctions. You can say, look at just anything, anything you say sits in front of someone that didn't before. Say, look at these great eBay auctions and that's all you might

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say and have another line. But even better, you can be a little bit wiser and go the headline approach and say; you've never seen items for sale on eBay like these . . . and just have a link to your auctions. Whatever you do, and, we'll, and let me add one more thing. Anytime you have a link, it has been proved, oh, just too many times no doubt about it. If you do say, click here, you get more clicks. It's the ole tell the person what to do and they'll do it more likely. If you say, , you never seen auctions on eBay like these . . . click here to see what I mean. You're more likely to get a click. I don't care if 1 out of 100 people click on that. I mean, that's more. It's set up and other than that, a strict business account that I use that gets put on every e-mail that we send.

Michael: Do you use listing software and if so, what's the best one that you found?

Greg: I have used several. The one that I like the best was Mpire and that's spelled Mpire.com. After I got really good at it, they stopped using a listing service. They've now gone to a free research and, and searching tool which is really fabulous. But I miss their listing service. I've tried Ativa. I've tried several. I'm going to tell you what we currently use and even though we're heavy eBayers. We use eBay's own turbo lister tool.

Michael: Okay. And that's a free download?

Greg: It's a free download. I don't really like it but no one really likes it but, but it's fine with me. I'm pretty savvy when it comes to creating web pages and HTML. I can do little things with turbo lister just because I know a lot of computers that I can kind of make it work for me better than, than probably some can but I tell you, if you sell 10 or 20 items a week, you really need something like turbo lister to just take the grunt work out. To put up the same template every time so that at least, you don't forget the important things. In our templates, we have the we'll combine shipping at a greatly reduced rate, you know, three or four times already there. We've got all of these places already formatted. I know where the title is going to go. I strongly recommend everyone here to be using, at first turbo lister and then if you want to go to the paper services like Ativa, that's fine too.

Michael: What's your take on a 5-day auction, 7-day auctions? Ten day auctions? Is there a place for different types of auctions for those and what do you think is the best value?

Greg: There is. The best value is a 7-day auctions as a home. The way eBay works is the second that you list an item, the standard default is seven days later from that second unless there's a daylight savings time change, 7 days from that second, your auction will end no matter what. Seven days, if you go 10 days, you have to pay an extra fee. I haven't found it to be worth it for us but I'm kind of cheap. I like to use more secretive techniques. I like to get

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into the buyers mind. I like to create an action. I would rather do that then just spend money trying to get more buyers. We really like the seven day techniques. We have currently listed a piano that is almost like new that is ours that we've been trying to sell on eBay. We actually put it up for last Christmas very late in the season about two weeks before Christmas. Got a lot of interest and no one quite wanted to pay the price because it's not something we can ship. They had to come and get it. There was no one close by who wanted our piano. All these people far away. They wanted me to meet them half way. It just wasn't going to be possible. It's an awkward thing. We have had that in our eBay store now for almost a year and what do you know, and by the way, the big advantage to an eBay store is you can list things for 30 days at a very low rate and that piano cost us 6¢ a month to list. The drawback is once it does sell, we're going to pay more in eBay fees than we would if it were in auction.

Michael: How much are you selling? How is it selling for? Did it sell?

Greg: It has not sold yet. I think it is $1,600 and something dollars is what we have it for. It's really a beautiful. It's very everyone knows it's worth that that's why we get so much interest but we just have to find someone close by who can, who can get it.

Michael: Do you recommend the 7 day over the 5 day?

Greg: I do recommend the 7 day over the 5 day. However, there are many times I use a 3 day auction. If I'm selling something that's really hot, they, and I'll give you some examples. Low price and really in demand, those things seem to sell as well in three days, as they do seven. You should turn your money over faster. It's better velocity use of your money. For instance, we, we watch a lot of movies probably more than we should. We often buy them on Amazon. The day they come out, which is Tuesday of every week but we'll often buy them on the weekend. Amazon will often ship Sunday night. You have all day Monday and Tuesday and often we'll get them via UPS Tuesday afternoon. I have them the day they came out and my wife and I'll try to watch them furiously for a few days and then we try to get them listed by that weekend, Friday or Thursday night. If so, if we can do that, we can list them Thursday night or Friday night. We will list them in three day auctions because they're hot. Everyone is wanting them. We just put them up for a penny and they go. It's just silly. Actually, if we had a seven day auction, they will have lost some of their demand at the end of that seven days. Whereas, they're still going strong while they're still less than a week old.

If you sell perishable goods like, I've never bought any but I'm just so tempted to buy some Alaskan Salmon that is flown in fresh and they will overnight you. Not flown in but they'll over night you through Fed Ex this incredible Alaskan Salmon that was not raised on a fish farm or anything.

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They're always one day auctions because perishable items, and they need to ship them every single day and that makes a lot of sense. But, in general, three days is the shortest we'll go. Almost everything else will go seven days. If it's an extremely rare item that may be there aren't a lot of people interested in and yet, it's worth a lot of money, I will pay for a 10-day auction and here's how you do it. You start it on a Thursday night because what that will do, is go two weekends ending on a Sunday night which is the myth of all at will. Some people say it's a myth. The all important night to end an auction. Your auction if you start it 10 days on a Thursday evening, gives two weekends worth of coverage. That's pretty powerful.

Michael: When you are listing an auction, eBay, they're pretty good at up selling it. They want to sell you a featured listing. They want to sell you bold. They want to sell you highlight. They want to sell you gallery pictures. Tell me what to stay away from.

Greg: I can tell you what we have found works best and what the masters of eBay and I agree on. That is that gallery pictures are a must. That means when someone searches for your item, not only do they see your title but they will see a small picture of your item next to that title. Gallery pictures are 35¢ and every single one of your auctions, should be a gallery picture. That's one up sell eBay is doing to you that you should do. We generally find that we never do bold face or highlight or special featured auctions or anything else. We hardly do anything else except sometimes on a high-priced item that is hot.

If I happen to have an iPhone the week that the iPhones came out, I almost certainly would have for that paid to have it bold face and may be even highlighted in a color in a search result. That would have cost me $5.00 to $6.00 more to have that. There's no doubt, I want to stand apart from the flood of auctions. It is a high-priced item and it's very hot. I'm going to go for some of those added services. But for day-to-day, even fairly rare items, only do a gallery. Do a seven day auction. Most cases, that's what you want to do. That's the best use of your time and money.

Michael: What's the highest price item you ever sold on eBay?

Greg: I sold an $11,000.00 book. That was really pretty sweet. The book was from this collection and it was a book that was a signed limited numbered boxed book. The book was The Gun Slinger by Steven King. It was a special numbered edition. I need to qualify, it actually was a trilogy. It was the first three Gun Slinger books inside a boxed set that was numbered. Steven King of all things and why, why this lady's husband bought this is beyond me but any way, he bought it. She probably paid $50.00 for it whenever it first came out and that was probably considered expensive. But just about that came out probably in the mid-80's, '84 maybe, '83, '84', '85 and so less than two decades later, I sold it for $11 for more than $11,000.00.

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Michael: You earned 20% on that or did; do you negotiate different deals with different sellers?

Greg: I often negotiate different deals with different people and if it looks as though their items will sell for a lot, I give them deals for that month, I believe that we always send a very detailed statement of everything. I believe that month and I've probably should have gone down further but she was so thrilled anyway and I was thrilled and we were all new to this and instead of charging her 20%, I charged 18, no 17½% for all the books we sold that month for her.

Michael: Wow.

Greg: Yeah.

Michael: That's a great deal for her.

Greg: Yeah, I think so. I mean, she couldn't. There's no way she could have sold those.

Michael: What happens? When do you give up trying to sell a book? How many times will you list it? Until you say all right -

Greg: Yeah.

Michael: It's not selling. How do you work that out with your client?

Greg: Okay. Fortunately, we have a good sell through rate. Fortunately, most of our items do sell. If a book doesn't appear as though it's going to sell much and I just, I tell you, and I hate to say this on a course that I'm teaching. But when it comes to rare books, I kind of have a gut feel sometimes. If one just doesn't seem like it's going to be a seller at all, I'll look it up and see if it sold in the past. I'll even go to a book finding service and see if there is many of them for sale and what their prices are. If it doesn't look as though a book is going to sell, I will keep it out and combine it and use it as a bonus book when I get another one on that same topic. My client is thrilled for that. That just makes the other books sell and this one would not have sold by itself. We will re-list the book at most, one time. You'll get, you'll get arguments that say that's wrong to do that I should relist over and over.

I understand their point because buyers come and go and check eBay different times. But here's the way I decide, I will relist the book if it has one or more watchers. As the seller, I can see how many people have clicked to be

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a watcher on every item that I sell. A watcher means they get regular e-mails from eBay. EBay kind of whenever, whenever they volunteer to be a watcher of something I'm selling, as it gets close to the end of the auction, eBay will remind them, hey, you're watching this item, it's almost over. It's got 7 hours left. You better start bidding on it.

If I have someone who has raised his hand or her hand and said, I'm kind of interested in this; I'm just not ready to bid. The item in without a bid, I will relist it one time in my store. That means for 6¢, I'll put it in the store for 30 days or it had more than on watcher. If it had a lot more watchers, I might relist it in a seven day auction but almost always, I send it to my store. After 30 days if it doesn't sell, I just put it in the unsold pile and take it back to her.

Michael: All right what's your technique when you're selling? Do you start out at a low bid to get people into the auction frenzy or will you set a minimum bid? Have you found that setting a minimum bid to high, you get no action. What works best as far as the listing price?

Greg: Yeah. I don't like people who write eBay books that tell you a minimum bid, a low bid is always good or a low bid is always bad. It really does depend and I can tell you exactly how to know. If an item is worth a lot of money, start it at 1 penny. Just no doubt. I guarantee you the world will not let that thing go for a penny.

Michael: With no reserve?

Greg: With never a reserve.

Michael: Just have confidence?

Greg: I should make that clear that we just don't reserve anything. Buyers don't like reserves. Just one cent and let it roll. Within minutes, sometimes seconds, you'll get a bidder. I mean, it is just amazing if it's really worth a lot of money. The funny thing is that's the hardest. At first, it's the hardest one for people to start at a penny but that's the way to go. Now, if I'm selling a book that's a used book and I'm again, I know I am using books a lot but just, that's just an example. It's a used book but not a rare book. Someone might want it there's a small audience out there. A few have sold here and there in the book store selling services but it's not a great seller. I will almost always start that at $2.99. I did a lot of testing to see what the price point was that would make or break a book and we found that anything over $3.00, if it's a book that someone kind of wants but not too much. They won't pay more than $3.00 for it but $2.99 is something that moves the most buyers into that buy mode when it's a book that's not high in demand but also there's not others of them on eBay for sell at that time.

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I used to ask lower than that and they would sell for 99¢ and they will sell for $1.99 but we only get one bidder. To make it worth my time and it's really not worth my time to sell something for $2.99 but there's always a chance that it will go up. eBay will often surprise us on the upside. I have found that, well, a book. I didn't buy the book. I'm not out any money for it. If it doesn't sell, I don't have to pay a listing fee because my client pays that. But they don't pay me anything if I don't sell it. But they do pay the cost; it cost me to list it. I'll throw a book up there for $2.99 and that's actually a pretty good price point for your buyers to try garage sell items that they found at a flea market or whatever for 50¢. They might want to put it up if they can't really figure out from research what it will sell for. Try $2.99. It doesn't sound like much but often they sky rocket it from there and surprised us.

If an item is worth a lot of money but there may not be a lot of bidders, I don't start it at a penny. I start it at $9.99 or $29.99 or $39.99. If it's worth several thousands of dollars, I probably will go something like $599.99 or $799.99 or $999.00. I will start with a significant starting price because there might only be and this is rare. There might only be in one seven day period, one or two people look for that one item. It's rare. It's worth a lot of money but there's not a lot of demand. I need to make sure that we get a good starting bid in case there's only one person out there who wants it. Then, I can at least make my client fairly happy.

Michael: What about all these retail franchises you see that specialize in selling products on eBay. Any advice on those?

Greg: Like the store fronts?

Michael: Yes.

Greg: Well, no advice other than I would ask for their history. They have actually been coming under a lot of financial problems lately and a lot of them. A lot more seem to be closing than opening. I live in the Oklahoma area. We are not on the East or West Coast. Things always come here last. Just as all of the eBay stores and store fronts. All the news started arriving that they really weren't doing that well and starting to close down. We started getting eBay stores all over the place here. I'm on the leading, the edge of everything. Not the leading edge. Sure enough, there are now, they've been open for three or four years.

There now beginning to kind of shun their eBay business. We will now re-ink your printer cartridges, refill printer cartridges and they start doing other services. It's obvious that they aren't making it by eBay alone. Couple of reasons. They have to charge 25 to 35% of an item and sometimes they'll charge more than that. A lot of them have a minimum price. They'll say, even if we don't sell it, we have to charge $8.95 just for listing it.

For more interviews on marketing consulting go to http://www.hardtofindseminars.com © MMVII JS&M Sales & Marketing, Inc. San Diego California -Tel. 858-274-7851

Now, that's not a bad fee. I mean. I understand what they're saying because it takes a long time to write a good auction. The sad thing is they don't really write that good of auctions. I mean. How many of those places have people working for them that know how to write to their buyers. You've got to figure the odds. Even if they have good training, the odds of most of those stores, writing good, direct marketing copyrighting to their clients. Writing an auction listing, writing benefits instead of features. The odds of that are pretty slim. Their sales are mediocre. I don't mean this to disrespect any of them. Some of them, I'm sure do great. But probably if you want someone to sell something for you, you should probably find an individual even better though, you should be doing it yourself.

Michael: What are you offering to people who have stuff to sell on eBay who want to educate themselves in more detail on eBay? How can you be of help in educating my listeners?

Greg: Well, I do several things. I don't want to state that my first and foremost career is being an author of books not eBay. EBay is our part-time little side line career even it's engulfing us. It's not my major career and so that's important to note if we go out of town a lot. I go on business trips a lot. Our eBay business has to kind of suffer when we do that. We have to put auctions on hold. We have to not be able to sell for the week leading up to it in case someone buys when we're gone and we can't ship it.

Really, the travel that I do as an author causes us some problems in our eBay business. I have to always remind people that it is a side line business and that even though I devote major effort to it, as you can probably guess from this call, it is a side line. Sometimes it's a while before we can sell even client's items that we pick up here locally if we happen to be the ones picking them up. But I will say that I consult in eBay. I offer training seminars. I've done training seminars on line and I've written some books about eBay.

My wife has written a book on eBay and the title is I really don't understand this but her, the title is I Married an eBay Maniac and I really don't know what she means by that but any ways, that's the title. I wrote the marketing chapter of that book and you can imagine some of what we talked about here today is in that book. Even she has gotten on board with this and really gotten excited about the way we do things. It really is so fun to see so much success on eBay. When other people tell us how thrilled they are what we sell things for, they're just elated and so then all it kind of feeds itself and makes us want to do it.

What we have found though is that people have so many different needs when it comes to eBay. They never sold before. They live out of our state and they call and ask if we'll sell something for them. That's very difficult. For

For more interviews on marketing consulting go to http://www.hardtofindseminars.com © MMVII JS&M Sales & Marketing, Inc. San Diego California -Tel. 858-274-7851

one thing, we have to take possession of anything that we sell because if someone asks us a question that we don't know the answer too. We have to be able to look at the item and answer that question truthfully and honestly. We just don't want to write up something about being in mint condition and may be the owner honestly missed it, that big scratch on the bottom of it. It's difficult for us to be consignment sellers for people who live very far from the, in our case, the Tulsa, Oklahoma area but I do a lot of consulting.

A lot of people will say, well, I'm just starting on eBay and I don't get pictures or I don't understand all this about shipping or I don't understand all these new shipping rates or something like that. They want to hire me just to give them a one hour phone call consulting or something. I must be honest; I don't feel that comfortable doing that. I would rather give them two days worth of material than, you know, 30 minutes but I just find that people have different needs. I just want; you just have to address what people’s needs are. Even though I've written books. I give training seminars in all of that. Really the best thing to do even if you just want copies of some of the newspaper articles I've written, the best thing to do is just send me an e-mail. That's really the best way to get in touch with me.

My e-mail address is for all eBay related business is questions@bidmentor.com. Questions@bidmentor.com and, cause I teach people how to use eBay. I'm a mentor for them. My domain is bidmentor.com. If you want to sign up, I have a sort of information digest newsletter that I mail regularly and I don't use an auto responder for that. I love auto responders but I have found I used to use it for my e-mail digest and I kept getting more than any other side line business I've ever done on the Internet. I kept getting accused of spamming people whenever they had the request to get in on my service and do a double opt in. I have found that if people write me at that e-mail address questions@bidmentor.com, they can ask me whatever they want and, generally, I just answer them. I mean, I'm not charging people for answers to little questions or anything. Please let me know that you hear about me from Michael Senoff’s www.hardtofindseminars.com and you are sure to get even more special attention.

If they want to start to getting some of my newsletters, I will be glad to add them to my list if that's what they request. I'll do that manually and I just their e-mail and I just think that's a better way of doing this. I don't why it seems to be important for this to me but it is. I don't use the list for any other purpose. I don't give away their e-mail or share it or sell it or do anything with it. They can cancel at any time and so, I would say the gateway to reaching me is questions@bidmentor.com.

If you want to see what we're doing at any one time, you can just go to bidmentor.com and it will just list all our auctions. It will just show you right to

For more interviews on marketing consulting go to http://www.hardtofindseminars.com © MMVII JS&M Sales & Marketing, Inc. San Diego California -Tel. 858-274-7851

the second what we're listing. I think, I don't know what we've got up there now. A few boring books, actually. This is a pretty boring set of books I think that we've got listed this week. I am getting ready to go on a business trip again so I didn't do the, the big golden tip that we've talked about. I think that's informative. You know. I do what I think I can handle and I, I don't promise if I can't deliver. Bidmentor.com will show you all of our options.

Michael: That's wonderful. I've learned a ton from asking you these questions during this interview for sure. Is your e-Bay screen name? I'll know you'll find it if you go to bidmentor.com but what's your eBay screen name?

Greg: It is also bid mentor.

Michael: If anyone goes to e-Bay and they click on, community and type in bid mentor, they'll find listings of all of your auctions there as well?

Greg: Yeah, just go to bidmentor.com. It will take you to e-Bay.

Michael: Now, do you have a download of your book in your about me section on eBay?

Greg: What I did on my about me page, is I put up a link to one of my first e-Books that wrote about eBay. It's got a very special technique that we haven't even talked about here. If someone would like to see how I write and would like to have a free e-Book, and it's about 90 pages. All solid information. They can go to bidmentor.com and click on any auction and go to my about me page, they'll be a link there. Right click and down load the book. It's yours free. It sells for $9.77 on Moby Pocket, which is Amazon's e-Book service. You know, it's real book. It's not just fluff. It's not there to sell you something else. It's a tried and true technique that will add income to every item you sell on eBay or any other place. It's just a guarantee addition of 99¢ or more to every product you sell. It's an ethical way to do that. Hey, I'm going to give it everyone listening in.

Michael: I've heard that technique. I'm going to let it be a surprised for the listeners but anyone who is considering selling on eBay. This one technique, it's so simple. If you are a power seller and selling thousands of dollars, thousands of items a month-

Greg: Yeah.

Michael: That could really help you financially.

Greg: That is true.

For more interviews on marketing consulting go to http://www.hardtofindseminars.com © MMVII JS&M Sales & Marketing, Inc. San Diego California -Tel. 858-274-7851

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