Bubba Jay

Blog is moving...

2008-12-11T00:05:00.000-08:00

So I finally got around to making my own site, blog, online resume...and not using Blogger's. I'd been wanting to do it forever, but just hadn't pulled the trigger.

Anyway, you can check it out if you want at what else... www.BubbaJay.com ! Tell 'em Bubba sent 'ya.

Post Thanksgiving Happenings...

2008-11-29T13:31:00.000-08:00

Well I had a great Thanksgiving. Got up a bit later than normal and went to the gym. I ran on the treadmill for about 45 minutes, then did some ab work and stretching and then rode the stationary bike for about 15 minutes before heading over to my Mother-In-Law's house for the big feast. I ate too much, but didn't make myself sick - so a happy medium by my standards. I followed that up with a nap in the reclining chair and then some dessert.

Friday followed with a bit of guilt from over-eating, so I returned to the gym for a swim. Got in 2300 meters in the hour and headed home for a day of non-commitment. After two days in a row of no work, I was starting to relax.

This morning I awoke refreshed. Another day with no particular agenda other than baseball practice this afternoon. I could get used to this schedule...ah yes, I was used to it, then I went back to work. Dang!

Anyway, it had been raining for the past few days here, and I decided a nice muddy trail run was in order. I headed over to Calavera Lake for the dirty deed.

I hadn't been on the trail for a few weeks, and it always amazes me both how tough it is, and how wonderful it is. The uneven terrain and unregulated inclines make your lungs and legs burn equally, and the beautiful surroundings and lack of anything but nature soothes them right back. The latter overcoming the former and making the run fantastic.

I got good and sloshy from the rain soaked paths and muddy bogs where the small foot bridges had been washed away from the torrents. I did cross paths with a few folks, exchanged pleasantries and kept on truckin'.

I usually run with my music on - on the street that is. But on the trail, I never bring it. I like to hear the quiet - unlike the traffic filled suburban routes we run on. Occasionally a duck or goose or some creature inhabiting the area surrounding the lake will squawk or run through the brush letting me know I'm intruding, but other than that it's pretty darn quiet.

By the time I hit the last mile back on the road to home, I'm feeling the impact of the hour on the trails up Calavera Mtn. and around the base, the short steep ascents around the lakes edge and the extra effort made by my leg muscles to find sure footing in the slippery clay footpaths.

I drink some water, and jog it on home. I find myself basking in the sun stretching outside my front door - not quite ready to return to the inside. I cool off, and finally stop sweating. Suddently I'm chilled and ready for a warm shower. Great day - great run. Time for a bike ride this afternoon maybe, or tomorrow.

27 days 'till Christmas I think...I better get back to the hustle and bustle.

10 day giveaway

2008-11-18T18:39:00.000-08:00

If you've been reading my blog much over the past few years, you probably already know that I've made my living doing Internet Marketing and web design for the most part. I made two very successful membership websites with a buddy of mine named Chris Vendilli.

Chris lives in Pittsburgh and I've actually never met him face to face. We met online in an internet discussion forum about eBay, started a project together, got incorporated and made some money together. We made another site a year later...and that's our history.

Over time we continued to do our own projects and recently Chris put together an awesome promotion. He's actually a police officer for the city of Pittsburgh, and if you go to this link
10daygiveaway you'll learn more about what he did, and why he did it.

'Tis the season...

2008-11-12T22:22:00.000-08:00

Wow, Halloween is gone, Thanksgiving is just over a week away, and before you know it, Christmas will be here followed closely by New Year's. Squeeze in work, family and...heck, there's no more squeezing.

I've been putting off my workouts and gained some weight. Nothing too major, but it adds up...15lbs over the last 6 months. I lost 100 lbs 2 years ago. It took me a year to do it, and kept it off for a year...and now I've gained a bit back.

I don't like it. 'Tis the season to over eat and gain weight. I've got to get a handle on it before it I end up with a few of those handles again!

Head clearing

2008-11-03T10:01:00.000-08:00

What is 'head clearing'? It's when I do a download...a mind dump to get stuff off my mind.

Work - too much. I remember now why I didn't like having a 'job' and a boss. It's not either the job or the boss - I have two jobs now, and two bosses, and really like both. But it's the loss of freedom. I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I like to be free to make my own path, my own decisions and work - at least mine - just doesn't lend itself to that.

But, times are tough out there, and I need to feed my family, pay bills and take care of business - so I suck it up, shut up and go to work.

Kids - love 'em. I have four kids. They're all so unique and different and I love each of them for their own merits. My oldest son Cole is turning 18 today. Wow, feeling old right about now. My youngest, Jacob is 8. And I have two in the middle, Dylan 12 and Teddi my daughter is almost 16.

The older two live with their mom locally, and the younger two with me. The younger two keep me busy and unfortunately between their Baseball, Boy Scouts, School, and my two jobs, I don't see my older two very often. Add to this that they're teen agers..heck adults and they just don't really want to hang out with Dad too much. It's kind of a bummer - but life I guess.

Location - we've been trying to move to Big Bear, California for a few years now, but with the housing market stinking it up out here in California, it's just not happening. We talked with a mortgage guy the other day about refinancing and that's not going to happen either. So, the newest plan, save some money, pay off some debt and move to Big Bear and rent our home and hope and pray for the best renters in the world. Cross you fingers.

Racing - I haven't done any Adventure Races in months. If you've known me for long, I did 4 two years ago I think, and 7 last year as I recall. Love them...but need to be fit and honestly it's been tough...well if we're being honest - I've been lazy. With my schedule, when I did have time to train I usually opted not too. But, I'm back at it. I have a snowshoe race coming up in 2 months. I got third last year so I'm going to start shooting for that. I've been running 5-6 miles 3 days a week - either road or trail runs, and riding my road or mtn. bike the days in between. I usually don't do any workouts on the two days that I work my day job and then night job in the same day - my 'double' as we call it, pretty much zaps me. They're 16 hour work days and they're always back to back so I just can't do it. But other than that I've been pretty disciplined lately. I wanted to get some kayaking in again and some high altitude hiking to get my legs and lungs strong for the snowshoe race as it's up in Big Bear at over 6,000 feet to START and climbs around 1000 to 1500 feet from there.

Halloween came and went, before you know it Thanksgiving will be past and Christmas is just around the corner. Dang, it only reminds me we were hoping to be in Big Bear by now. Bummer. We booked a week up there at Christmas...keep the dream alive!

Ok, so you're all caught up. I'm busy, but doing well. Hanging in there - you do the same!

Blogs

2008-09-18T23:15:00.000-07:00

Interesting...I just got a Blog comment from "anonymous" on my post below titled "Getting Red Going Green". I was chastised for not keeping up on my Blog. I'm not sure how to feel...first they're right - I haven't kept up on my writing lately. But, second - where is their Blog? Who are they? What right do they have to judge my frequency of writing? Third, I put the Blog out there so should I be judged? Perhaps.

Anyway, here come the excuses...

Times are tough. I've been working from home for 5 or 6 years now I think, providing for my family from my various e-commerce endeavours. I started looking for work outside of the online realm, much to my demise. Even worse I found a job. And to top it off, I found another.

So, a month later, I went from working at home full-time to working two jobs for a total of around 70 hours a week for someone else.

I have a background in restaurant management, and fell into position as the Front of the House Manager at a local Irish Pub. The Pub is owned by Matt Hensley - ex-professional skateboarder, and band member of the fairly famous Flogging Molly. It's a fun, lively atmosphere with live music every night and a young clientele and staff. I enjoy it despite the fact that I don't drink and am not Irish. I work there approximately 30 hours a week, 4 nights a week.

I was happy to find a job in the evening allowing me to pursue my own businesses in the daytime, still be home when my boys get out of school and so on. But when I got the Pub job, I was just filling is serving, and the hours were less regular and not management, so I kept looking.

Amazingly after a few weeks I found another job doing basically what I've been doing myself - at home, though for someone else. The company has more business than I did, and they know more than I do about several areas of web-design and I was excited to learn some new stuff, get paid and still be working with eBay and websites. It was a part-time gig too and I could basically make my own schedule.

Then it all came together...or fell apart - depending on how you look at it. My skills were appreciated at the web design job and they gave me an enormous raise and asked me to work full-time. I accepted and things have been great there.

A few weeks later, the Pub asked me to start managing 3-4 nights a week - a raise was given and now I suddenly have two jobs for 70-hours a week or more. Don't forget I never quit running my own businesses at home, but they've definitely taken a back seat.

So, why haven't I been Blogging? Maybe I could start a band - Blogging Molly!

Getting Red trying to be Green

2008-06-16T16:02:00.000-07:00

For the past several years we've had our boys doing chores around the house for a small allowance. The goal besides distributing the household workload was to teach the boys some

responsibility towards doing work as wall as managing their money. Honestly, it's worked wonders!

One of the bi-weekly chores is to sort the plastic bottles from the aluminum cans. Once a few bags has accumulated we take a trip to our local recycling drop-off to turn them in for cash. What better way to show the boys the value of recycling, right?

So today - Monday, I tell the boys to get the cans and bottles in the car so we can go turn them in. We head down to the Albertson's by our house where Re-Planet has a recycling drop-off location.

As we pull up, I can see the two big bins have the doors closed and as we pull closer I see a sign stating that they're closed because the bins are full. A bit frustrating after putting the sticky, leaking soda can filled bags in the back of my car, but we head South to the City of Carlsbad's recycling facility off of Faraday. I can't believe my eyes when we arrive to see a sign saying they're closed on Monday's.

I head North again as I had to make a stop at the Post Office anyway. I recall a recycling spot off of Tamarack next to the Sav-On Drugstore, right by the I-5 freeway. As we pull up, my youngest starts to giggle as he sees before me that it's closed as well. No sign explaining why, no business hours posted, no signage at all...just locked up tight. We continue to mail our packages and head over to the mall off Jefferson. I have to stop by Sports Authority. As I get closer I recall they had two self-serve recycling machines out in front of Stater Bros. grocery store. And as you can imagine by now...no luck. They'd replaced the machines with a water dispensing machine.

I was ready to quit at this point. Just thrown the dang things in the garbage can somewhere, and my older son reminded me of one last shot - the Re-Planet recycling facility next to Ralph's off of Oceanside Blvd, just East of the I-5 freeway. It was just over the hill, so why not. Heck, I'd already spent $10 on gas at $4.59/gallon trying to drop them off somewhere, what was another mile or two?

As we pulled into the lot, my son was elated, "they're open, they're open" he chipped. But as we got closer it turns out they're replaced the nice Hispanic man that ran this recycling center with two large bins and two self-serve machines. Oh well, a sign of the times I thought as we got out to feed the cans into the beast.

After an hour of driving, and literally five locations we were ready to get our $5.00 to give to the boys for their work.

***WARNING*** was what the little window said. As both machines were inoperable and jammed with something other than cans and bottles apparently. My boys looked at me not quite understanding when I told them to load the sticky bags back into the back of the car.

I was quiet for a bit on the drive home, reflecting on our adventure. My son, with his infinite wisdom said "it's tough to help take care of the environment isn't it Dad?" Yes it is, yes it is.

Schools Out Forever...

2008-06-15T19:34:00.000-07:00

Ok, just summer. Wow, it seems like it was only a month ago the boys were heading back to school and bam! - they're out for 3 months!

Dylan's got Boy Scout camp in a few weeks. Jacob is playing All-Star baseball and still has his Tournament ball team too. He also has Cub Scout camp in a month.

No big trips like last summer (Tony Gwynn's induction into the Hall of Fame in New York), but of course we'll spend much of our time up in Big Bear. I plan on getting the boys to do a lot of trail running and mtn. biking with me, as well as kayaking. My guys don't really watch TV anyway, unless it's a baseball game, or really anything on ESPN. But the've never really spent much time watching cartoons or anything else and they don't own any game systems. Closest thing they have is a computer and the only games they have are of course...baseball and football games - go figure.

So, it will be a fairly low-key summer and I bet before you know it, they'll be returning to school and it will seem like a week since they got out.

Central Coast Adventure Race

2008-05-11T20:22:00.000-07:00

Central Coast Adventure Challenge - This was a 12-hour race - with cut offs.

We started with a kayak leg that took us about 45-50 minutes and took us from one end of Santa Margarita Lake to the other. It was about 5 miles in our estimation. We paddles the 3-person Kayak with Randy, Myself and Veronica and Blake was in the solo Glider.

We were out of the boat in good position, maybe 10th out of the 50 or so teams. Next we had about a 2 mile run to the Bike Transition. Unfortunately about 100 yards into this run, Randy rolled his ankle severely spraining it, or possibly breaking it (no word yet).

I hooked him up to a tow system and helped him to the bike TA. We got him mounted and took off on the bike leg. I had made two tow rigs with some PVC and surgical tubing for Blake and I to tow Randy and Veronica. But, we hadn't anticipated Randy's lack of ability to really pedal much at all. One other surprise was a 17-mile fire road climb. YES - 17 miles of climbing - almost non-stop. I towed Randy the entire way except for a short distance when I just needed a break and Blake pulled him and I towed Veronica. Once on top of the Mountain we descended over rolling terrain hitting checkpoints flawlessly thanks to Blake's excellent navigation and pre-scouting the terrain. There was 1 CP that I had to run to in my Bike shoes about 1 mile off the bikes and do a bit of rock-climbing to get the CP. In total the bike was around 30 miles and with all that climbing took us nearly 5 1/2 hours. Still we were encouraged when we arrived and found ourselves still in great position overall, but knowing that our teammate couldn't continue. We'd come in right with Feed The Machine and a few other very well known competitive teams with "kids" (young adults in there mid-late 20's) and we're all mid-40's, me being the 'baby' at 43.

We dragged Randy to the medic who said it was an absolute no-go for Randy. Ice/tape/rest was all he was having. At this point our 4 person team was disqualified - and all we'd earn was a DNF (Did-not-finish).

We decided to go after a few more checkpoints anyway - for the training anyway. We had 3 1/2 hours to get the last points, get the boats and get them back to the start/finish TA. I'll make a long story short, we made a nav error - not Blake's fault, but a team decision, and wasted a bunch of time/energy/water and fuel not getting where we wanted to go. When we did find where we needed to be we had run low on time/water and needed to abandon. We still had to get out to the other end of the lake and paddle the kayaks back.

What should have been an easy task was made more difficult when we ran into a bear cub about my size on the trail. A cub - but with Momma' bear likely close by, we quickly changed course and had to re-navigate our way back to the boats.

At this point the light was gone, we'd been out almost 10 hour and had an hour paddle back to the boats with little fuel/water and no lights. Luckily between Black and I we remembered the layout of the lake and found our way through the darkness and 1/4 moon's glow to find the finish.

Randy was there waiting for us. We packed up the bicycle/kayaks and finally left the TA at around 10:30pm after having arrived at 6am.

So....not the race we'd hoped for, but we learned a lot. I did anyway, and had a great time. Tough? - Absolutely. I was toast!

Can't wait to do it again...can't wait for the Poison Oak to set in. :o)

Outrigger Paddling

2008-05-11T19:03:00.000-07:00

My son Dylan started paddling competitively just a month ago. He paddles down in San Diego on a coed team and really enjoys it. This weekend they had their first race since he joined the team. This particular race was not coed and they raced in the all boys division.

It was quite a surprise to my son when he found out the race was 1 1/2 hours long, and just the boys - no adults like practice. There workouts were typically an hour long and were supervised by an adult.

But as it turns out, they did just fine. They got 3rd place overall and as one of the photos shows, they're sporting there medals (turtles). He was proud and tired at the same time. What a great workout and good time. I'm so glad he enjoys the water as much as I always have. Some great pictures below taken by a family friend that actually got him involved in the outriger paddling.

Soccer on the Beach?

2008-05-06T23:15:00.000-07:00

If you've read my Blog even a little bit, you've surely heard about my son Jacob. He's quite a little athlete and I'm a proud papa, so I talk about him.

Well a few weeks ago we got a note home from school. I know what you're thinking - same as me when my son told me he had a note from his teacher. But it turned out to be a note from the PE Specialist. The note said that this teacher had "rarely seen this level of athleticism at this age" and since he coached a local competitive soccer club he wanted Jacob to come try playing soccer for him.

Truth be told, Jacob had asked to play soccer, but it had conflicted with his rec baseball, travel baseball or football schedules, and we'd just never made the leap. One other factor was the expense of it. Competitive soccer in our area runs from $1000 to $1400 per year, money we just don't have.

I called the coach and explained our situation and he encouraged us to let Jacob give it a try at least and we'd go from there.

He went to 2 practices before he was invited to play in a weekend Beach Soccer Tournament - one of the largest soccer tournaments in the US. Strangely he was not committed to baseball that weekend and we went to play in the sand. He did fantastic.

Afterwards the coach told us that Jacob was right where the others were after a year of coaching and he'd just started a few days before. I thanked him for the opportunity but told him our time constraints and financial concerns.

He said if Jacob wanted to play, and we'd allow it - he would "make it work" and would cover the cost of the soccer. We couldn't believe it. Was he "that" good? Maybe so, and as nice as it was to hear, and even flattering - it's just too much. The poor kid wouldn't have a spare moment to himself.

We sadly had to decline the invite and told the coach maybe after baseball. He insisted we keep the uniforms he gave us and bring Jacob out when we could and he'd see to it that his skills would improve.

I'm still thinking as a retirement plan - Baseball is where my future is, but Soccer's not a bad backup. :o)

SCRAT - It's all about the acorn - Adventure Racing

2008-04-27T18:03:00.000-07:00

Today was the Orange County Adventure Race...with nearly 250 competitors...the largest AR in recent history for sure.

I raced with a team I hadn't raced with before. Team SCRAT (like in the movie ICE AGE "It's all about the acorn").

One guy was a guy I'd seen at races and even talked to a few time, his sister, myself, my friend Michael who I've been doing trail run/rides with regularly and a new guy none of us knew until today.

Anyway, we got together for the 5 person Co-Ed race - the premeir division and....smoked the field! We got 1st place for 5 Person Team, 1st Person for 5 Person Co-Ed and yes.... 1st Finishers overall.

We were happily surprised and felt good about the showing. Details of the race are below.

Ok, the race was sprint distance...it started out with about a 1 mile run to three checkpoints. The first you picked up a paddle 'handle' (4 foot stick), at the second CP you got the blade of the paddle (a 10" x 1' flat board with 2 holes drilled in it), and at CP3 you got 2 zip ties per person. Then back at the staging area you had to construct the paddles by putting the blade on the handle and zip tying it together. While that was going on you had to inflate your raft. As a 5 person team we had a 3-man raft and a 2-man raft so we inflated both and were off to the water.

The paddle was about 1 mile or so - short, but no easy task in a raft with funky paddles. The CP was a floating buoy out in the middle of the lake. We were the first team to get there and return to shore.

When we got back our team had to direct two blindfolded team members through a maze of sorts collecting rocks from buckets and then direct them out of the pen.

Now we were off on the Mtn. Bike section. 6 Checkpoints covering about 7 miles of trail. Not a big deal - nothing technical at all, just fire roads. We flew through it and returned to the staging area.

Upon our return we had to do an obstacle course of sorts - nothing to challenging and then off on the run.

The run was about 3-4 miles of trail running with some fire roads mixed in. We flew through it finding the checkpoints with no problems. We came in just under 2 hours for what was billed as a 4 hour race.

As I said - 1st overall, 1st in our division...1st, Numero Uno, Number 1, Tops, The Best, Fastest...should I go on?!

We had a great time, had excellent teamwork and that's what it's all about!

Ocean Kayak

2008-04-22T12:50:00.000-07:00

I've been doing mtn. bike/trail run workouts every other day for weeks now and my legs were starting to feel seriously toasted, so I opted to take a day off both and go for a nice paddle. I usually head down to the lagoon and paddle, but decided to head down to the beach and do some ocean kayaking. I was in for a treat.

I paddled out through the harbor and headed south running parallel to the beach. I was about a mile from shore I'd estimate had been paddling about a 1/2 hour when I saw a few dolphins maybe 1/4 mile ahead of me. I hoped they'd stick around as I drew nearer.

Not only did they stick around, but they were breeching within feet of the kayak. I literally got splashed like a visit to Sea World! I almost rolled the boat. It was absolutely incredible. I've been in the water bodysurfing or boogie boarding when there were dolphins nearby, but nothing like this. I sat and didn't paddle for about 5 minutes while they played nearby. As I began to paddle again, I saw them skimming the water right next to me, below me, in front of me. There were about 7 of them I'd guess.

I continued to paddle South down past the Oceanside Pier and then turned around at 45 minutes. On my way back I saw them playing nearby but paddled a more direct route back to the harbor.

I was out for an hour and a half or so and probably did around 6 miles I'm guessing...no way to know for sure. I'm so glad I went to the ocean today and skipped the harbor. Very very cool day!

Rattlesnake at Calavera Lake

2008-04-20T21:57:00.001-07:00

I was mountain biking around Calavera Lake with a friend the other day...look what we came across. This big rattler was close to 6 feet long and quite thick.

Competition And Learning To Lose

2008-04-15T20:46:00.000-07:00

There's no doubt I'm extremely competitive. I'm not sure when it started or what made that intense desire to win a priority. But it's definitely there. I hate to lose at anything...I mean it's bad. I hate losing in games with my kids...seriously. How bad is that?

I guess it should come as no surprise to me that my son Jacob inherited or learned this behaviour from me. And while I think competition is a great thing...the overwhelming 'need' to win can have its pitfalls.

If you've read my Blog in the past - you'll remember that he's an incredible, natural athlete - specifically a baseball player. Since he was very young he could throw and catch. He has that natural smoothness to his play. Coaches are constantly telling me - 'he moves well' referring to his plays at second and shortstop.

For the past season Jacob's been playing on a Tournament baseball team - also known as "Travel Ball". It's a team we put together of the best 10 boys of the local league of 150 kids. I coach the team with another coach whom I've worked with for the past few seasons. They're a good team, and they've faired well in tournaments around Southern California.

This past weekend we had a tournment locally and the first day boys lost the first game and won the second game on Saturday. We returned to play Sunday in a do or die situation and the boys rallied in the last inning from being down by 3 to winning by 3 and everyone was pumped.

We advanced to the final Championship game against a VERY competitive team - a team that routinely wins every tourney they enter. It was tough going and our boys were getting beat pretty bad.

Then it happened...Jacob missed a groundball hit to him. Not the end of the world...certainly not for most players. But he'd made probably 20 incredible plays in the 4 game series and he is not used to missing the ball. He let it get to him. I told him from the bench to let it go.

"Don't let 1 mistake become 2" I coached. Let it go...but he was visibly upset. Another ball came to him - this time he scooped it up like a pro and... threw the ball wide to the second basemen allowing the runners to advance extra bases. He was coming apart at the seams now.

We got the last out of the inning and had our at bat. Jacob came to bat, still with tears in his eyes. I'd tried to reassure him and calm him but it hadn't worked and now he was supposed to focus on hitting. He was rattled and backed out of the box repeatedly and watched - without swinging at 3 strikes. Something he hasn't done before. He walked dejectedly to the dugout. It didn't help he was the 3rd out and we were headed back out to the field.

He was standing on the field sobbing and we had to pull him from the game. He was in danger at that point...obviously unable to focus, protect himself or make a play.

I wondered how it had come to this...he felt so pressured that he couldn't let 1 mistake go. No amount of reassurance seemed to help. Of course everyone and their brother reminded him of all his 'highlight reel' plays - diving snags to the left and right, turning double plays that no one at his age makes. But he sobbed on. It broke my heart.

I have to take responsibility for it. I don't know how I did it, but I made it so important to win that my 8 year old doesn't know how to lose. I've always tried to be supportive with the good and the bad. I'm not typically a yeller - certainly not at my ball players. I just didn't see it coming.

Anyway, not a great game. He's fine now and really was better within an hour after the game. Kids bounce back that way. We went to batting practice today and he wanted to stop on the way home and play catch - and we did. Just me and Jacob, playing catch at the park. This was my son, the happy, go-lucky kid. Hopefully we can bring this to the games and still win a few games.

Vail Lake Adventure Race

2008-03-04T17:31:00.000-08:00

Wow, I can't believe it's been since January since I posted, almost 5 weeks. Time flies when you're having fun - right?

Not too long ago I had another Adventure Race. This one was up in the Temecula, California area at an area called Vail Lake. It's a private resort actually, but they allowed us to use the facility for the race.

I raced with the same guys I raced the Lake Hodges AR with and we placed then, so we were hoping for another podium finish - and got it!

Well I took 3 full days off...did nothing to try and kind of get my fresh legs back for my race today. It was killing me doing nothing - but I guess it paid off.

The race started at 7:00am with 3 hours of Mountain biking. We had 10 checkpoints to get. You could get as many or as few as you wanted, but each checkpoint counted as 5 points and you got a 1 point penalty for each minute you were late over 3 hours. We got 9 and got back at 2:59...with only a minute to spare. We later found out, not one team got all 10, so we felt pretty good about our bike peformance.

Next we transitioned into the Kayaks. 2 hours, 6 checkpoints and around 6 miles of paddling. We cleared the course with 20 minutes to spare! It was touch because the checpoints were always about 100 yards from shore, so you'd have to get out of the boat, run (which is tough when you've been sitting and paddling) and then get back in the boat and paddle again...6 times!
Last was the run, or as they call it the trek. There were 9 checkpoints, 3 hours and about 8 miles of terrain to cover. We worked well together and pumped out 8 of the 9 and came in with 30 minutes to spare. The one we missed was about 20 minutes away, so it would have been 40 minutes round trip or 10 minutes late, which would be a 10 point penalty to only get 5...so we ditched it.

We normally race 3 guys and a gal, but the gal has been MIA lately so we raced all guys. First it was 3, then 4...then a 5th mate...too many. You can only have 4, so we ended up racing a 3 and a 2. But we stayed together during the race anyway.

At the end of 7 hours of racing you don't really know how you did because you don't know how many checkpoints everyone else has. And if the points tie, it comes down to total elapsed time.
Our team name is "My Kind Of Party", so we had MKOP1 and MKOP2. When the awards were dolled out - we got third place...for the 2 man team and the 3/4 man teams. It was a great day for Team My Kind Of Party and for me!

I love Adventure racing. It is so freaking hard. At the end of the bike leg, I got off to run into this ravine to get a checkpoint. Both my quads immediately cramped. When I got out of the kayak to run up the banks, my hamstrings cramped. And when I ran for 8 miles with a pack all over the countryside, I was fine.

There are so many variable - physcial and mental. For an 8 hour, very physically demanding race you have to remember to eat and drink or you'll seriously bonk. You have to be able to use a map and compass. This is critical as thats how you find the checkpoints. One mistake and you could be wasting time looking for a checkpoint that not's there. You have to stay within 100 yards of all teammates, all the time. So it's a team event - no one wins alone. We towed someone in our kayak because they were tired. We wait for slower runners. I pushed someone up a hill on the bikes...we're a team. I just love the whole sport. I like triathlons, but AR has just taken multisport to a new level for me.

Say it... Ka-Too-La

2008-02-15T15:21:00.000-08:00

That's Katoolah, the sponsor of the Snowshoe race I did awhile back in Big Bear. I was sure I'd written about it, and was looking back and realized I never did - doh!

Well, the entire Snowshoe The Bear event was awesome. I went up a few days early to help my friend Peter - the owner of Equada Outiftters get ready for the race. He was one of the sponsors and the event headquarters so he had his hands full.

I spent the days before hanging out at his Mountain Shop, helping stuff the 'goodie bags' with the Kahtoolah rep, and getting acclimated to the altitiude. I was fighting an ever-worstening cold but there was no doing that.

The day of the race I was working the registration table until 10 minutes before the race, and then headed up to the start/finish line.

I was so congested I could hardly breath, but I'd been waiting months for this race and wasn't going to miss it for the world.

I knew the course - I'd been snowshoeing out on the course several times. I knew it was basically straight uphill - and around 1000-1500' of climbing (guessing here). I also knew that all the other 'flatlanders' or those of us from 'down the hill' would start out too fast and too hard.

I decided ahead of time that I was going to race the tortoises' race in the "Tortoise vs. the Hare" story. Nice and easy...

As I predicted everyone took off running like crazy and I quickly found myself down about 30 places out of the 100 or so racers. I wasn't too concerned. I knew other than being sick, I was fit, and doubted that all of them were that much more fit than I was.

Turns out I was right, and within less than 1/2 mile they were already dying. I started picking them off, 1 by 1. Within a mile I was probably in the top 10 and by the time I hit the top of the mountain I was beat, unable to breathe and had moved into 3rd place.

It was now a mile and a half of basically all downhill though through the backcountry, and not on the nice groomed trail. I ran the entire way back and no one passed me. I didn't know I was in 3rd place, so I kept pushing hard.

As I rounded the last corner I was hurtin', but I could see the end in sight. I finished up just over an hour and "4th place". I actually got third we figured out later, but someone from the other race, had a wrong number, or went on the wrong course or something, and somehow their number was in 3rd in my race. When they got called for the awards ceremony and prizes they opted not to mention the error to anyone. :o(

Oh well, I raced well and I think had I had the advantage of living/training at altitude, like all of the winners, I'd be right up there with them. Not too bad for a 40-something vs. the college kids who won. I'll see you all next year punks! :o)

Happy Birthday Bubba

2008-01-22T11:43:00.000-08:00

OK, so today is my birthday....43 years of wonder. I slacked off a few days over the weekend and then went for a Mtn. Bike ride yesterday, where I spent nearly as much time in the dirt as I did on the bike. I was feeling pretty beat up this morning.

I planned on my regular Tuesday morning 10k that Nic and I always run...but she let me know last night she wasn't running this morning. She had to go help someone do something...early.

Anyway, I slept in, and when I got up...running wasn't on my list of things to do.
Then I got on the scale. Soon the my running attire was donned and I was ready to go. I doubled up my socks to try and protect my blistered foot, but even walking hurt. 100 yards from the house I almost turned back. Then I thought I'd try jogging instead of walking. Low and behold, it felt better to trot than stroll. I got to our timed 10k course and off I went.

Honestly I felt pretty crummy, and as I approached 1 mile, I was going to turn around and call it a 2 mile warm-up and go swim or something. But I knew the something would end up being TV and Birthday cake. So on I went.

As I approached the turn-around point for my 5k run, I checked my watch. I was actually running pretty well, right on schedule or even a tad faster, and my heel was achy, but not rubbing too bad. I pushed on.

I was planning on turning around at the 1/2 way point for my 5 mile out & back, but I felt OK and when I checked my time I was around a minute below my normal average. I couldn't stop now right?

So I continued on the 10k course, determined to actually run the whole 6.2 miles. I wished for my running buddy...wished I'd brought my mp3 player...neither was going to happen. As I approached the 1/2 way point I was 1 1/2 minutes below my fastest time on this run...time to suck it up.

My heel didn't hurt anymore, my lungs did as I ran hard up the nearly 1 mile stretch of road uphill. I hurt inside as I crossed the top of the hill, knowing I had an equally long downhill. I stretched out my stride and flew. It was one of those special running moments... my legs turning quickly below me, no effort, not really even feeling them. I guess it's the mythical 'runners high' come true. I was in the moment for several minutes, feeling nothing. No pain, no anything really...just floating.

But, as the terrain flattened out, so did my delirium! I had a mile to go...I was feeling it now. My watch said I was minutes ahead of my fastest time on this course and I was looking at sub 9 min/miles (yes - that's fast for me for 10k - so stop laughing).

As I rounded the last corner for the 1/2 mile straight away finish, I picked up the pace. Too much as it turns out, and with 1/4 mile to go I was blowing up. I struggled the last hundred meters and was done. 55.:15. That's 8:55 mile/average for the 6.2 miles. Not blazing, but a new PR for me.

Happy Birthday Bubba!

So you wanna' be a Rock Star?

2008-01-21T15:36:00.000-08:00

Well you may not, but I know someone who does...my son. My oldest son Cole - recently turned 17 is just about as close as you can get without actually being a rock star. Check him out with my daughter Teddi.

He's got the hairdo, tight pants, boots...leather jacket, the works. He actually does play the Bass Guitar and plays in a band that changes names weekly it seems with some buddies of his. I'd love it if he took some lessons.

Cole is not necessarily the athlete my other children are, but he is most certainly the artist that the others aren't. He loves to draw, paint, work on the computer and has a unique talent for it. He's always had his own style and never really tried to fit a mold. Now it seems his style is that of the 80's big hair bands, and that still makes him unique now in 2008.

Cole's Mom has a friend that does video production and he and Cole are good friends. Quite some time ago he invited Cole to help out on a video shoot of the Beach Boys, or was it their sons...I'm not sure now actually, but it was very cool for Cole. He like it, they liked him, and he's done some additional 'gigs' for them.

Recently he went on a video shoot for an up-and-coming young Pop Star named Whitney Steele . He was just going to do some production work, help set-up and tear down the stage I believe. He was walking around working and Whitney saw him and assumed he was in the band based on his 'look'. He explained he wasn't and they chatted a bit. Well as fate would have it, the 'band' that was supposed to show up was missing a few guys, and Whitney immediately insisted that Cole stand in at the Base position for the video.

So, if this isn't as close as you can get to being a Rock Star...without actually being one, then I don't know what is. Pretty cool for Cole. Cool for all of us. Now if we can get him into some lessons for Bass, or into a technical school where he can further his post-production skills...Check out the video below. Cole is to Whitney's left (right side of the video) in the top-hat (his previous look).

eBay Live 2008

2008-01-19T00:08:00.000-08:00

Whoa - I'm outta' control - 2 eBay posts in a row?

Summer may seem a long way off since we just celebrated New Year's, but it'll be here before you know it. And what comes with Summer? Ebay Live of course!

If you haven't attended an eBay Live conference, I suggest you do.

What is eBay Live? Ebay Live is a once a year convention, held by eBay. The eBay community gets together to network, celebrate, learn and teach. They're beneficial to those new to eBay as well as an experienced PowerSeller. There are hundreds of vendors offering tools to make your work easier as well as sourcing for merchandise. But one of the most popular attractions at the Live conferences are the classes. There are dozens and dozens of free classes on just about every topic from How To List to Advanced Tax Strategies for PowerSellers.

Of course there's the ever-popular closing ceremonies dinner where all of eBay's employees line up to applaud 'us' and there's a great buffet dinner and live entertainment. The two years I've attended I saw the B-52's and Davey Jones (The Monkey's...yes The Monkey's).
There is always a presentation given by CEO Megg Whitman and eBay President Bill Cobb. These are usually a 'sign of things to come' type presentations and are always entertaining if not enlightening.

This year it's being held in Chicago from June 19th - 21st at McCormick Place West. McCormick Place West is a new facility opening this year.

How can you register? Usually registration opens around April of the year. I'll let you know for sure when it's live and give you a link too!

Good News For eBay Stores!

2008-01-18T15:46:00.000-08:00

I know, I know - it's been quite some time since I wrote about eBay - the original content of this Blog. But, like the poltergeist...I'm baaaaaaack.

If you've been around eBay for a year or more you may remember when eBay changed the search function so that any items listed in one's eBay Store would not be displayed unless there were less than 30 of the searched term in the fixed price/auction categories.

This was devastating for many eBay Store owners forcing them to pay more for auctions style listings just to get the exposure they needed to sell their wares. It didn't help that eBay raised the fees for Store owners at the same time – but that's another story.

Now, when buyer conducts a search on eBay, at the top left of the page there is a tab named “Stores” (see image below). Previously if you clicked it, it just took you to the eBay Stores Hub where they would have to enter their search term again. But, with the new changes, when the tab is clicked it shows the results based on the search they performed.

The big question is whether or not shoppers would even realize that eBay has added this new functionality.

Regardless, there's no down-side to it, so in my book that's a plus!

These 'aint your Miami Dolphins

2008-01-17T10:35:00.000-08:00

I took my car in for service and had an hour to kill, so I headed over to the Coast for a run from the dealership. When I hit the Coast Hwy, I looked out at the Ocean and right there in front of me was a pod of around 6-10 dolphins swimming along. They rolled along at what seemed like my exact pace. I watched with childlike excitement, though I've witnessed this dozens of times, it always brings me joy.

In what seemed like minutes, I was 1/2 hour North of my starting point, and out of beachfront, so sadly I turned around and bid them farewell.

The run South was great, nice surf, nice salty breeze, and before I knew it my hour run was through, but I missed my running companions.

Snowshoeing.."If you can walk, you can showshoe"

2008-01-13T14:24:00.000-08:00

That's what I'd heard - "If you can walk, you can showshoe". I figured they were lying and it had to be harder. I envisioned a bowlegged waddle. But what I found was that todays modern snowshoes aren't like that at all. They're lightweight, maneuverible and don't require any huge amount of technical skill. What I also found out, is while it's not extremely technical in nature, it can be exceedingly physically exhausting!

Nicole and I went up to Big Bear Lake, California to check out the course for the upcoming Snowshoe The Bear snowshoe race. We got our snowshoes from Equada Outfitters - an awesome mountain shop in Big Bear. I'm actually making them a website at www.EquadaOutfitters.com but it's not done yet.

Anyway, we got Kahtoola snowshoes, which are a pretty slick system. You just step into them, almost like a ski binding. You can wear your trail running shoes and you put on a hard soled neoprene over-bootie.

Unfortunately my left was a bit loose and started rubbing a bit early into our trek. By mile 2 my left heel was pretty sore. At mile 3 I pulled off my shoe and sock to find a big flap of skin where the 50-cent piece size blister had long since popped. I was prepared with my pack full of adventure racing supplies, so I had a fist-aid kit with duct tape in it. I put a bandage with duct tape over it and it immediately felt better.

But, by mile 4-5 I could tell it had come off and was rubbing badly on the decent. Add to that my right heel was beginning to develop hot spots and it was tough. We were out for 3 1/2 hours total. Much longer than we'd anticipated and it was much harder than we'd thought it would be.

I think it had to do with several factors. First - we were at 7000 - 9000 feet altitude the entire time. Second, the snowshoes we had are made for a light snowfall to pack, not necessarily powder. They had around 2 feet of powder the week before. So as our shoes would break the surface of the snow we'd sink 6-8 inches or so. Not bad, but then you have to lift your foot/shoe all the way out of the hole and drive it forward. It's a killer workout. We had water and some gels, but ultimately, not enough of either for nearly 4 hours of tough work.

But, we made it back fine. Nicole was such a trooper for what was an extremely tough outing. I'm glad she didn't have any issues with her feet or being cold. I had brought gloves and outer shells and beanies. It seemed pointless when we left, but after you begin to sweat and get up over 8000 feet it gets cold quick and by our return we were both fully dressed in all the attire I'd brought.

It reminded me what I already knew (but it's good to be reminded) - you can't mess around in the backwoods in winter. You have to be prepared for anything. If we'd gotten lost or hurt and were not prepared we'd be popsicles by morning. Just 4 days prior an elderly man had gone hiking in this same area. They got a call from his cellphone saying he was lost and then nothing more. They got all that snow after the call and now they're really just trying to recover his body - knowing that without supplies he has no chance of survival out there.

I always carry the essentials into the backwoods - even mountain biking, anywhere even slightly remote. Anyway, I got off topic...sorry.

Here's a picture of my left heel today (2 days after the venture).

I'd love to say it looks worse than it really is - but it actually smarts pretty good. I learned a few things. My feet sweat terribly with this amount of exertion. I need good quality sweat wicking socks - two layers and probably a second set in my pack.

As my feet got wet from the sweat they started not only chafing, but also started to get cold. By the end my toes were pretty solidly numb. Too much longer and I could easily have gotten a bit of frost-nip, if not frost-bite.

I also learned to take more water and more food, and even another under layer shirt per person.

Overall a great trip and something I've long wanted to do. I shot quite a bit of helmet cam video, but the camera was slanted at an angle and it almost makes me dizzy to watch it. So I made a short video with only a tiny bit of Nicole actually snowshoeing, but I thought I'd share it with you anyway. Here you go:

Just like old times

2008-01-09T22:08:00.000-08:00

It's been quite a while since I've been on my road bike. I've been busy riding the mountain bike, training for some Adventure Races. I've been running and of course swimming. But I just haven't been riding my road bike lately.

It's strange because everytime I get back on it, after a brief hiatus, I just love that feeling...that 'I'm a kid again' type feeling. I get that feeling everytime I get on my motorcycle too, but it's even better on my bicycle.

I planned on a mtn. bike ride today too - but we've had quite a bit of rain lately, and although I enjoy riding in the dirt, I'm not a huge fan of riding in the mud. So, road bike it was.

Anyway, it was just a great ride. I rode 40 miles, from my home over to Highway 101 down the Coast to Del Mar, California and back. Two hours and 10 minutes - for an average of around 18.7 mph as I recall. Not bad for a month off the bike (road) and the hilly course.

Did I mention my bike is 23 years old? When I was 20, I raced bicycles on the US National Sprint team and worked at a bicycle shop and I worked for a custom frame builder, Dave Moulton. He made me three custom bicycles. A road bike, track bike and a mountain bike. Somewhere along the way I sold the mtn. bike, then years later the track bike, but could never bring myself to part with my criterium frame. I've upgraded the parts, but still ride the steel frame.

When I ride weekly group rides with a local racing team, all the vets look at my ride and say 'wow - nice bike'. All the 20 year olds didn't even know they made bikes before aluminum and carbon fiber. My bike weighs at least 5-7 lbs more than theirs, but it's 'my' bike. Custom made for me. Nothing rides like it.

Tomorrow, back in the pool and then Friday I'm heading to the mountains for some snowshoeing to train for an upcoming snowshoe race.

Adventure Race Training

2008-01-07T10:03:00.000-08:00

I've mentioned before that I'm doing some adventure racing - the sport includes trail running, mtn. biking, orienteering/navigating, kayaking, climbing/rappelling and more.

In an effort to prepare for these 6-24 hour long races, I've been doing quite a bit of training trail running and mountain biking, both in the daytime and after dark with lights.

Well, I couldn't resist a downhill video session with my new helmet cam that Santa brought me. :)

It's pretty bumpy and I'm still figuring out what the 'view' of the camera is, so the orientation is a bit low on the horizon, but it's still fun! Enjoy...

Sledding in Big Bear, California

2007-12-23T08:50:00.000-08:00

Ahhh, sledding in Big Bear! We've been coming here for years to spend vacation time in our favorite place - Big Bear, California. It's a small mountain community at around 7000' elevation in the Mountains above San Bernardino.

When we first came here, years ago we used to have to hike up the sledding hill. For several years in fact - but it's improved. The first improvement was a rope tow up one side. You'd sit in your tube and grab on to the rope. One year they added log-like steps with hay on them. Then a big rubber mat. Then miraculously one year the rubber mat moved like an escalator. That got better for a few years and then last year, they actually covered the moving sidewalk so you're out of the elements for the 3-5 minutes it takes to get to the top of the sledding runs.

I've combined all the videos I shot this week into one sledding montage put to the music of AC/DC. :o) Enjoy!

Crunch, Crunch, Crunch

2007-12-19T20:51:00.000-08:00

That's the sound I hear...crunch, crunch, crunch. I'm in Big Bear, California. My home to be in the next few months hopefully. It's a crisp 38 degrees outside and I'm mid-way through a 7.5 mile run.

There are so many things that go into this run. They seem to all come to me at once. A year and a half ago I started losing weight. When I plateaued a year later, I had lost over 100 lbs. My wife has lost 75. We're the same people with a new lease on life. So here we are...at 7000' altitude, a week before Christmas, running in the snow. Yes - the snow. One of the many reasons I can't wait to make Big Bear my permanent home instead of vacaction destination. I love the snow and I love that crunch, crunch, crunch sound our feet make as we run the Alpine Pedal Path along the North Shore of Big Bear Lake.

The weight loss is one of many things...the next is the running itself. An athlete most of my life, I've never considered myself a runner. But I've run 20-25 miles a week for the past 75 weeks. I'd be lying now if I told you I wasn't a runner. I enjoy it now. It doesn't hurt anymore. I find comfort in my runs. I think better while I run and certainly better after.

Ok, back to Big Bear! It's the small town I love - the community. It's the skiing, hiking, mtn. biking, backpacking, kayaking, running, horseback riding, snowshoeing...jeeesh the list goes on and on.

I don't understand it...evertime I tell someone I'm moving to Big Bear, it's always the same reaction. First they get the dumbstruck look, and then they all say it. "Why Big Bear?". I recite the list above and I guess because none of those things are part of their lives - th lieir expression doesn't change. And I just smile. I can't wait to make it my home.

It's been a goal for years. Slowly working towards it. Getting the ducks in a row, and now the house is on the market. Of course it's an ugly time to try to sell a house in Southern California, but I don't even care. I don't have to make a dime on it. If I can just break even, I'll be the wealthiest man alive! I'll be living in my vacation spot of choice, on the Pacific Crest Trail in the mountains of California, a mile above the ocean, where the air is still clean and I can hear that crunch, crunch, crunch!

'Tis the Season

2007-12-11T12:31:00.000-08:00

Wow, Thanksgiving came and went in a flash and Christmas is just around the corner. I can't wait until next week. We're heading to Big Bear, California - our favorite vacation spot and future home - for a week of relaxing and fun. Big Bear got over a foot of new snow in the storm we had in Southern California this past week!

So what's new? Well lots of stuff! Our bicycle clothing has been selling fantastic. We've ordered and sold through our arm, leg and knee warmers, jackets and shorts. We designed a few new short styles and they have arrived and are selling well too!

Most recently I got some of my samples in for my new line of Triathlon clothing. We'll have Tri shorts and Tri-Suits. Probably a few other items, but they samples look good. We're fine tuning the styles and they'll be ready for the early Spring Triathlon Season.

What else...weight loss is being maintained. Freelance eBay and Internet Marketing business is up! I've been doing a ton of freelance work creating listing templates, designing eBay stores and more. Nic is helping out at her old job working part-time after someone recently left with no notice. And with the holidays upon us - it's a good time to make some extra money.

Happy Holidays everyone! Whether it's Chanuka or Christmas, Kwanza or just another time of year for you... it's still the Holiday Season - so Happy Holidays!

Monopoly - it's not just a corporate conglomerate

2007-11-25T15:00:00.000-08:00

My family likes to play games. Board games to be specific. We always have. My wife and I have played cards since we started dating - rummy or gin usually. And as our boys came of game-playing age we got them started with the basics...Candyland and Chutes & Latters and Uno. Then we graduated to Life, Battleship and Monopoly Jr. And they've grown to love it.

Jacob & Nic at Starbucks

As it turns out - we rarely play at home. We keep our games in the back of the family car and the games are usually played at Starbucks. It's such a regular occasion that when we walk in we're greeted with "Monopoly tonight?" .

We still mix the games up - but our family favorite is the classic Monopoly. Even my 7-year old has been playing since he was 5. We all have our favorite game pieces and some (Jacob) even have custom pieces - like a LEGO man.

Of course our boys could make change for a hundred since they were toddlers - and we credit the board games with that. But they learn a lot of other values from playing. Patience, teamwork, a bit of business sense - but mostly they learn about family. This is our time - game time. Family time - sitting, sipping a hot chocolate or mocha and spending an hour or two together playing a game.

Thanksgiving Day Bicycle Ride

2007-11-22T13:56:00.000-08:00

Like I don't have enough to be thankful for... I got to go for a great bike ride this morning with my friend Josh and his girlfriend Lilian. We met a group of 40 or so from Swami's Bicycle Team for a 40 miler up through Camp Pendelton to San Clemente and back. It was a leisurely pace for us of around 15-16 mph. A bit slower than I'm used to going, but it is Thanksgiving Day and wasn't supposed to be a hammer session. I seem to have a hard time not going hard all the time, so this was probably a good thing for me.

I'll warn you first - this is a 30-second video shot with my cellphone, while riding - so the quality is exactly what you'd expect...pretty bad! But I wanted to try it and add it to my blog.

Anyway - I do have so much to be thankful for - and I am! I don't think I'll list them all here, but a short list would include God, family, friends, health, freedom and independence. Thank you everyone for your part in all of this!

Happy Holidays!

Here's a picture of Josh and Lily on the ride.

Sunday night

2007-11-18T22:44:00.000-08:00

Sunday night... it was a long day. I got up at 5am to go the the Swap Meet to try and sell some of the things filling my garage. Our house is on the market and I'm trying to get lean...as far as clutter that is. In general, I'm the anti-packrat. I throw stuff away almost too quickly and then wish I'd kept it. But, I still manage to collect enough stuff overtime to fill my Trooper from front to back floor to ceiling.

Anyway, after a 6-hour stint at the lovely Oceanside Swap Meet, I was $500 the wealthier and 24 boxes of stuff lighter! WhooHooo

I grabbed some Chipotle for lunch and headed over the the Boy Scout Space Derby event. This is a fun tradition held anually by my youngest son's Scout Pack. They're balsa wood rockets that fly down a fishing line race track propelled by ....rubber band powered propellers.

My son, being the knucklehead he is, decided he intentionally didn't want to make it aerodynamic. He wanted it completely square, like block of wood it is when you get it out of the box. He also insisted we not paint it, or finish off nicely. He wanted to win the "Procrastinator" award (which is a real category), even though he planned well ahead to not finish the darn thing.

Amazingly he finished 4th overall out of some 60 rockets - beating many of the wafe like aero shaped rockets that obviously hours were spent on. It almost irritated people and only made our family chuckle. We spent literally 5 minutes on the entire project and he flew through 5 rounds with only 1 loss on the track before his final round for third place - which he lost. Anyway, it was fun.

I then hurried home for an online conference I was hosting for AuctionSelling101.com - our eBay education website. We coveed eBay stores today, where I instructed the attending students on how search is different for eBay stores than it is for fixed price and auction format listings.

Then we spent another hour where I literally opened up a store, and built it before them online in the conference room where I can share my desktop while talking to them in my headphones. Very cool stuff.

We had some dinner, and went over to Starbucks for an hour or so to play some Monopoly with the family. Then hit the grocery store and then home for the night.

Turns out we had a stellar day on eBay with the bicycle clothing! We sold 5 of our new cycling jackets and vests, several pairs of arm and leg warmers, toe covers and shoe covers and several pairs of shorts. Gross sales of over $350 for the day in just my bicycle clothing. Very good news!

We have an order already in that should be arriving in another week, and I have an order put together to submit next week. I sent out an email to my 400 plus past customers of cyling products directing them to my eBay store letting them know we had full inventory and lots of new items in stock. I guess it worked! :o)

Pop Warner Football

2007-11-17T21:37:00.000-08:00

It's funny...I couldn't wait for this day, and now it's come and gone and I'm kind of sad. The day...well, the last day of Pop Warner Football of course!

I have two younger boys playing ball this year. It's the first year for both of them. My youngest has been bugging us for years to play. He's 7 and this is the first year he's allowed to play. He asked Santa for pads last year - a year before he could play on a team. So of course Santa brought both he and his 11 year old brother full football pads/helmets...the works.

They spent hours out in the yard tackling each other. I have to be honest - I loved it. I played football as a kid and hockey as I got older. I like contact sports. I'm one of those guys that likes the physical hitting. The crack of pads against each other. I know...sick right? :o)

Anyway, my younger son Jacob is around 40lbs lighter than his brother Dylan. But he would hit him hard - drilling him. He'd bring him down hard and delight in it. We couldn't wait until the season started to see him in his 'element'.

Dylan however is more of a technical type kid. A math wiz, a thinker...not so much of a physical type kid - though an excellent athlete. Dylan runs distance with ease and is great at Baseball. We just weren't sure how he'd hold up under the pressure of coaching and the physical punishment dolled out on the field. It turned out because he is fairly light weight for his age - that he played down a division in what they call "older-but-lighter".

Imagine our surprise when Jacob came home from practice saying it was "ok" not great. Saying he didn't want to play next year and showed general disinterest in playing. We watched practices from a distance - nothing going on at practice (like poor coaching or bullying). He is small for his age and was the second smallest on his team. At 7, he was also the youngest on his team with most of the boys being 8 or 9 years old. But we still thought he' revel in the sport. He just didn't.

He played his minimum required 10 plays a game, sometimes more. He was a wide receiver and they call that a 'skill' position, but really at this level it's a blocking position for sweeping runs, as the quarterbacks are usually too young and weak to pass the ball effectively, certainly not to a wide-out.

It was such a surprise to us, and to Jacob. He can't wait for Baseball to start and he's actually practicing with his tournament team once a week. He loves baseball and has played for several years at the All-Star level. I think he thought he'd be an All-Star at football, and when he wasn't it really took the wind out of his sails. We tried to encourage him, but the lesson in humility was a great lesson for this cocky young man. I think he'll play football again, even if it's not next season. He is an incredibly gifted athlete, and as he gets older we'll delight in seeing him put those skills to use in different arenas.

Ok, that's Jacob's story - but the real story here... the shocker, is Dylan. Dylan was immediately seen as one of the quicker boys on his team. He was the starting tight-end immediately and they used him often as an outlet for the QB. He LOVED playing tight-end. He loved practicing. He came home telling of the big 'hit' he delivered in practice or even the licking he took now and then. We were so happily surprised at his joy.

But wait - it gets better. It turns out, probably the best athlete on his team was the quarterback. And having at QB really limited his ability to run the ball - at least at this level. So they went to the next best they had - Dylan. After practicing for nearly 6 weeks at one position they switched him from tight-end to starting quarterback. He was absolutely dilerious with pride and joy! It was fun to watch him.

He did have some serious growing pains in his new position. Remeber, this was his first season ever playing football, and certainly had no practice at quarterback. But he's a smart kid, a good leader, and works hard. He had some rough weeks, dropping snap after snap. Pitching the ball back to non-existant running backs because he mis-called a play. But it got better, and better and soon things started to click.

The team didn't have a winning season overall, but for Dylan it was stellar. He started throwing completions, running the ball himself for 1st downs, and making good calls and plays with the old QB who was now his primary running back.

As the season wore on, attrition took its toll on the team and what was a lean team in terms of numbers dwindled. They found themselves short on players and soon Dylan was playing both ways - as starting QB and on defense as a safety or linebacker. He was leading his team, had worked through adversity and it shows in the way he carries himself. He talks "team" and "we", not me and I.

This is why kids play sports (in my opinion). They learn, grow, get stronger and smarter and learn about life while they have a ton of fun. Football...I love it - can you tell?

That's a happy kid!

Adventure Racing

2007-11-15T11:01:00.000-08:00

So some of that weight loss I wrote about in my last post came from an extensive amount of exercise. Over the past 20 years I've raced bicycles, played semi-pro paintball, done triathlons, raced inline skates for RollerBlade around the country, swam, ran and rode all kinds of things. But this past year, after losing the bulk of my weight, I started doing more triathlons.

I completed 6 or 7 triathlons this season - mostly sprint distance and a few international distance. These races typically start with a swim of up to 1000 meters, followed immediately by a bicycle ride of up to 25 miles, followed by a run of up to 10k (6.2 miles). Some have different formats or distances, but that's the typicaly scenario.

I also competed in several swimming events including a 5k open water swim...that's a 3.1 mile Ocean swim for you metrically challenged folks. :o)

Well after having done the triathlons, bicycle racing, swimming...everything else I was of course looking for the 'next thing' - the evolution of my sports.

Let me shift gears a bit and come back to this. About a year ago - or more, I started planning a move for my family. We're moving to Big Bear, California. It's a small mountain town of around 5,000 people (at the most), East of San Bernardio/Los Angeles, California. It's gorgeous up there at almost 7,000 feet. We spend nearly all our vacation time there hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, mountain biking, skiing, snowboarding and kayaking and boating on Big Bear Lake. Nic and I work at home full-time and we can do our work anywhere...so why not Big Bear? Oh yes, I almost forgt to tell you... I can buy a house for around 200,000 dollars less than where I live now! Anyway, with the mountain aspects coming into play I thought Adventure Racing was the natural progression for me...

Ok, back to the 'evolution of my sports'. Along the way I heard about Adventure Racing. It's a triathlon "plus" if you will. Like a triathon the distances and disciplines vary, but essentially here's what they're about. You will Run/Trek/Hike, Swim/Paddle, Bike/Mountain Bike, Climb/Rappel, as well as normally do some other tasks requiring teamwork or using your brain - like a mental type puzzle or riddle - oh yeh, and you do all this while navigating using a compass, topographic map and coordinates - no GPS. You can do them solo, but typically you're on a team of 2-4 people. They're a team event with everyone having to stay within 100 yards of one another at all times. They last anywhere from 6 hours to 6 days...yes nearly a week!

Well I got my first taste this summer with an Urban Adventure Race in San Diego. My buddy Josh and I finished 2nd place overall. This was essentially just a bike race with some fun events thrown in the middle. At approximately 5 mile intervals we had to walk on stilts, ride a big wheel through an obstacle course, jump on a giant hippity-hop, do a bean-bag toss, and do a wheel barrow race with a teammate in the wheelbarrow. It was fun and got me thinking about a 'real' adventure race doing the things I like and excel at - Mtn. Biking, trail running, kayaking...

I got my first chance last month in the Lake Hodges Adventure Race. It was billed as a 12-hour

race. Here's what the race entailed: First we kayaked 1.5 miles across the lake and back to retrieve a small foam ball (again - the checkpoints are not given - just the coordinates and you have to navigate using a map/compass to find them). Upon returning you carry the small foam ball on a golf tee around a short course without it falling off. Seems easy enough unless you just kayaked for 1/2 hour and your arms are shaking and you're out of breath. My two teammates Louis and Cory and I all did fine and soon we were off to cover around 20 miles of terrain on our Mtn. Bikes. We used the coordinates of checkpoints and a map to follow trails to the 6 checkpoints we needed. The checkpoints took us to the top of the tallest hill in the area - no small feat on the bikes and negotiating the course with the other 75 competitors. Cory got a flat on the way back, but that only set us back about 3-4 minutes.

At this point we were instructed to build a small waterfall out of pvc tubing - 20 pieces max that had been provided. There was a funnel at one end and a bucket at the other. Our goal - fill the bucket with 3 dixie cups with water from the lake 50 yards away. So for 10 minutes we ran to the lake, and back with our 6 oz. of water - pouring them in the funnel, having it run down our version of the waterfall we constructed and into the bucket. When the bucket overflowed we got our next set of 3 checkpoints to navigate. They were on the water...

Back in the 'yaks for another 5 miles of kayaking. By the end of this leg of the race my arms were ready to fall off! But we made good time and passed several teams on the water. This leg was nearly 2 hours on the water...

Along the way you have to remember to eat and drink or you'll simply run out of gas in a 12 hour race of non-stop exertion. We all did well at this with an alarm we set to chime every hour to remind us to eat drink.

When we got out of the boats we got our next 5 checkpoints to navigate. They had to be done on foot. Trail running/hiking only. According to the map it would be around 6-8 miles of ground to cover. And off we went. We found the first two checkpoints right away. The next two proved to be challenging as they were each at the very top of two large peaks of at least 1000 feet of climbing each...ouch! Eventually we found them and hit the last checkpoint on the way back to the Start/Finish line.

What a great feeling it was to be jogging down that last bit of trail and see the finish. I was seriously pooped out. It took us 7 hours to complete the entire course and we finished 1st place for the "Masters" group - which means our teams averag age was over 40. :o) We finished 2nd for 3-4 person teams and 6th overall. Not bad at all.

This truly was an adventure, and I can't wait for my next AR!

A Landmark Day

2007-11-15T10:30:00.000-08:00

Ok, it's not really a 'landmark day' but it's a change. For the past two years this Blog has been about eBay and Internet Marketing - hence it's old name... eBay Jay. But I've found I really wanted to write and share more and so I've decided to make it my 'catch all' Blog. You may learn more than you wanted to know about me, but you're taking your chances reading my Blog anyway.

So - Bubba Jay it is from here on out.

Ok, let's get started with the details...lol. Guess who these folks are?

Wow, that's right - it's

Nicole and I... 180lbs ago. Yup - I lost 105lbs and Nic lost 75lbs over the course of the last year and a half. Actually we lost it all in a year, but have maintained that weight for another 6

months now. Here's an after shot from a few months ago.

I actually wrote a short 'story' about our weight loss and entered it into a contest that Weight Watchers had... for most Inspirational Story. And we won first place in our region, out of a few thousand in the US. A local news channel from NBC came out to interview us and were were on the news.

It was kind of fun. Here's a link to the NBC website and you can check out the short 1 minute video.

http://video.nbcsandiego.com/player/?id=160971

Ok, enough fat talk. I'll be back soon with more. Or as my Weight Watchers meeting leader Melanie says "we'll see less of you next time".

eBay Success

2007-10-11T19:30:00.000-07:00

And the hits just keep on coming...

That's right - more good news on the eBay selling front. I've been importing my own Bicycle clothing line from overseas and am having great success with the full line. I've recently received and practically sold out of arm warmers, leg warmers, knee warmers, bib shorts, shoe covers, toe warmers and more.

Within a week of getting my order and getting them online, I'm nearly out of all of them and have already placed another $1000 order. This is great news as the magazine business has been slowing steadily over the past 6 months with increased selling restrictions and increased competition.

I'm working on long sleeve jerseys, and have jackets, and vests coming in my next order in additon to more of my staple shorts for men and women. Pretty exiciting for us - having this success with our clothing line.

We're also working on a deal to open a US Distributorship for some swim related products from the UK. This would help fill out our whole triathlon line.

I am almost done making my own race number belt and will buy in bulk the materials needed for that project. In addition to the cord locks I wrote about previously I've also already ordered bulk elastic lace and small zip lock baggies to package 'speed laces' for runners and triathletes. It's all coming together nicely!

It's so easy

2007-09-14T18:27:00.000-07:00

Selling on eBay is so easy. On our new site AuctionSelling101.com people are always asking, "what should I sell?", or "what's a good product to try and sell?". I've given a list of basics to ask yourself to evaluate product ideas, but people always ask the same question.

They make it so much harder than they need to. I know I've been selling on eBay for years...7 or 8 now. But it's just not that hard.

Example: The other day I was looking for things to sell. I am doing a lot of triathlons lately, and I already sell bicycle shorts, jerseys and other cycling related items. So I did a search for triathlon to see what I'd find.

I found several things under that heading that I could sell. One was a very simple small item. Cord locks. You know the kind you push the little button and stick a string through it. Check out the pictures below. Someone was already selling them, but for $4.00 I think, plus shipping. I know that's highway robbery, so there's a potential item.

So that's what they are and from the image you probably get the idea.

Runners and triathletes use them to avoid tying their shoes when they're in a hurry, or simply for the convenience of not having to tie them. I actually used these for one of my young boys for a year or so before he was able to tie his shoes...they worked great.

Anyway, I figured heck, it's a small piece of plastic. How much could it possibly cost? So I did a Google search. The search returned hundreds of items. I also went to an International Trade site I've used before called Alibaba.com. It's a free site and you can import things from overseas.

But the bottom line was I found them in lots of 100 from a place 100 miles from my house for about .30 cents per pair. I ordered them online, and had them in two days. I took a few photos - made a listing and put them up on eBay.

I made a fixed price listing for a pair of them for $2.99 and FREE SHIPPING. They were up for about 1 hour before they sold. Ok, .30 cents my cost, two stamps and an envelope to mail them - that's another $75 cents and I'm into them for just barely over a dolloar and I sold them for three. I net $2.00. Not a killing - I get it. But a few hours later I sold two pairs to another person. So I made $6.00 that first day. I figure if I only make $10 a week, that's $40/month. Again - not making a killing here, but it's just one little simple item.

You get a dozen of these type of little things that you source yourself and then you're making $500/month. Now that may not make a difference in your life, but for some it could be life changing... a car payment or the rent!

Oh yeh, if I import them myself from China I have to buy 5000 or 10000 at a pop, but they end up costing me around 5 cents a pair instead of 30 cents a pair. Of course it takes longer and I have to assume that I'll actually sell that many, but I could put them up on eBay in lots of 100 for $100 making them only $1.00 each and I'd make an even greater profit margin. I'm sure you get the idea.

Let's recap....

It's EASY. Just get busy...

Bicycle Jerseys and more!

2007-08-28T22:00:00.000-07:00

They finally arrived! If you've been reading my posts you know I've been having my own cycling shorts made and imported to sell online. Well I ordered jerseys quite some time ago and they've finally arrived.

They're selling fairly well on eBay in both men's and women's styles.

I also got some bib short samples as well as arm and leg warmers so we should be stocked up for winter.

eBay Dance?

2007-08-28T21:56:00.000-07:00

If you own your own website you've probably heard of the 'Google Dance'. If you haven't, let me explain.

Google updates it's search engine index periodically. This normally turns the whole ranking of sites on the world's most popular search engine on end, wreaking havoc with site owners as their rankings are disrupted. This is the 'Dance'.

Ina Steiner of http://www.auctionbytes.com/ reported that eBay will soon be delivering it's search results by 'Best Match' results by seller quality (PowerSeller status and selling track record) instead of strictly by relevance. eBay did not explain what selling track record meant, but it seems likely to be based on Detailed Seller Ratings that were rolled out recently in Feedback 2.0.

Currently, customers see default search results by "Time Ending Soonest," so everyone has an equal chance of showing up at the top of results as listings end. But I believe eBay may change the default sort to Best Match in an effort to serve up more relevant, quality listings. (Currently shoppers on eBay may select Best Match from a drop-down menu on results pages.)

This is apparently being tested in a few categories on eBay France.

I think this means, your item will show up, but rather than showing up at the top of results when your listing is about to end, it may be buried on a lower page throughout the entire duration of your listing.

Steiner says "If eBay implements Best Match as the default sort, I think some sellers will be devastated. Shoppers, too, may be annoyed, particularly in some categories, and it will be interesting to see if they change their preferences to "Time: Ending Soonest," though eBay is not likely to share this information with us.

My advice is to be sure and do your best to optimize your listings for whatever changes eBay plans to roll out in the next few months, and get ready for a rocky ride."

You can read the entire article here http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y207/m08/abu0196/s01

Preparing ahead of time sounds like the ticket. I've already begun myself. Pray for the best and Prepare for the worst.

AuctionSelling101.com

2007-08-14T12:30:00.000-07:00

Yup - it's live! We launched a few weeks ago and have had a great response to our initial offer. We already have several hundred members and the discussion forums are active. This past weekend we also had our first live conference with around 30 members in attendance.

Very cool stuff. We're getting ready to add another 8-10 videos in the next week or so. We have more convferences lined up in our virtual classroom, and will be breaking them up into ability levels. Check it out if you get a chance HERE .

eBay Jay?

2007-07-14T21:39:00.000-07:00

A good friend of mine left me a voicemail the other day and she asked me "What's the point of being eBay Jay if you never post to your Blog?". Good point.

She was right. I haven't posted here for literally 6 months! That's ridiculous isn't it. It's not like I haven't been busy, but who isn't? We're all busy.

So as that little girl in Poltergeist says... "I'm baaaack" or something like that. :o)

Ok down to business. Have I been busy? Absolutely!

I updated my links on the right. I removed a bunch and added a new one. The new one is http://www.auctionselling101.com/ . What is it? It's a entire membership site devoted to teaching other people how to successfully sell on eBay. It's going to launch soon, but we had an initial membership available for SpaceHogs members and members of the Warrior Forum as a WSO. We let in 100 early birds to get some feedback on the site, get some affiliates to help us promote the official launch and get some activity going in the discussion forums.

The site is really awesome and our greatest project yet. I say "our" as in me and Chris. That's Black & Blue Marketing, our Corporation and the team that launched the super popular http://www.spacehogs.net/ . Anyway, we're very excited about it.

What else is new? Still doing the magazines though sales have slowed over the past 6 months. There is soooo much competition it's crazy! I did finalize some tools specifically for magazine sellers. I offer them on a subscription basis on this new site of mine http://www.magazinesellersresources.com/ . If you sell magazines, these tools I had custom coded will turn days of work into literally 1/2 hour - literally!

On my other eBay username we have been going through some changes. First as some of our Adidas stock was slowly dwindling we decided to source some new stuff. First we got some Nike shoes, which sold very well, but we had a few issues with customs from importing them and then had some claims of them not being genuine Nike products. Now we did get a smoking hot price on them, but they look like Nike's, they feel like Nike's, I even wore mine for 6 months with no problems, but we didn't want to take any chances or possibly mislead anyone so we just pulled the plug on that whole project.

Next we decided we needed another line of products. Something that wasn't a name brand. Something no one could say wasn't genuine. I've been selling bicyle clothing for years off and on, mostly from my own stock and then stuff I'd find at the thrift store or swap meets. So I started looking overseas in Taiwan, China and places like that. I found a great supplier that would make me my own line of bicycle shorts and other cycling apparrel for a super price. I've ordered and received several orders of a few hundred pieces each with great results. Our cost is low so I can price them right on eBay and they're selling very well. Here's a picture of the men's shorts:

The JN is for Jay and Nicole...awwww sweet isn't it? :o) Anyway, hopefully it's the start of something great and profitable as we grow the line into triathlon gear, jerseys, arm and leg warmers, tights, gloves...all the cycling specific clothing.

I think that about wraps up the update. Still need to get back to SpaceHogs.net and get it updated, and keep plugging along on the other fronts. Hope to see you online!

Shooting Star... 10K

2007-01-11T22:39:00.000-08:00

So they call it the flying star. You get one when you get 10,000 unique feedbacks on eBay. And I got mine. :o)

I know it's a small picture, but if you look closely it says 10,006. I actually have over 14,700 positive feedbacks, so that means over 4700 returning customers. Not bad.

What does it all mean? Not much really. Just a milestone I'd been shooting for, for quite some time. According to eBay it puts me in the top 1% of all members...for feedback that is.

25,000 anyone?

Entrepreneurial Spirit: Alive and Well

2007-01-09T22:29:00.000-08:00

Wow, I'm almost embarrassed as I see I haven't posted to my blog in 2 months. Of course it was the two busiest months of the year. Not just for me, but for most of you too I'd imagine. We went from Halloween, straight into Thanksgiving, followed by Christmas and then shortly thereafter New Years.

During that time I launched a highly successful website with my partner "Mr. Black". We're Black & Blue Marketing Corp., and the site is www.SpaceHogs.net . It's an entire membership site dedicated to teaching others how to market to the Social Networking crowd - a.k.a. MySpace.

My eBay Education Specialist Certification has been put the test as I've been teaching literally 2-3 private lessons a week lately. I have a new Trading Assistant client, a new car dealer to list cars for, another new site of my own I'm working on, developing more tools for magazine sellers ... what else. Ah yes - I've started importing products from China too. People always ask me how I keep track and I have no good answer. I just do. And sometimes... I just don't :o)

If you've read my blog before you'll probably recall a previous post about what I called EADD, or Entrepreneurial Attention Deficit Disorder. Well I was reading an old Forbes magazine today....June of '06. That alone should tell you how many directions I'm headed...I'm reading 6 month old magazines 'cause I can't keep up!

Anyway, in the Forbes there was an article by Rich Karlgaard. He writes a regular article called Digital Rules for Forbes. He also has his own blog at http://blogs.forbes.com/digitalrules or you can check out his homepage at www.karlgaard.com . ANYWAY, he wrote a great article called "Blessed Are the Hypomanic".

I won't go into the whole thing, but I wanted to quote a bit of it...that explains so very eloquently what I feel about myself and this whole EADD thing I've tried to explain to others, but feel I muddle through.

Rich writes:

Last week our Preacher spoke about Spiritual Gifts. She identified a dozen or so, Leadership, evangelism, empathy and faith were at the top of the list - just what you'd expect in a church sermon. She surprisingly also mentioned entrepreneurial personality. "Some people are gifted at starting things," she said. "Sadly, we anal-retentive types are too quick to come along and criticize entrepreneurs for not finishing their projects. That's wrong. The entrepreneurial gift isn't to manage and administer. It's to start things."

Very true. Some entrepreneurs I know are good at managing and administering, but not many. Most are a mix of visionary and hustler, with a dash of attention deficit disorder thrown in. They see opportunities the rest of us overlook. They are driven by a breathless energy to assemble resources in pursuit of those opportunities. Then soon after their baby is toddling, they get bored."

Rich goes on to explain more about where some people feel that entrepreneurial spirit comes from, but I won't quote the whole thing. I just really felt like he was talking about me in many ways...and it felt good to not feel like I was the only one who gets things going and moves on to the next...

Anyway, that's my thought for the day...actually my quote of someone else's thoughts, but I still recognized the brilliance in his writing, right? :O)

I'll try to get some more regular posts going here shortly. Have a great week, and try and stick to those dang resolutions you made a week ago!

Updates...Updates...Read all about it

2006-10-31T20:00:00.000-08:00

Wow, time is flying! It's Halloween already and before you know it, New Years Day will be here!

So updates are in order...

Let's see, LowPricedMags, my primary eBay user ID...we just hit 13,000 total positive
feedbacks...almost 9000 unique positives. I've got my eye on that big 10k...the flying star.

Our other eBay store All_that_and_More! where we sell just about everything, but mostly sell Adidas Golf Clothing, has been doing very well, very consitant.

We have a few other user ID's we're working on some different projects with, and will keep you updated as things progress on that front.

Let's see...other sites...

Well, my site www.HookupyourMySpace.com is literally busting at the seams with traffic. Checkout out this screen shot from my awstats page in cpanel...

Can you believe the growth? Would you like to have nearly 30,000 unique visitors to your site this month? Of course you would. It's MySpace marketing folks.

I'm using MySpace to drive this traffic and the traffic I spoke about in my last post, for Vtag...is continuing to grow week after week.

With that success on the MySpace resource site, I decided to expand on that success and I started and/or bought 5 more resource sites. I now have www.RapRnBlayout.com, www.SpaceTagger.com, www.ClearSpaceLayouts.com and a few others I'm still tweaking.

All the other sites are hanging in there...holding their own.

What else...the eBay car business is steady...still shooting cars for dealerships and posting around 100 listings/month for them.

Oh yeh, just remembered something else I've been working on ( of course... ). I had a custom checkout built for my magazine business. The problem is that when people order magazines on eBay, they typically want to send them to multiple addresses as they're a very popular gift item.

Well the challenge is that neither eBay or PayPal, or ANY other checkout system on the market allows the user to enter more than one shipping address. Then my customers send emails and leave notes in PayPal and at the end of the week, you end up with literally a thousand emails and notes to reveiw...not a good scenario. So, I solved the problem and had a solution built.

Here's a link to the main page https://www.search4mags.com/checkout/ though you can't get in much further without a transaction pending.

I had to outsource it to a company from India and it took several weeks, but the result is awesome! Now my customers can enter as many addresses as they want, and they can select new or renewal for each title as well. Then they can pay through PayPal or by Money Order. It gives them a receipt and gives my customers all the information I'm trying to convey to them in automated emails.

It is more efficient, and more accurate. Better for me and my customers.

The checkout had to be certified by eBay, which it was and I'm now in the Solutions Directory and in the Developer's Program.

But the big plan is to spend a bit of time using it, work out any potential bugs and then I'll offer it to other magazine sellers for a monthly fee. It'll save everyone time, trouble and make a bit of money for mui!

MySpace Marketing

2006-10-11T23:16:00.000-07:00

Ok, I promised an update on what I've been up to. MySpace

I know you don't have to look very far to find someone who will tell you "I hate MySpace". You'll have to look even less to find a concerned parent when MySpace is mentioned.

These are valid positions to take...though neither affects me or what I have to do with MySpace.

I started using MySpace around 8-12 months ago. Using it, meaning exploring it. I actually got involved helping my kids work on their profiles. My teenagers were 'pimping' their profiles, and I thought I could either forbid it, or get involved and try to understand it and keep them safe. I'm more the educator type, so I got involved.

A few months later, I had my own MySpace resource site, www.HookupyourMySpace.com. It's a site that gives you all the tools to 'pimp' your profile for free. I was trying to drive traffic to the site, but was having a bit of trouble. I figured that MySpace itself had to be a the place to find the intended users of my site, but how to reach them was another issue.

So I started doing some reading. I searched the Internet high and low for MySpace marketing information. I read any blog post or discussion forum thread that had to do with the topic. Eventually I found the Warrior Forum where Internet Marketing is the mainstream, and I ran into some savvy marketers. Turns out they had been doing the same thing. Trying to figure this MySpace thing out.

Well I bought and absorbed anything and everything I could find in the next few months, and tried out a hundred different tactics and ideas for marketing on MySpace. Some worked great and others...well they just stunk.

But after that many months I had some great successes as well. Along the road I had learned how to market effectively on MySpace. Well as fate would have it, others were looking for someone who had done what I did. Someone who knew even a little about how to get traffic from those 61 million registered users to their site or products.

I was contacted by many and have worked with a handful of great companies creating marketing campaigns for them, and implementing and executing those plans. And again, success was had. The Vtag company that I spoke about in my last post was actually one of them, and I continue to work with them.

You won't believe how their traffic has EXPLODED!

Literally in 6 weeks we took their site traffic from less than 100 unique visitors per day to nearly 150,000 UV per day! I wish I could take all the credit, but this is truly the perfect product for MySpace an completely viral (spreads from user to user "like" a virus). Their great product coupled with our marketing efforts has launched the product nicely.

Remember the MySpace site of mine I mentioned before... www.HookupyourMySpace.com ? Well I was getting about 5-10 visitors a day 3 months ago. Now, I'm getting around 2500 unique visitors per day. And I don't have a viral product persae.

The marketing tactics work. So, a partner and I decided that with all the poor information out there, we could do better. And www.SpaceHogs.net was born. Spacehogs is a whole members site built around MySpace marketing. We have a huge eBook full of marketing tactics and "secrets" . We have over 8 videos showing you how to do what we do...not just talking about it, but walking the talk. We're having our own adder bot built and it will be included too. But probably the best part of the whole site will be our members discussion forum, where you can get coaching and help with your MySpace marketing. And you can share with others what is and isn't working for you. The forum will be invaluable.

The cost? Not enough in my opinion. My partner... Mr. Black has it set at $47 right now I think. That's a 1 time lifetime membership. I think it should be like $9.99/month but we're working on setting the price. Bottomline, if you want to learn about marketing on MySpace, there is NO better resource.

If you want to hire someone else to do your marketing for you, then drop me a note and I'll get back to you.

Your voice on the web...MySpace, eBay, my Blog?

2006-10-11T22:31:00.000-07:00

I haven't written much about MySpace in my Blog, but it's become a big part of my Internet Marketing life recently.

I have dozens of profiles, bots, Myspace resource sites and much more. I will need to bring everyone up to speed on this whole MySpace deal. I have also been actively marketing for several companies on MySpace and driving tremendous amounts of traffic to thier sites and products. Again, big update is needed.

In the meantime, I wanted to tell you about one of the products I've been marketing. It's FREE to use, of course, but is really valuable for MySpace or eBay or dozens of other places.

What is it? It's called a Vtag. It's your voice on the internet. How? You call an 800 number and record what basically amounts to a voicemail. So your phone is the microphone. Then you go the the Vtag website and grab the code they provide you and paste it where you want your voice to be heard. When someone clicks the button...poof your voice plays.

Think of the possibilities...you could do audio blog posts from the field, record a song at a concert, make an audio profile for MySpace, use it to describe something on your eBay auction...it's so cool..and FREE.

Ok, example time...so you can figure out what the heck I'm talking about!

Allright, if you didn't click it, go back and do so. This is one of a several different skins available. They come in a few colors, sizes with the scrolling text and without it. There are even a few fun ones.

How do you get a Vtag? Go to www.Vtag.com and register (FREE), and get started making your own and get your voice on the web.

Yikes! Too Long...gotta' FOCUS

2006-09-20T22:42:00.000-07:00

It's simply been too long since I've posted here on my Blog. I've been so incredibly busy, you can't imagine. In the past month I've launched or purchased/rebuilt 5 new websites. I've been very busy shooting cars and listing them on eBay for dealerships, I've been doing quite a bit of marketing on MySpace for a few different companies...and that's just work.

I've got 2 boys playing baseball and I coach both, and my daughter is playing Softball to boot! That's life, right? I know everyone is busy. Sometimes I just feel overwhelmed.

Anyway, I found a fantastic article that I though I'd share with you all. It's helped me tremendously...well not exactly. I think it has the potential to help me if I will only follow the advice given in it.

I'm pasting the article below. I got the article from The Warrior Forum, one of my favorite forums for Internet Marketing information. The original post was writtne by Internet Marketing Guru John Reese. It's long, but very wise.

------------------------------------------------

"DOUBLE Your Profits Now!"
By John Reese of MarketingSecrets.com

I just thought I would share a little "wisdom" with you
that I learned the "hard" way over the past 12 years
of running online businesses. Hopefully, some of you
will be able to benefit right away from what took me
YEARS to figure out and finally DO. It was the major
difference in finally finding big success online.

1. Have many Internet projects you are working on?
Have many ideas you are developing that you want to
make money with?

YOU'RE IN DEEP DOO-DOO AND YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW IT.

One of the hardest lessons I had to learn was that
working on several projects at the same time was
literally the KISS OF DEATH for my online ventures. I
was under the impression that if I could create TEN
little online ventures that could each make a measily
$2,000/month, then when the day came that they were
all online I'd be making $20K/month.

Take it from me, that will NEVER happen.

I once had over 20 projects being developed at
the same time. I even had a TEAM of employees
at that time to do it. It still FAILED.

FOCUS. THAT'S THE SECRET TO MAX PROFITS.

Just as you cannot make a million dollars without
making just ONE DOLLAR first (there's no other way
around that order) you really can't succeed online
unless you work and FOCUS on just ONE PROJECT and work
on it until it's profitable. Then and only then should
you work on Project #2.

It's too easy for entrepreneurs like us to surf around
the Internet and see opportunity everywhere. It's too
easy to come up with yet another new "plan" to create
yet another little venture -- often sidetracking us
from our original project.

So stop working on multiple projects at the sametime
-- at least not until you have ONE project making you
enough money that you can sitback and relax and "play
around" with a 2nd and 3rd and 4th project. Until you
create just ONE project that is able to support your
lifestyle you have no reason to be working on other
projects. YES, many people will disagree with me, but
it's a FACT.

The way to succeed online is to FOCUS. It's better to
do one thing "great" than to do many things "fair". If
your primary project is just not growing to the size
you want it to to support your lifestyle, then you
should probably focus on another project instead. Pick
another market. Do some research. Don't be afraid to
try something else.

DON'T FALL IN LOVE WITH YOUR PROJECTS.

If you give them an honest effort and they prove not
to be as profitable as you want, don't be afraid to
DUMP THEM. Online ventures are very inexpensive to
start. Don't be afraid to bail out on a failing
project and start another to focus on.

You'll make a lot more money by making one project as
best as you possibly can. Instead of spending your
time trying to get another project going, work on
GROWING your original project -- go out and get more
affiliates or test more advertising campaigns. THEN
work on creating a backend product that compliments
your initial product/service.

MILK YOUR MARKET.

Work on making your original project as big as possible.
When you can't do anymore, THEN considering starting a
second project.

2. Make Lists And Prioritize Based On One Thing -- PROFITS.

You should do "brain dumps" often. Pour everything in
your head onto paper. Get everything off your mind. We
all get a gazillion ideas everytime we surf around.
Don't clog your mind with these ideas, write them
down.

THEN RELAX AND STOP DWELLING ON THEM.

You don't need to let these ideas encompass your thoughts --
they are safe on paper or in a computer file you've created to
note them.

Make a list of "tasks" you need to work on for your
business. Write down every conceivable thing you'd
like to accomplish. Then prioritize this list from top
to bottom based on what will you make you the most
money or have the biggest impact on your bottom line.

It's funny how we often will spend a lot of time on
tasks that don't necessarily bring in new profits for
us. So work on those things that will most directly
affect your bottom line FIRST -- then work on the rest
of the list.

Also work with a better PRODUCTIVITY "BALANCE". Plan
to work 3-4 hours a day working only on some tasks on
your list. As Internet entrepreneurs it's too easy to
surf this site and other sites and PROCRASTINATE. The
Information Age makes it too easy to procrastinate --
because we can NEVER know everything there is to find
online, so we can surf INDEFINITELY.

Kill your web browser for a few hours a day if you
don't need it to accomplish the work you need to do.
Surf only when you've accomplished your day's tasks.
Same with email. Close your email client if you don't
need it.

(AND HERE COMES A "BIGGIE")

3. STOP TRYING TO COME UP WITH THE NEXT "BIG THING".
LET OTHER PEOPLE *SHOW YOU* WHAT'S MAKING MONEY.

For many years of my life as an entrepreneur I was
trying to come up with the next "Big Idea". I was
always trying to innovate. I was always trying to
invent something. I finally realized that it's much
easier to make money THE LAZY WAY.

Let other people do all the hard work for you. Let
other people figure out what people want to buy. Then
you can DIFFERENTIATE yourself and offer something
similar to the same market. No, don't copy off of
people. But create a product that compliments a
popular product/service. Not only have you created
something to offer to that same "hot" market, you have
also created something that makes for the perfect JV
for that original person that "showed you" the market.

Online, you can find out ANYTHING about any business.
Do some research and check out other successful people
online. Notice what kind of ad copy they use.
Subscribe to their ezines or autoresponder series. See
what they send you -- realize WHY. Buy your
competitors' products. See what they sell you on the
backend. Figure out HOW they are making money.

THEN EMULATE SUCCESS.

Stop trying to do things the HARD WAY. Keep an eye on
people that have already figured it out.

OBSERVE ADVERTISING

Check out the keywords for your market. Notice the
companies that are bidding for your keywords. Keep an
eye on these listings for at least a couple of weeks.
The companies that remain at the top are most likely
MAKING MONEY with that advertising or they wouldn't
keep paying for it (unless it's some Fortune 500
company just wasting money). Go to their site and see
WHAT they are selling. How much they are selling their
product for. What autoresponder series they might be
using. What their offer is. Buy their product. Figure
out their backend.

Do a little RESEARCH and you can find out the exact
"blueprint" for success in any market.

AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST...

4. Be proactive.

If you want more subscribers, go get them. If you want
to bring more traffic to your site, go find some
partners that can send it to you. If you want more
email subscribers, create more ways for people
to opt-in and take more advantage of the traffic you
already have.

Don't sit back and "hope" your business grows, MAKE IT
GROW. No matter what your goals are, you CAN make them
happen if you TAKE ACTION to make it happen.

This is your year to do it. Make it happen.

-----------------------------------------
John Reese is an Internet Marketing pioneer that has
been actively marketing online since 1990. John has
sold millions of dollars worth of products and services
online and his network of Web Sites have received over
1.4 BILLION Web Site visitors since their inception. You
can learn more about John, his home study courses,
and subscribe to his free ezine by visiting:

http://www.marketingsecrets.com

(c)2003 MarketingSecrets.com. All rights reserved.

Hope you enjoyed it and you learned something. I know I did!

Favorite Thingz and How To Make Money on MySpace

2006-08-23T23:19:00.000-07:00

Are you a member of any affiliate programs? Chances are you probably are somewhere somehow. It's an opportunity to make some money by referring a potential customer to an advertiser.

Well here's an affiliate program of sorts, made specifically for MySpace. It's called FavoriteThingz . You go to the website and browse through Bands, Teams, Companies, TV Shows, Websites, Players, Games, Movies and you can even upload your own images and url's. Talk about a great way to advertise your sites!

Check it out below!

" allowScriptAccess="never">

There are NO GIMMICKS, NO SPAM, ABSOLUTELY FREE!

It's cool all by itself, just to display your favorite things to your Profile viewers, but You have the opportunity to make some money while you do it!

Let's say you add a video game to your favorite things like the one below:

When others are viewing their favorites they can click on them. They can actually be redirected to an advertiser that sells that game and others. If a purchase is made you get a referral commission.

Awesome isn't it! It is the first of its kind on MySpace. It's perfect for Blogs too. They make codes for Friendster, MySpace, Hi5 and a bunch of other Social Communities. Click HERE to get started on yours and start making some money for hanging out on MySpace and Posting all those comments and bulletins!

Awesome tool...check it out!

2006-08-19T23:34:00.000-07:00

This is a really cool little tool I found today. Actually I heard about it at eBay Live, but finally got around to checking it out today. It's called FilmLoop. It's completely free and it does a few different cool things.

You create these neat little scrolling images and then you can post them in email, blogs, on eBay, MySpace...wherever you want. You can have it go and get all the images from eBay by username or others usernames or upload your own images and make screensavers. Awesome tool.

Check out the Horizontal scroller below:

You can also create the type below. I've put this into one of my eBay listings to show you how powerful it can be! Talk about cross promoting your items!

Here's a link to this looplet in one of my eBay listings. Click Here

There are tons of other ways to use these, be creative. And don't forget....they're FREEEEEE! And FREE is a very good price!

Official Review of The Auction Resource Network...FREE

2006-08-19T00:11:00.000-07:00

Hey there! My buddy Chris from 3RiversAuctions just released his newest eBook. I have it for my Blog readers...absolutely FREE.

It comes with full resell and giveaway rights and there is even a link to watch a free video inside the eBook!!!

If you want to go straight to the video you can check it out here:

http://www.3riversauctions.com/videos/auctionresourcenetwork

The ebook also comes with an auction template making selling it on eBay a breeze - there's even a mystery bonus included...

Download the ebook here:

http://www.blackandwhitesprocket.com/ebooks/arn-review.zip

The eBook basically reviews a pretty cool tool. I use the site myself and visit it a few times a week. With the free download you also get another FREE ebook (again with full resale rights) called Top 10 tips for eBay Sellers.

Go check it out, you've got nothing to lose!

Secret technique for getting your eBay listing ranked at the top of Google!

2006-08-16T03:21:00.000-07:00

Here's a little known secret about how to get your eBay listing in Google's top 3 ranks for the keywords in your eBay listing title.

How? Make it a featured item.

Usually items in the last 2 or 3 days will show up in the top 3 ranks on a Google search for the keywords in your title.

Example: I found this item on the featured listings list: Life-size Bob Daddy-O Wade Longhorn Herd Sculptures

Now Google "life-size bob daddy-o wade longhorn"

Top postion on Google!

Here's another: 150 Acre SW Oregon Mining CLaim Property

Google it: "150 acre sw oregon mining claim"

Number 1 again.

Now it doesn't always work...for instance an item where there is a lot of competition for the exact description like:

sony cyber-shot dsc-w7 7.2 megapixel

It shows up as number 10 on Google. Still remarkable exposure don't you think?

So, it may not always be worth the price of "featuring" your item, but in some cases, HOW CAN YOU BEAT A #1 RANKING ON GOOGLE for your eBay item?

Hope that gets the wheels turning!

eBay Education Specialist - eBay University

2006-08-11T01:11:00.000-07:00

eBay U...it's just what is sounds like. A place to learn about eBay.

I've been teaching people how to use eBay for probably the past 6 years or so. For the past several years I got a lot of teaching referrals from my Trading Assistant listing on eBay.

We'd teach individuals, families or businesses how to buy & sell on eBay for $20 an hour. It was always informal and based largely on the individuals experience level and the topics they desired to know about.

For the past few years I've been seeing those "Learn How To eBay" class advertisements in the Learning Annex magazine and even local Community College handouts. I always marveled at the fact that whenever I looked at the Bio of the instructors, they always seemed to be business people, but with very little eBay experience. With only a bit of investigating, I found many have fewer than 100 feedback points, yet they're teaching others as an "expert" in their field.

Well at the recent eBay Live event in Las Vegas, they had a seminar on the eBay Education Specialist program. For a nominal fee, eBay would instruct me on the art of teaching about eBay. They include videos, a Powerpoint presentation, handouts and student books.

After I got home from Vegas, I jumped in with both feet. I knew a lot about eBay, but I always like to learn new things, and I did learn quite a bit during the online class I took to become a certified eBay Education Specialist.

Now my name is listed on the instructor database, so I can be found by potential students looking for a "Basics of eBay" curriculum. I set up a simple website so my students can learn a bit about me and register for my classes. I'm ready to roll.

My classes will likely be held in small conference rooms at local hotels or schools. I'd love to work my way into the local Colleges. It has the possibility of providing a decent part-time income as well. I'm able to charge whatever I want, but I think a fee of $50 for the 4-hour class with a $10 materials fee (certificate and student manual) is a reasonable amount. With say 20 students on a Saturday afternoon, that's $1000...not bad for 4 hours work.

Once I've had some student feedback (much like eBay's regular feedback system), I will qualify to be certified for a "Beyond the Basics" class. Again, with more feedback I can teach a Business Specialist class as well.

I think it's a great opportunity to share what I know about eBay, which I already enjoy obviously. I searched my area in San Diego & Los Angeles. There are maybe 50 people in all of San Diego and Los Angeles certified to be instructors and guess how many have a class scheduled in the next 3 months? No one within 50 miles, and about 5 people in the entire Los Angeles area. Sounds like potential to me!

Anyway, I'm fired up about it. Check it out, it might be for you too.

eBay Guides

2006-08-08T19:43:00.000-07:00

What the heck? An eBay guide...what's that?

That's what I hear from most people I tell about my guide and others. It's not a guide "about" eBay. It's actually a guide about buying a magazine on eBay, written by me, but hosted on eBay.

eBay has created a way for members to share their knowledge on just about any subject with other members. You can find out more about it HERE . You can review a book, DVD movie or MP3 player, or write a guide about something.

Well, I wrote a guide about how to buy a magazine on eBay. I know, it seems simple enough, but you wouldn't believe the miriad of questions I get about it. So, I wrote my guide Buying a Magazine Subscription on Ebay .

It's really a broad overview of what to look for as a buyer. But it answers many of the questions I used to get asked daily. I still get the questions, but hopefully it helps some. At the bottom of the guide eBay asks you to tell them if the guide was helpful or not. So far 103 out of 109 people have found my guide helpful. That's good news for me.

Out of the 22,242 or so guides on eBay (you can see them all HERE ) I rank number 729 as a ration of helpfulness votes. They actually give you a little icon next to your user ID and feedback score...mine says "Top 1000 reviewer". Here are the available rankings.

Anyway, I invite you to read my guide, whether you've purchased a magazine or not. Hopefully you'll learn something about the process and can vote that - yes, my guide was helpful. Once again, you can visit the guide here: Buying a Magazine Subscription on Ebay .

A side benefit of this is traffic generation for your eBay store and listings as it does share my user ID and store location with the visitors to my guide. The guides are also submitted and indexed by Search Engines, further increasing the opportunity for more traffic.

If you have some knowledge about any topic, share it with others. Make the eBay community a better place for everyone by sharing what you know. Also right now, there is a big promotion where eBay is giving away $100,000 in eBay Gift Certificates divided between 500 people over 10 weeks, for those who write a guide, review or eBay Blog. Check it out!

Don't forget to visit my guide and let eBay know if it was helpful...of course it is! :o) Buying a Magazine Subscription on Ebay

Buying on eBay - How to find the best deals

2006-07-24T23:02:00.000-07:00

How do you find the best deals on eBay? Well one of the best ways is to be the only bidder, or have very little competition.

"And how do I do that Jay?" Well, as you may know I have a website called http://www.sweetdealfinder.com . It has lots of cool links and tools for doing business online and finding great deals. But one of the lesser known tools is the "eBay Misspelling Tool". You can find it in the top left hand corner of my site.

The super simple explanation: People misspell words in their titles. If they spell Apple Ipod Appel Ipod, it might not ever get seen by 99% of eBay shoppers. But you can find it easily.

Anyway, I could explain how to use the tool, but my friend Chris from www.3riversauctions.com has put together a sweet video that explains it so much better than I ever could.

He even tells you how to have eBay email you when someone has made a mistake on the spelling of one of the words in their title so you can swoop in and buy it cheap!

Check out the video, totally FREE here:
http://www.3riversauctions.com/videos/not-just-another-ezine.htm

How to deliver eBooks? E-Junkie of course!

2006-07-05T21:26:00.000-07:00

One of my goals over the past year is to slowly get away from selling a physical product. Physical products have to be purchased, photographed, inventoried, then when sold, packaged and shipped, sometimes insured and occasionally they get returned...sheesh! So long term goal...sell electronic products or ones that are drop shipped.

So let's get right to it. I sell eBooks on one of my sites, and on one of my eBay user id's. The site is www.best-ebook-store.com . Nice url huh? :o) I also use it for delivery my eBooks from my site www.bestskytv.com and on my eBay auctions for eBooks.

So an eBook is still a product that needs to be delivered to your customer once they've paid. At first I would just email the eBook once I'd received notification that a customer had made a purchase...but after a bit I realized that long term, this wasn't going to do. What if I went on vacation, or my email went down?

I actually have an eBook I sell about how to get your products delivered to your customers electronically through your email for free...but there are some challenges involved in this. First you must of course have your computer on and your email program open. Again I'm thinking...vacation. Come to think of it, I think about vacation alot...hmmmm. OK, I'm back.

Anyway I started looking and asking around and came across a great product that has worked out exceptionally well for me. I don't ever recommend stuff I haven't tried or items that don't work, so take my word for it, this works.

The product is called E-Junkie and you can find it at HERE . What is E-Junkie? They explain it so much better on their site than I ever could, but I'll give you the basic overview. You upload the product to their site, they generate a link for you. You can put the link on a webpage and when the purchase is made and the product is paid for, they customer is immediately given the product to download. It works with eBay too and PayPal! And it's VERY affordable. Starting at $5 a month, it's well worth the investment. They don't charge a commission, there's no per transaction charges...really they're the bomb!

I use it for eBooks, but you can use it for selling Mp3's, eBooks, software, photos and digital are, games, templates, scripts, icons, phone cards and more!

They supply stats on your sales, downloads and it's all customizable too. Again, they can tell you much more and much better than I can, check it out for sure if you are even considering selling and delivering electronic media. Click the logo below to find out more!

Blog Blog Blog

2006-06-29T18:24:00.000-07:00

So I've had my blog for a few months now, so I thought I'd touch on they why and how of it.

Why get a blog? Some people enjoy writing. Some people get good therapy for themselves out of writing about lifes goings on. Others do so strictly for business reasons and others to educate the masses. Google has one, HP, Sony...just about everyone it seems is blogging. Businesses use Blogs to communicate with its customers.

But me...why did I start a Blog?

Well a bit of all of the above. I do enjoy writing, even in my matter of factly style. I wanted to educate anyone willing to read it, on a miriad of subjects that I've endured in my pursuit of making a living online. And I too, want to communicate with my regular readers.

Has it worked? Who knows really? You're reading it right? Why? You may have gotten here via my email signature. It appears this is the way most of my readers find their way here. The first month around 70 visitors total, then 80 the next, thn it dropped off a bit...down to 60. Then this month boom, back up to over 100. Ok, I'm not the New York times, but I have had a few people email me about what an "interesting" blog I have. I'm not sure that means they like it or not, but I'll take interesting. :o)

I'm trying to touch on eBay, websites, email marketing, and any other online endeavours I've run across. But if you have a topic you want to see my comments on, let me know. Chances are better than not, that I've tried it or at least given it some thought.

Feel free to post your comments on any posts you like or dislike too.

$5 Banner creation

2006-06-28T21:49:00.000-07:00

Banners...what are they used for? Normally you think advertising. Now when you need a banner you have two choices...make your own or hire someone. I've done both. Now I like to think of myself as a fairly artistic and creative guy, but my skills are still limited and my time is even more limited than my skills! Below is a banner I created for eBay keywords advertising.

It's not bad, but even as simple as it is, it probably took me an hour to make.

Well through my searching and doing business online, somewhere in a forum I found a guy that does fantastic work, and dirt cheap. His name is Justin and he owns 5dollarbanners.com . You can check out some of the hundreds of banners he's done at his site, and I'm going to paste a few below. I really like the animated ones he's done for me. $5.00! And he usually has them done in a day or two. He does all different sizes, whatever you want.

Justin also does eBook covers, CD's and website headers.

Anyway, that's my shameless plug for a guy that does super work at great prices. Check it out the next time you need some work done.

eBay Live...come and gone

2006-06-28T15:23:00.000-07:00

eWow, it seems like I was just writing about eBay Live 2005 not so long ago...and BAM!, Live '06 has come and gone. The recent event held in Las Vegas actually sold out at just over 15,000 attendees. It was the first time that has happened in the brief 5 year history of the event. They actually didn't allow "at the door" registration because of maximum capacity.

The show was great! We always have a great time. I heard so many people griping about having to pay $50 for the three day event, or simply refusing to go on the grounds of "I'm not paying eBay another cent" type mentality. Honestly, the entertainment alone is worth the admission price, not to mention the show itself.

It's always great to meet people you've chatted with on the phone, including eBay employees, account reps, PayPal staff and others that we indirectly work with every day. On more than one occasion I've leveraged my past relationships with people I met at eBay Live to help me work through an issue I was having.

I realize not everyone makes their living on eBay like I do. But I always want to learn more, and would always take any opportunity to do so.

I did learn a lot. Some I'll share in future posts and others I'll touch on briefly here today.

So what's new? eBay Blogs! Yes, if you didn't hear, eBay has a blog now. It's free and is another way to drive traffic to your listings. They're new, and their future is not yet determined, but at this point, why not, right? Check 'em out here http://blogs.ebay.com/ .

Shipping terms are going to be enforced better. That's the promise from Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay. We saw her at the "Keynote" speach. You can see her below. What does that mean? It means when you see a listing with a Buy It Now of .99 cents for say a $50 item, then you see Shipping & Handling $49.01. This is what eBay calles excessive shipping and is really designed to save the seller money on eBay fees. You see, if you're unfamiliar with the eBay fee structure, the way it works is, the higher you start an item at, and the higher it closes at, the more eBay charges you in fees. But, that doesn't include shipping. So, they're paying next to no eBay fees, and still making the sale. Smart, but it's cheating and in the past it's gone on un-patrolled.

This is the view from our seats. I guess Meg and others are fans of the Monkees - the old "hey, hey with the Monkees" band. And yes, the lead singer Davey Jones of the Monkees and his new band were there to put on a short concert at the end of the speaking. It was really fun. Snack foods, soft pretzels, soft drinks, hot dogs, pop corn and ice cream bars were all free for everyone at the event that around 10,000 attended.

By the way, you can listen to the Keynote speach by visiting here: http://www.wsradio.com/internet-talk.cfm/radio/ebay-keynote-2006.html

One of my favorite things at eBay live is the "Seller Scalability" area of the show. This is where you meet one on one with an eBay account rep and they go through your listings, and store and give you immediate feedback on things you can do to improve your sales, appearance and effectiveness. It REALLY helped me out last year. I especially liked this year when I was told "wow, this looks great. I wish there were something I could help you with" . Now while I appreciated the compliment, I really wanted someone to pick my work apart and show me what to improve, but this was beyond the scope of the show meeting.

The show was very large and took us about a full day to walk through at a fairly brisk pace. Then the second day we re-visited particular booths of interest and the last day, really just fooled around. :o) There are also educational seminars and guest speakers going on all day everyday for all abilities on all manner of subjects. Jerry, from Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream was there. The PostMaster General from the Post Office was there. There were classes for newbies and for PowerSellers alike. Again, we got SO much out of those classes last year, but were much more selective this time around.

Speaking of the PostMaster General...he informed everyone that you can now print International labels and fill out customs forms all online and at home, like you already could the regular and priority postage before. This will be a huge time-saver for anyone doing International shipping on a regular basis.

Of course there is always the collecting to do at the show. Last year they had the trading cards I mentioned in my past Live post, but this year it was a mini deck of playing cards...Vegas Baby! And the ever-present lapel pins to trade and save too.

The closing ceremonies or GALA Event as it is called, is always a great bash. There are literally a thousand eBay employees lined up on both sides of a red carpet and they all cheer, clap and give you high-5's as you enter the event. There is food galore everywhere, all part of the $50 you paid for the whole show. There are give-aways, entertainers, and always a headliner band. Last year B-52's, this year Huey Lewis . It was fun. Also it wouldn't have been a Vegas event if they didn't have about 20 Elvis impersonators running around and show girls for numerous picture opportunities.

All in all...definitely a great time. I didn't get quite as much out of it as last year, but I'll definitely go next year. And by the way, the show is heading back to the East Coast...Boston! Should be a fun time and will feel like it's just around the corner.

Hey...who's that dude below? YES! It's eBay Jay himself. :o) Yeh, that's me.

Hope to see some of you in Boston next year!

MinuteProfits.com Review

2006-05-19T01:02:00.000-07:00

I think I've mentioned it before, but I'm kind an info-product junkie. I always get sucked in by the "make thousands per week, buy now" hype. I do always look for the ones with the money back guarantee, and I've often exercised that option when the products turn out to be less than advertised.

Anyway, I thought I'd start reviewing some of the products as I buy them, use them and find out what they're all about. I'll share with my readers what I find out, good or bad.

Tonights venture... Minute Profits.

Following is the basic speal they sent me in an email.

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From: The Desk of Sebastian Foss

Subject: Profits in 15 Minutes ?! MinuteProfits!

Hi! My name is Sebastian Foss and I thank you for taking the time to read this!

How would you like to make $50 - $250 every hour - starting minutes from NOW ?

http://bubba76819.incomesite.hop.clickbank.net

Many people ask me everyday - "Sebastian, there are so many 'make money on the net' guides out there - which one shall I buy -
which one really brings in money - I finally want to start making money on the net". Don't believe any hyped promises - you won't be making thousands of dollars every day and you won't be a millionaire by next year but my System is a surefire method for everyone who wants to start earning online ".

http://bubba76819.incomesite.hop.clickbank.net

If you are ready to finally start making money online this is the right System for you.
I have developed the "MinuteProfits" - System that allows you to stark making money on the Internet 15 minutes from now - without any investment or advertising!

All you have to do is click your mouse and go shopping! I will give you access to thousands of shops that pay an average $50 - $75 per hour. That's right... up to $75 an hour for being an " undercover eye " for the company. So if your ready to get started then we are going to take you through the process of getting paid to shop!

My shopping company database is so large that you can make thousands every single week by only shopping a few times.

And believe me - I'm going to give you access to a lot of shops that will give you $50 - $75 every hour!

I put in about 2 hours a week and I make between $500 - $750 a week! My personal best was $800 in one day and Im going to show you how you can make an incredible income with very little effort, too!

http://bubba76819.incomesite.hop.clickbank.net

Make an extra $500, $1000 or even $5000 per week with 15 Minutes of your time!

-------------------------------

Ok, so that's the basic ad.

My initial impression is that it's some kind of "mystery shopping" online type thing. Sounds interesting enough. I've done quite a bit of service review jobs, being a secret shopper. I understand the need for it as a business and I get the importance of doing it right as the "shopper".

Overall the ad is pretty cryptic, not really telling you too much about it, but I'm a sucker for this stuff so I'm "all in". I pay the "introductory price" of $49.97 and away I go.

I'll edit this article and publish my results shortly. Hopefully I'll be raking in the $50 - $250 per hour they're quoting us. :o)

UPDATE: Ok, it's about 10 minutes later. That was quick huh? It's a 75 page e-book on mystery shopping. The ad is very misleading in my opinion, and like I said before, I've done quite a bit of mystery shopping so it was of no interest to me. You can get all this information for absolutely free on the internet or even buy an eBook for a few dollars off of eBay with the same information in it.

That's why you look for the 100% moneyback guarantee. I know if it's through Clickbank, like this was, that I can get my money back.

So, my review is...don't waste your money. If you have a "mystery shopping" question, I'll be happy to answer what I can.

Adsense Arbitrage...My EADD exposed

2006-05-10T00:00:00.000-07:00

It's been a few weeks since my last post...I've been super busy! I've been working on some websites, where I'm using Adsense to make some money. And just to reinforce the fact that I seem to have Entrepreneurial ADD I'm onto something new...again.

The idea is called Adsense Arbitrage. On one side you make a website that provides some valuable information on your site. And of course you have Google Adsense ads on the site to hopefully generate some income.

Generally the websites are small, from 1 page to several pages. And they deal with niche's. A niche is a very specific area of interest. Example: Hobbies is a big area of interest. Model airplanes is a bit more specific. Remote Control airplanes is even more specific. And gas powered 1/4 scale remote control airplanes is a pinpoint niche.

If you build a site around a very specific niche, chances are you won't have too much competition for the keywords you're trying to target, and will be able to get search engine ranking and traffic.

Traffic of course is the key.

On the site, you can also have affiliate products, or perhaps a product of your own...maybe an eBook. Here's a site I created recently. BestSkyTV.com

You'll notice this is a 1 page site. It has a few different income generating areas. First of all there are the Google ads at the top and near the bottom. Then there are the descriptions for my two eBooks which I'm selling. These descriptions provide the text needed to pull the desired Google ads that are related to SkyTV. And then at the bottom, I have a search feed where I get paid a very small amount per click for the searches performed.

Ok, so that's the revenue generation side of Arbitrage. Like I said before though, Traffic is the key to success.

Now I just made this site a few weeks ago, so how do I get traffic to this fairly unique little niche? Google ads of course!

I use Google adwords to create a campaign as an advertiser. What am I advertising? My eBooks. So I create a campaign with a few hundred keywords having anything remotely related to satellite tv and SkyTV and I bid very low...2-3 cents per click.

Then it's a numbers game. If I get 1000 impressions a day, and 100 clicks, that's a 10% CTR or click through rate. Not bad. Then how many people will click one of the ads on the site? How many will buy one of my eBooks? How many will click the search links from the RSS feed a the bottom? And also important to consider... How many people will visit and do nothing?

Let's presume I set a daily budget of $20 for my campaign. It's not a ton, but if I'm only paying .02 cents per click on average, that's a 1000 clicks from my Adwords campaign to the site. If I have that CTR of 10%, or 100 people visit my site, then it becomes a numbers game. The revenue depends on many factors. What are the advertisers on the site willing to bid to display their ads? The quality of information Google feels my site is offering, and several other factors. But at the end of the day, if the clicks (Adsense revenue) generate more than it cost to drive the traffic (Adwords campaign), then the difference is my revenue.

If I net $5 at the end of the day, it's a success. It's not a killing, but $5 a day is $150 a month and there really is next to no work once it's set up. What if you made 10 profitable sites? $1500 a month. 50 sites? You get the idea.

This idea works well with blogs too. Here are the sites I've been working on.

Magic Site
Sky TV Site
Pet Information Site
Botox Site
Ticket Site

There have been many others, some I won't share, some I may share later. I don't want to give away all my secrets. :o)

On another post I'll get more into the nitty gritty of how to research what profitible niche is, and how to find it. But that's a topic for another day...

eBay & Entrepreneurial ADD and more about Trading Assistant work

2006-04-18T15:25:00.000-07:00

"What the heck is he talking about?" I can hear you all now. I'm sure I have it. I have so many things going on, it's hard to stay focused. I'm working on several new sites, still running my eBay busniesses - which entails answering over a hundred emails a day, and investigating new online business opportunities all the time. I am constantly telling myself to focus on one thing at a time...at least for a short amount of time, to get something done. Every day it's a battle, but it's a war worth waging. Ok, enough whining. I'm sure we all go through it. At least I hope it's just me! Anyway, I wanted to go back in time a bit, back to the Trading Assistant gig. If you've read my previous posts, you'll recall the post "My Best Trading Assitant Deal Ever" . Well I'd been very busy with that when another deal fell in my lap.

I had posted my Trading Assistant profile on eBay, and a local car dealership found it. The parts manager called me and explained he had a large quantity of car parts to sell. We met for lunch to discuss it, and it turned out great.

It turns out, that a fairly common practice at these car dealerships, is they buy parts, and after a few years they become "dated". So, they write them off the books and literally toss them in the dumpster.

Well this internet saavy parts manager would take his marked down parts and sell them on eBay. But it had become too much work while he was also trying to manage a multi-million dollar parts business. So, we came to an arrangement.

The deal - I would come to the dealership, photograph and log all the items. I'd go home and create the listings, and launch them in a store/and under a username I had created just for them. They paid all fees and they did all the shipping. I got a flat 20% of the closing value for my work. Again if you look around this is quite a departure from what most Trading Assistants do or what they charge, but it worked great. I didn't have to pack or ship the items, or store them. They felt comfortable because if it didn't sell I didn't make anything.

Was there an opportunity for me to do work and not get paid? Absolutely! But it built an incentive for me, and a relationship. A year later it turned into a multi-dealership car listing business with this same dealer group...but more on that later. So was it worth it? You bet!

I did learn a valuable lesson I'd like to share with you. As many of you know...just about anything can sell on eBay. And this dealership taught me just how true this was. One day I was in the parts managers' office, and on his desk was a standard sales brochure for a new Ford Mustang.

I was flipping through it while waiting for the manager to do something. When he saw me looking at it, he mentioned how the brochures were hard to come by, and he'd just received a box of 1000 or something like that. He laughed and said "we should sell them on eBay".

Well if you knew me, you'd know what I did. I jumped on his computer. You know what found? Car brochures for sale. Old ones, new ones. Every make and model. We weren't the first ones to think of it, but we put a twist on it. I told him, there were quite a few online already and they were selling for a few bucks. Not really worth the work to mail it out, after fees and my split.

Then the light came on. I went to the manufacturer website. They had the auto brochures for download in a .pdf format. Check one out HERE. What could be easier? We sold tons of auto-brochures on eBay, that were electronically delivered via email. No packing/shipping, nothing. An email - that's it! Then we started selling the accessories brochure in .pdf format and along with that we included a price list of what those accessories would cost them, and the special "internet" price we were offering them. This resulted in the sale of the brochure and then the accessories. I still got a cut of the accessories and I never had to even take a single picture or ship anything. A few clicks of the mouse. That's the power of eBay! Then I went crazy. I found brochures for every make and model of car out there, domestic and foreign. Everything from Hyundai to Maseratti, Toyota to Ferrari. Many are even available in several languages including Spanish, Chinese adn Korean and more. There were very few people doing at the time so we listed them as store items and it cost us only pennies to do so.

I love that story, because it truly exposes what's possible on eBay. Something for darn near nothing! That's my kinda' job. :o)

::Side note... I'm not sure if I was infringing on some copyright or anything like that. The dealers do give them away, but that's how it went down.

Something for FREE...for real this time!

2006-04-09T23:17:00.000-07:00

Hey, I'm like you probably...in the fact that I'm kind of leery of anything that's offered free. Of course nothing is free right? I've visited 1000's of websites and joined 100's of mailing lists all for what? Information. Information that has educated me, and given me the opportunity to make my living without ever having to go to work for someone else, ever again. :o)

Anyway, in this pursuit, I came across something that is free. It's a program called Niche Profits, that will show you exactly how to make money with your own ideas. And like I said...it's FREE. Check it out below!

I'm not making any money on it, it's just something I think can help just about anyone who is interested in making money online, either on eBay or on a website of their own. How? It's called "Niche Marketing". What is it? It's finding a market that is already existing, that needs to be filled. Think general. Let's say you like cats. So you want your "niche" to be about cats somehow. That's your niche. Then you need to find out what people want to buy. This product will help you find this out. Then it will help you find out how to get it to your targeted customer for as little as possible with the greatest perceived value.

It's just below....check it out!

Get your hands on Joe Cooper's Niche Profits Course. This is a
$97 valueand worth the price of this package alone.

This incredible course shows
step by step method of how to make a killing selling
info products online.

Including the simple technique that you can use every time you create a new product that brings in
thousands of dollars in a very short period of time!

Click Here To Download Now For FREE!

That's it...it really is free. Shortly I'll be giving you some products you can use to develop those niche's. Free of course! :o)

Mailing Lists - You have to build one

2006-04-09T22:52:00.000-07:00

List building is a method of direct advertising. You get to place an advertisment or offer in front of someones face. This is the most responsive type of advertising around.
The power of direct marketing is amazing. I did over $20,000 in sales in under a week with one eMail to my optin list.

If you are interested in growing your own optin list you should visit: http://www.ListExplode.com/index.php?referid=bubba76819 You will be able to virally grow your list to over 100K members in 30 days. Once you have a large list you can advertise your own products or affiliate products.

I recommend starting by selling affiliate programs. Once you get the hang of it and know what people are buying you can start creating your own products and selling them.
Good luck building your list, and get ready for it to Explode at:
http://www.ListExplode.com/index.php?referid=bubba76819

eBay Store at www.yourstorename.com - Register a domain for more traffic

2006-04-05T00:33:00.000-07:00

As the title infers, yes, you can register a domain and have the traffic visit your eBay store.

Seems strange, I just figured this out. I don't know how many times I've been to the "manage your store" page, but there it was DOMAIN REGISTRATION . When you click the link only a brief desription is given, but I'll recap it for you.

Why register a domain name?
Registering a custom domain name for your eBay Store can greatly enhance your business. You can promote your Store and build a professional brand with an Internet address that's easy for buyers to find and remember. When users enter your domain name in their browser (or click on a link or bookmark), they will be forwarded to your Store's URL on eBay.

For example, suppose that you specialize in clocks, and your eBay Store's name is "Fancy Clocks." If it's available, you might register the domain name www.fancyclocks.com. Whenever users request this address in their browser, they'll be forwarded to http://stores.ebay.com/fancyclocks.

Note: Your custom domain name does not need to be identical to your Store name.

How to register a domain name
eBay works with third-party domain registrars for this feature. To register a domain name, read about each provider and choose one from the list. You'll go to the registrar's Web site where you will be asked to create an account. Registrars normally charge a yearly fee to register a domain name. You will be billed directly by the registrar, and any future management of the custom domain name will be done through the registrar's site. eBay does not charge fees for this feature.

Note: Please make sure that your domain name does not contain eBay's trademarks "eBay," "Half," and "PayPal" (or variations of those marks).

When you set up your custom domain name on the registrar's site, eBay will prepopulate your Store's URL as the destination that your domain should forward to. We will also include a code at the end of that URL (?refid=store) to track when a user enters your Store from outside of eBay. If the user purchases an item, you can earn a Store Referral Credit. For more information, see the eBay Stores section in the eBay Help Center.

Actually that's not a recap, that's straight from eBay and it explains things pretty well. I always want to tell people to buy magazines from me, or print my url on a business card but when they ask what the url is, I used to have to say www.stores.ebay.com/lowpricedmags. So I registered www.ShopLowPricedMags.com . Try it, it refers you to my eBay store. Now with a regular domain name I can run a PPC campaign and people will remember the name. It could be anything. I could have registered www.JaySellsMags.com and had it forward. I register my domains with http://www.jdoqocy.com/click-1940573-10395051 . They're cheap, usually $6-$8 or less so and easy to use and offer low cost hosting and other services. They refer the traffic from www.ShopLowPricedMags.com to my store for free! :o)

Now I just touched on it briefly, but don't forget to add that "?refid=store" to the end of your url, to get your store referral credit. What's that you say? eBay pays you 75% of your closing value fees back for referring the business to them. Can't beat that right? Heck No! Make sure you add it on the end of your url and put it in every email you send out to every customer, friends, family....people will click it, people will buy, you get paid back.

eBay Affiliate Program - How you can make some dough from the world's largest marketplace!

2006-03-29T16:07:00.000-08:00

Perhaps you've heard of 'affiliate marketing'. If you haven't (or even if you have) I'm going to give you a brief explanation. Basically you sign up for an affiliate program with any number of suppliers. Then you're assigned a unique tracking code. Then you refer online traffic to those suppliers using a link with that tracking code embedded in it, and the supplier pays you a commission for either the referral or a sale, whatever is outlined in their program.

It's a simple concept. It's basically 'word of mouth' advertising that you get paid for. Sounds good right? Of course it does :o) . There are affiliate programs for just about anything and everything.

Let's say you have an adidas website (like me). You're already getting traffic there. You may or may not 'sell' anything on your site, but you can still make some money. You do a search on the internet for 'idiots Affiliate Program' . On Google, it would return this page . As you can see, right away there are plenty of programs.

The first one is a program with a company called Soccer.com . Their program is described as "If you love soccer, have your own Web site, and would like to earn some extra cash, then our affiliate network is for you. Simply link your Web site to the center of the soccer universe and become a SOCCER.COM affiliate. By joining The SOCCER.COM Affiliate Network, you can open your very own online soccer shop and make money by providing Eurosport's best selection of high quality, hard to find soccer equipment on your own Web site."

They offer:

You'll earn 7.5% commission on all sales originating from your site!
Receive monthly commission checks for all commissions totaling over $25.
Team-up with The Fabled Soccer Traders at Eurosport, the name that people have known and trusted since 1984!
Take advantage of the support, encouragement, and expertise of your friends on the SOCCER.COM Affiliate Team!

Now I'm not trying to tell you to sign up for this program, and I get nothing if you do. It's just an example. So you put a small link on your Adidas site. Maybe something simple, like an image of a soccer ball with some simple text under it that says "Adidas Soccer Equipment". The link takes them to that Soccer.com site. If they buy something, you get paid. I know you just dollar signs right?

Now, my Blog is about eBay, so you may be asking yourself "what's he rambling on about this for?". Well eBay has an affiliate program too....YES, they do. That means you can cash in on the world's largest online marketplace without ever selling anything of your own.

eBay and many other retailers and suppliers don't want to get too mixed up in the business of paying affiliates and all that. So they utilize a third party company that offers marketers (like you and me) a chance to get hooked up with these great companies. eBay uses a company called Commission Junction . CJ offers programs with literally thousands of companies including CompUSA, eBay, Citi Bank, Yahoo, Buy.com, Home Depot, REI, Tommy Hilfiger, USA Today, Quicken Loans, Expedia, Zappos.com and many, many more.

Ok, so you get signed up with CJ (it's free), then you tell them you want to refer business to eBay. They give you a code to use for referrals. There are over 900 links they offer just for eBay so you can tailor it to wherever you think you might want to put the link. They even have links for eBay Canada (ebay.ca) and eBay Europe (ebay.uk) and many other countries.

Ok, let's check out the links.

First a text link: ebaystores.com

This one goes to the eBay stores section. If someone signs up for a store within 30 days of following this link, I get paid $30.00. Not bad eh? I want you to mouse over it for a second, and notice the code at the end. This is my referral code. This is how they track that I sent the person to eBay. Now when I create the link I can encrypt the code also so it looks like this:

Encrypted code text link: ebaystores.com

Cool huh? Another thing I did was if you click the first text link, you'll see it takes you out of the blog to the landing page. But, the second link I've elected to have it open a new page (my personal preference since I don't want my site visitor to forget where they started).

I think you get the idea. I'll put a few of the other eBay links so you can see what's available.

120x200

120x60

250x250

160x600

Alright, that's probably enough, you get the idea. You can get the eBay Affiliate Program detail HERE. They have all kinds of tips, tools and help to get you started and help you be successful. They'll outline the payment details and anything else you could want to know.

Later I'll go into some more ways to maximize affiliate income using some other tools and other sites. Good luck!

Time Savers for email

2006-03-26T23:32:00.000-08:00

If you run a business online there is a chance you may run into one of the same problems I ran into. I needed more of ME! As my businesses grew, so did my customer base, and subsequently my email load. Nowadays, between all of my online business I get and answer literally 100-200 emails every single day.

There is no way I could type these out and be efficient, much less get it done at all! The reality of my businesses are, that most customers tend to ask about the same questions and my answers are equally similar.

So, I use a program called 101 Clips. It allows me to have about 100 possible text clips as well as images, web addresses, phone numbers all with one click, inserted into your email or wherever you'd like.

Now no one likes to receive what they feel is a "canned email", not even me. :o) So I always personalize my responses a bit, adding a name or date that is relevant to that particular customer so they know it's not just "canned".

Another similar program is Short Keys . It works very similarly. Both have a free 'lite' version and a more extensive version for sale. Both are very inexpensive.

If you find yourself in this position, you should first do as I did, and find out why your customers all want to know the same thing, and why aren't they getting that information. You could drastically reduce your answering the same emails by giving your customers the information before they ask.

An example...many of my customers wanted to know when they would get their purchase after it had been shipped. So I put into place a system where once they had paid, they got a confirmation email (automatically of course). This email included the estimated delivery time and also told them they would be getting an email from the US Postal Service with a tracking number for their package. Then when I printed the mailing label, I checked the box that would email my customer the tracking label.

Of course, nothing is fail proof. Some people just don't read. And that's ok, they'll get one my emails sent at the click of one button and we're both satisfied. Go through each of the recurring questions and ask yourself how you can get this information to your customers before they feel the need to email.

Hope this helps save you some time and helps ensure your customer satisfaction.

FREE AUCTION TIPS #1-2 And 11 Time Tested Principles for eBay Selling Success

2006-03-24T22:42:00.000-08:00

AuctionTip #1: How to Put an Attractive Background in Your Online Auction Ad

Have you ever visited an auction and noticed a peculiar and catchy background?

Here's how to do it...

First off, go background texture hunting at this site:

http://www.grsites.com/textures/

Once you find one- upload it to a free image host like:

http://www.theimagehosting.com/ or http://yourimagehost.com/

Now, for the moment you're been waiting for...

This requires HTML so don't faint on me. Make sure this is the first thing that appears in your ad html:

***background="http://www.yourhost.com/yourimage.gif">****

That's the code you'll need... between the asterisks and that's it! Drop me a note if you need help.

AuctionTip #2: The BEST Types of Products to Sell

Without a doubt, there are a few types of products you'll need to sell in order to become really successful on eBay…

Here are the 3 types of products you should try to sell if possible:

Consumable

Example would be anything a person would buy and use up and buy again. To say there is staggering potential for backend sales would be an understatement.

Information

Any product you would download or receive by floppy or CD is considered to be an info-product.

Though it takes some study and patience to reap the rewards of selling information effectively, in the long run it will be worth the effort.

Collectibles

EBay is famous for its rare items. Stamps, beanies, antique whatnots, you name it, and it's there.

Sentimental items carry with them the largest profit margins. When you're pulling in $100-200 profit margins or more, your volume doesn’t have to be heavy to get where you need.

If you want a brainstorm with a list of all the various products categories, visit the link below:

http://listings.ebay.com/

11 Time Tested Principles For eBay Selling Success

Without a doubt, something separates good sellers from the not-so-hot ones. It has nothing to do with magic either- it has everything to do with sound practice...

Here are 11 principles to live by when you start your auction business. They will work wonders for you...

1. Pick Your Niche and Define Your Market

This is ground zero for your success strategy. Find your own niche. Define your market. Then you can know the type of person you’re going to be selling to and the types of product you want to sell.

You're auction sales letters will be a hundred times better if you know the person who you are writing for.

Along with being in a superior position to take advantage of repeat business, the benefits from becoming specialized are endless-

We well be getting into this a little more later.

2. Your Vision

Know where you want to go with your business and why. Every business that thrives has a soul and a purpose. What is it that you want long term? Do you want to become financially independent?

What do you want short term? Do you want to make a steady income every week? If so, how much? Give yourself something to shoot for and try to surpass it.

Remember in the beginning to keep plugging away. The toughest time is at the start. Everyone has to serve as an apprentice before they can truly master what they do.

When you're starting out be willing to absorb every ounce of helpful information your brain can hold.

3. Order is the Foundation of Every Good Thing

One of your early foundations of success is order. Strive for efficiency in every aspect of what you do. If you’re lacking in a system of organization your whole business is going to be threatened.

This not only includes keeping things in their place but things like keeping income tax and business expenditures records.

4. Serve Your Customer With a Passion

In business your customer is the only thing. You customer is far more important than any product you sell. Strive to give them quality at every level of the transaction.

With online auctions most sellers have a hard time looking past the initial sell. As far as they are concerned after the initial bid the relationship is over. That is why most of them don’t do so swell when they try to make a business of this.

Look far beyond the first sell. It is only the beginning of a long mutually beneficial relationship.

5. Become An Expert In Your Field

Become an authority in what you do, wherever you choose to go with you online auction business. If you sell CD media supplies, you want to be thought of before anyone else.

When you become an authority in your field, a whole new universe of business and opportunity is opened up to you.

I buy certain types of things on eBay from the same sellers over and over. I wouldn't dare do business with anyone else, not when they have proven themselves and their product.

You want to earn that same type of position in the minds of eBayer’s for your niche.

6. Credibility- the Key Factor in Selling

Become trustworthy. Remove every doubt about your credibility any chance you get. You can do this through presenting yourself positively through your feedback, being passionately devoted to your business and by being an expert.

By making great complete ads and from answering emails quickly.

The X factor is the critical ingredient for online sales success.

7. Harness the Power of Technology

Use you existing software of the Internet to handle repetitive tasks. This will free you up to grow your business to a level...

One of my big sticking points is leverage. Leveraging means getting everything you can, out of all you got. When you use existing tools and methods for freeing yourself from repetitive tasks, you will compress time.

That means you will get more work done with less effort... and as a result you will make more money.

8. Get Everything You Can Out of All You Have

A wiser person than myself once said, "There are only two qualities in the world, efficiency and inefficiency, and only two sorts of people: the efficient and the inefficient."

Maximize results while minimizing your expenditures. This is the essence of what it takes.

Test ads ruthlessly to get more for your advertising dollar. Look for better ways to do business. So much can be do to get better and better returns. Set an ideal up for yourself and call it, "efficiency"- if you do this you will never become stagnant in what you do...

Always search for better and better returns for the amount of resources you put in.

9. Probably the Most Important Thing: Your Sales Letter

Your sales letter is your salesman. On the net, how you're potential buyer perceives you and your product is everything.

Copywriting is the art of showing you and what you sell to your buyer in the best possible light.

It’s the most important thing you have going for you. A carefully crafted sales letter can increase you results exponentially without having to spend an extra penny.

10. Shoulder The Risk in the Transaction

Risk reversal is on of the strongest free sales tools you have at your disposal.

When you offer your bidders a satisfaction guarantee, you are telling them that you are confident that your product can deliver, and if not you are willing shoulder the risk for them by giving them their money back…

Very rarely do they ask for one unless your product is poor.

This is one of the easiest ways to increase sales; if you have a good product to begin with, don’t neglect this technique. I see many sellers who don’t offer one when they could.

It’s a must to offer one with your Dutch auctions. A strong risk-reversing offer will clinch sales that pass others by.

11. Perseverance Will See You Through Anything

Perseverance is your greatest asset of all, especially when things get rough. To me, nothing is more fulfilling than meeting challenge head on and winning out.

Anytime you run into trouble or resistance in your business, accept it as a growth opportunity that you need in order to get to higher levels or success.

eBay...It's still "retail"...And that's ok with me

2006-03-24T02:10:00.000-08:00

Years ago I worked in "retail". I managed several sporting goods stores and several bicycle stores, before moving onto restaurant management. Besides not enjoying working for "the man", I tired of the customers.

In retail, and in a management position especially, there is a lot of butt kissing that goes on. And sadly, some people just plain take advantage of a good business. Sometimes customers are just unreasonable.

But, I knew the game and I played it pretty well. I read all kinds of books on how to deal with people, how to relate, "How to win friends and influence people". And in the end, I was able to get along with just about everyone, nearly all the time. :o)

But I'd be lying if I said it didn't get old sometimes. And when I first started my eBay business, I naively thought I was leaving that world behind. Little did I realize at the time, that a business that isn't run face to face with your prospective customers, needs more good customer service than most others. There is no phone, no face, no voice...there's mostly only a picture, some words on a page and what you say in those emails.

Now as I said, I learned a lot about relating to people along the way. But it takes a whole different type of knowledge to be able to write an email that will please everyone and doesn't imply a 'tone'. And believe me, I've flubbed this before.

All it takes is the slightest bit of sarcasm in an email to really upset a customer. The reason - they can't hear you. They imagine your smart *ss mouth running off at them and you raising your voice. When that wasn't your intent at all. Then they shoot back a snotty reply and then you're bitching at each other and it can get out of control quickly.

Ever get one of these emails? "WHERE'S MY PRODUCT, IT'S BEEN OVER A WEEK". What does that say to you. Well it's all up to your interpretation. But many people see the "CAPS" as "Yelling" in the email language. And the simple word "OVER" seems to imply they believe it's late getting their.

So you reply "You just paid on Wednesday, and I shipped it Thursday. It's not my fault, the Post Office is late!". Or something nice like that. And it quickly can get out of hand.

I can't tell you how many times I've typed, backspaced....typed, backspaced then re-typed only to read my reply to try to make sure there is no implied "tone" to my email.

It's really an interesting phenomenon, the interpretation of words on a page. I answer literally 100 to 150 emails per day for my current eBay business. And to do that, I have about a dozen "canned" emails that answer 90% of the questions that are asked. I've tweaked and tuned them over time based on customer reactions and questions. And I think they're pretty darn good. And just when I start thinking like that, someone will fire back a harsh reply stating "WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY THAT? I WAS ONLY ASKING A QUESTION! IF YOU DON'T WANT TO HELP ME FINE!" Then it's two or three more emails to smooth over the hurt feelings that I never intended to step on.

So, my advice is, take it easy. Remember the recipient of your email can't hear your "tone" like when you speak. They will think the worst, so write the best. Because eBay is still basically "retail"...and that's ok with me.

eBay Live 2006 Hits Vegas !

2006-03-17T09:08:00.000-08:00

eBay Live. Two years ago, I had never been. I didn't really care to go. I figured I didn't need to go. What was I going to learn anyway? But I kept hearing about it on the chatboards and people kept asking me if I was going...and in the end, I felt like I'd missed out.

So, last year in 2005 I decided I wouldn't make that mistake again. I planned the trip months ahead of time. And my plan worked. The event was held in San Jose, California. It was a relatively easy 6 or 7 hour drive from us, so no need to waste money on plane fare. Plus, because we planned so far ahead we were able to actually get a place in nearby (40 minutes) San Francisco where we had a timeshare property available. As it turned out, we went two days early, stayed the three for the event and then stayed two days after. What a great vacation! A full week in San Francisco and San Jose, and basically for free.

The event was absolutely awesome! I learned soooo much, and had the best time. I got tons of free schwag (goodies), and set up my businesses to reach the next level. I wasn't really sure what to expect, but I certainly got my monies worth.

We visited several vendors that we were using, and met many others that we ended up doing business with this year. We attended free classes on advanced marketing techniques, product sourcing, tax issues for your business, advanced PowerSeller only classes and so much more. We participated in invitation only panels and made sure along the way to collect all the limited items being distributed. Those included the coveted eBay Live Trading Cards, and the Commemorative Lapel Pins from eBay and many of the vendors.

And to wrap it up a free concert and gala event featuring none other than the B-52's. We were 5 feet from the stage doing the "Rock Lobster"! What a great time.

By the time we got home I was looking up on the internet where Live 2006 was going to be held and made our reservations (again, free timeshare time) for the Summer stay in Las Vegas. We've already got our itinerary set and can't wait! Just a few more months and it'll be here. This year Huey Lewis and the News and Jerry from Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream... very cool :o) .

eBay Express - Friend or Foe?

2006-03-11T00:56:00.000-08:00

Allright, enough history on me...for now anyway. :o) Let's talk about eBay Express. What is it? Is it another way for eBay to gouge me for fees? What's in it for me? Who, what, where, when?

Ok, let's get to it. In eBay's own words, "At eBay, we know that it's our job to help you grow your business by continuing to attract new customers for your products. After talking with thousands of real-life shoppers, we've found that many customers are looking to buy new, fixed price goods in a more conventional e-commerce experience. To meet their needs, we are building a new specialty site— eBay Express."

Designed from the inside out to attract and satisfy today's busy shoppers, eBay Express will streamline access to your products.

With eBay Express buyers will:

Get it new. Shop our vast inventory of brand new, brand name, and hard-to-find products.

Get it now. Everything on eBay Express is offered at a fixed price by experienced, motivated eBay merchants. Get what you want now— no bidding, no waiting.

Fill a shopping cart. Buy from as many eBay Express merchants as you want. Pay for everything—including shipping— in a single, secure payment using PayPal or your credit card.

Buy with confidence. Every transaction is safe, secure, and fully covered by eBay Express Purchase Protection.

Sounds pretty good so far huh? It does to me. Basically it's a new site, designed with buyers in mind. The best news of all...no extra charge to the seller. That's right, no charge. Of course eBay is banking on increased sales, which is a win/win situation for them. More sales equals more fees. For the sellers it means increased visibility at no additional cost. Can't beat it if you ask me. It also may eliminate some of your competition that you have on eBay, as not everyone will qualify to be listed on Express. Second best news...if you qualify, you don't have to do anything else to be listed on Express, your listings are automatically shown for you! It's getting better all the time.

Not a member yet? Sign Up HERE

eBay will be holding a workshop online to help sellers prepare for the initial lauch scheduled for the 'Spring', which is just around the corner from what I understand. You can read more about it HERE. They also held a 'brown bag' discussion in late January and you can read about that HERE.

There are a few requirements to qualify to have your items listed on Express.

Here are the requirements to participate:

1) A feedback score of 100 or more (98% positive).
2) PayPal Premier or Business account
3) PayPal account will ship to unconfirmed addresses
4) Be a US registered seller
5) List in fixed price format or Stores Inventory form
6) Fill in the item condition field in Item Specifics
7) Include shipping costs in your listing8) Provide a picture or gallery photo in your listing

Not too restrictive, but enough to make sure it's the upper tier of sellers.

Well that's the scoop on eBay Express. Check it out, it is rumored to explode eBay sales!

Best of Stores Contest on eBay

2006-03-08T14:01:00.000-08:00

My last post was about eBay stores and how we learned about them. You can read it HERE. In it I went over how to open your own store, but that link again is HERE. Now today I just read they're having a 'Best of Stores' contest. I know they have it each year, but until this year we never really did anything special with our store so I never even considered entering.

There are several differnt categories, but basically the viewers vote, not eBay. So, if you're not entering your own store, be sure to vote for ours! :o) The store again is LowPricedMags .

If you're interested, you can check out some of the last year winners below.

2005 Best Shopping Experience
2005 Best Custom Pages

For this year's contest you can

eBay stores - how we did it

2006-03-06T22:52:00.000-08:00

So somewhere along the line I learned about eBay stores. You can Open a storefront on eBay.com yourself by clicking the link. What we learned about stores that you may or may not know.

Everything you list on eBay in any format will show up in your store.
It's dirt cheap to list stuff in your store. I mean 30 days for .03 cents! Can't beat it
eBay will pay you to send people to your store, when they make a purchase. Check it out HERE.
The store opens up tons of new marketing opportunitites including building a mailing list (which I'll go over later), sending out newsletters and promotional fliers through email marketing, getting your listings picked up by search engines and getting you world wide web exposure and much more.
You can customize them basically beyond a recognizable eBay store...almost like a regular website.
You can get some pretty cool tools for monitoring store and page traffic for your store.
You can set up your store to function while you're away with vacation settings and more!

So let's talk about these things a bit. I said everything you list in any format shows up in your store. But what about when you list something just in your store. Where does that show up? The answer is, they show up just like any other listing and are completely searchable. This is a fairly new change, but this update to eBay's policy should increase the exposure for store listings if it doesn't clutter and dilute the regular listing results. If you look at any given page from an eBay search, you'll have at the top "featured items". Sellers have paid extra to have their items appear at the beginning of the page. Then the next section has current auction and fixed price listings. Then after all of those there is a horizontal line and then all the store listings appear. Now if there are 12 pages of an item, the store listings may show up on pages 11 and 12 all the time, but it's more exposure than before - where store items would only show up if there were less than 20 items availalable in the other formats. There are also no gallery images shown for store listings in the regular search results. More on the increased store visiblity HERE

Next, let's talk price. It's next to nothing. I mean I listed 1500 items once, and it cost me $45. Compare this to listing 100 fixed price listings of items selling for $10. This would cost you .60 cents per listing or $60. For the 1500 items it would cost you $900 and the listing would be for 7 days, not the 30 day listing the store items are available. Pretty cool deal. Now the store isn't free, but they do start at a reasonable price, and they're free for the first 30 days!

Email marketing is a very effective tool. Let's say you're me and you sell magazine subscriptions. I promote my mailing list in my listings and in my store and on my about me page. And I get maybe 5 new subscribers a day. Now that's not a huge number but my list has grown to well over 2000 people. Now that's not a huge number, but when I send out a newsletter or flyer I see an immediate impact on my sales. But you have to grow the list and continue to provide something of value in the information you send. You can't just market, market, market to them. It gets old. Try to offer information that is valuable to that particular mailing list, so your subscribers look forward to receiving your emails and will open them.

Allright, moving on. Store customization. Our first store we've had for several years and have done very, very little to customize it. In fact just this past year did I finally figure out just how 'custom' you can make them. You can see our first store for All_that_and_more! HERE. Now check out our new store for LowPricedMags HERE. It's completely custom. Quite a difference isn't there? It has made a huge impact on our sales and we're going to take a second look at the first store soon. The magazine store we completely did away with the 'look' of eBay, at least on the homepage. We saw a huge increase in combined purchases. People get into the store and just shop. We love it! If you have questions about eBay stores or anything 'eBay' feel free to email me .

My best eBay Trading Assistant deal ever!

2006-03-06T10:22:00.000-08:00

It was a warm summer morning, when rounding the corner at the local drive-in turned swap meet, I saw it. My gold mine... :-) Actually it was just a large delivery type truck with a roll-up back door. There was a crown gathered so I hurried on over to see what all the hub-bub was about.

It turned out to be a whole truckload of Adidas and Taylormade golf clothing, shoes, hats and accessories. They were selling the stuff really cheap, and I was excited. I bought 40 Taylormade hats for a dollar each, knowing they'd sell for $8-10 on eBay. I bought an armful of shirts for $5 each and soon had spent my pocketful of cash (a few hundred dollars). I couldn't imagine they'd sell all of it, so I found a woman who seemed to be in control (partially). I found out she managed a local thrift store, got her card and headed home.

First thing Monday morning I was waiting at the door. After they opened, I gave Margaret a few minutes to get settled and then approached her. My plan was to offer her maybe a few thousand dollars for whatever she had left. I knew I could sell it for much more. She recognized me and we began to chat. Turns out the thrift store was part of my Church and I didn't even know it. They fund a local soup kitchen and emergency services for our local community. She told me how she had 3 or 4 other buyers coming in that wanted to buy all of the golf stuff she had. They had offered her $5000 and another $7000 at the swap meet. I was surprised because although I knew there was value in it, I didn't see that much potential.

She must have read my face, because she then pointed out the two full truck container loads in the parking lot. The truck she brought to the swap meet was just a sampling! Now I saw the potential! It had to be actually probably $100,000 worth of stuff I estimated. Turns out all of the goods were donated by Adidas/Taylormade to the Church to clean out a warehouse. All of the merchandise was prior year, or production samples, or salesman samples. Both men's and women's, hats, shoes, shirts, pants, shorts, skorts, jackets, sweaters...

There were two issues for my new friend. One, she had no place to keep all this product. She told me she had to return the truck containers in two days. Second, although she knew they had value, she was in a very low income area of town and it would take forever to move the product piece by piece and in her neighborhood she would get very little money for the items that way. Second, although she knew she had to do something with the product, she knew the value and although the $7000 would have been a huge boost to the sales (over 2 months sales worth), she saw the bigger potential.

And then it clicked for me. I knew I didn't have the money to compete with the other buyers, but I did have something they didn't (as far as I knew). I had eBay. I told Margaret that I sold stuff on eBay for a living, and that the golf shoes she sold me the day before for $5 I would sell on eBay for $50. That the hat she sold me for $1 I would move for $10. She couldn't believe it. So I made my move. I told her, I would take all the product. I would help her store it, sort it, and I would sell it all. I would split the profit with her 50/50 on whatever was made. I told her it wouldn't be quick, but it would be a steady supply of money for the store for the next year or two.

She barely hesitated. She said "done deal" and shook my hand. Little did I know what I was in for. I just found two years income without putting out any money from my own pocket. She and her staff spent the next month sorting the product right there in the store. Boxes floor to ceiling absolutely everywhere. She was getting heat from every direction to get it out of the store. So we got a storage unit nearby. It was packed floor to ceiling front to back.

I started out one box at a time. Each box had maybe 40 shirts in them. I checked out the competition on eBay and picked a medium start price to feel out the market. Turns out they shirts sold pretty consistently for about $15 each. So we got $7.50 and the Church got $7.50. They were selling the shirts in the store for $2.00 so my new partner was elated. Once I got more and more product up we were making about $1000 a week, so $500 each. I was pleased and they were ecstatic. A great deal for everyone. It has been over two years now and we're still selling this product. We still have 200 or more auctions up per week. We have an eBay store and an outside website. This one project has taught me more than any other. The supply has definitely gotten thinner, but we're still making $500 a week or so, and giving them $250 of it. This was our first PowerSeller business and continues to keep us in Silver PowerSeller status. You can check it out HERE. To learn more about becoming a Trading Assistant read this post to my blog HERE .

My eBay education continues...as a Trading Assistant

2006-03-03T14:03:00.000-08:00

I continued the "thrift store circuit" for another year or so. During that time I got involved in eBay's Trading Assistant program. A "Trading Assistant" is someone who will sell your items for you, generally for a commission. As I was going to garage sales, I'd tell people "hey, if you don't sell this, let me know and I'll sell it for you on eBay".

Pretty soon people were calling me on a regular basis. I even went so far as to run an ad in a community newspaper advertising I was a Trading Assistant. I can share my ad with you if you're interested. I got a great response to that as well, at least several calls a week.

Another trick I had was to contact people before they had their garage sales. How? Well in my city, the Pennysaver comes out on Tuesdays or Wednesdays. It would list maybe 50 garage sales coming up the next Saturday or Sunday. They always have the address because they want you to come. I did a zip code lookup online, based on the address and city and that was all I needed. I wrote this great letter explaining how I could sell thier valuable items for them if they didn't sell or if they wanted me to take a look at them before the garage sale, they could call me. I used all the PowerSeller logo's and Trading Assistant Logo's so it looked very professional. It cost me .37 cents at the time, so I spent maybe $20 a week to mail 50 letters and I usually got anywhere between 5 and 10 calls back. That's a pretty good ratio I think, 10-20%! Sometimes I'd get calls from their neighbors or friends who they had given my number to, and I was getting calls months after I quit this marketing technique.

I hung flyers up everywhere, at churches, schools, laundry mats and just about anywhere you'd find a public bulletin board. Honestly, I don't think I ever got a single call from one of my flyers.

Point is, all this marketing stuff I found on or through eBay. Start HERE . I also spent a lot of time on the eBay discussion boards. If you're trying to grow your business or just get a question answered, these online forums are extremely helpful. Another great resource were the Groups . I joined several groups for Sellers, PowerSellers, Trading Assistants, Store Ownwers, and I browsed many more. Just reading what others had to say, soaking it all in, good and bad. Learning...

Now being a Trading Assistant involves a lot of differnt dimensions and you can run that business in several differnt manners. I personally chose to charge a flat percentage and I paid all the fees - both eBay and PayPal from my commission. I also chose not to charge anything else. No up front fees for making the ad, or picking items up. So bottomline, if it didn't sell, I lost money. But I was pretty good at what I did, and rarely would I take something that didn't sell. And in the long run, I think I got so much TA business because people liked the concept of my business. If they didn't make money, I didn't make money. It definately made me more attractive than some of my local competition.

If you look around you'll see mosts TA's charge between $5 and $10 just to make the customers ad, whether or not it sells. Then a large majority of TA's pass all the fees associated with selling an item on to the customer. Then they charge their commission of 30-50%. I had a sliding scale that I changed depending on circumstance, but in general, items under $100 I charged 30%, $100-$500 - 25%, $500 - $1000 - 20%, and it ticked down from there.

I made special contracts with different customers and I learned some valuable lessons. My first large customer was a local golf driving range, that wanted me to move their excess demo clubs and past years inventory that was quickly becoming dated. Because of the high selling price of these items and large volume they gave me, I agreed to a flat 15%. Later I figured out that between eBay and PayPal I was paying out 10% and only making a little for all my hard work. But, I learned a lot from it, and still made some money. Other customers I negotiated flat 20 or 25% contracts depending on what they had to sell and how much they had to sell. Over time I figured out it wasn't really worth listing anything that wasn't going to sell for at least $50-$75. I became more selective about what I took on, and as I got smarter, I made more money.

I mentioned a contract for Trading Assistants, and I can share mine with anyone who wants one. It's a Word doc so you can modify it to fit your needs. All in all, being a Trading Assistant taught me how to run a business on eBay, not just sell stuff. And in pursuit of this, I landed my best deal ever...until next time.

My humble eBay beginnings

2006-03-02T22:48:00.000-08:00

7 years ago, I like many people had heard of eBay, but didn't really know what all the hub-bub was all about. But, I'm a digger. That is, I dig for information, pick things apart and in the process I learn.

I saw some real value in eBay when I found some things in my house that sold rather quickly and fairly easily. Soon I had moved out to the garage to look for valuables. If you've sold something on eBay before you understand that first buzz you get when you make a tidy little profit by selling something online. Like other things that give you a buzz, it's addictive.

In my past life I had managed bicycle stores and sporting goods businesses as well as managed restaurants. In fact I was managing a restaurant when I had first started selling stuff on eBay part-time. A buddy of mine had been selling things online pretty regularly for a year or so and suggested I hit the thrift stores in my area to look for things to sell.

Jackpot! Like most people I stuck with what I knew...Sporting goods. I found a nice Taylormade golf bag marked $5, some snow skiis, a hockey helmet, and a Nils ski suit. I left 20 minutes later having spent about $30 total. I headed home and got my ads up right away. The golf bag went for over $50, the skiis $40, the helmet $20 and the ski suit....$125! I made over $200. I was definitely hooked now and needed more. I started hitting what we called the 'thrift store circuit'. I made my rounds through about 20 different thrift stores in and around San Diego county. I bought bicycle clothing (jersey $5, shorts $4 would sell for $15 -$20 each), sporting goods equipment, anything I knew about I could see the value in it. I started spending a few hundred dollars a week, rolling my profits from week to week, and making $500 to $700 a week when I got lucky. Then my habit took me to garage sales and swap meets. I spent every spare moment looking for things that I could turn a profit on. I loved it.

After a year or so of this, and coming off a work-related injury (restaurant) I absolutely dreaded the idea of going back to work for someone else. I told my girl friend that I thought if I gave it all my attention, that I could make my eBay business income, match my regular job salary. And I never went back to that job.

Today, eBay has tens of millions of registered users located in all parts of the world. Also, it turns out that people spend more time on eBay than any other online site, making it the most popular shopping area on the Internet!

What does this mean for YOU!

You probably guessed it. This is the largest and easiest market place to sell your goods and services for EXTREMELY low costs. And it doesn’t take very long to figure it out!

Think about it for a minute.. there will be MILLIONS of hungry buyers viewing your auction listings within minutes.

There are literally thousands upon thousands of people making their living on eBay right now!
So your first task is to go signup at eBay as a registered user, its free. Go here: Sign up for a FREE eBay account here

Introductions....by eBay Jay

2006-03-01T21:48:00.000-08:00

Allright it's cheesey, eBay Jay. But somewhere along the line calling clients and associates started using the nickname to remind themselves of who I was, and I started using it myself to remind them of who I was. You know when you call someone and say "Hi John, it's Jay" and there's that long pause...or worse they say "Jay who?". So I tweaked the greeting Bond style. "Hi John, it's Jay...eBay Jay". Inevitably they'd reply "oh yeh, Jay, how are you?". A longwinded explanation, but I tend to be that - longwinded.

I don't profess to be a writer persae, but I do have lots of thoughts and I try to get them out as best I can. I've been selling on eBay for...sheesh 7 years now. I've sold a bit of everything. I run two fulltime Powerseller businesses with my wife and I do work for others on their eBay businesses and websites as well. I may not know everything about eBay (most certainly), but I do know quite a bit about the whole online auction business as well as website design and the business of managing them online. I have 5, errrr 6 websites. Some make money, some don't, but we'll get into that later.

So, that's a bit about me. I'll get into more later. Welcome.