eBay Changes To Continue

eBay CEO John Donahoe said yesterday that eBay will continue making changes [to it's business model] over the next three to four years. eBay is moving from 40% fixed price and 60% auction format to a 60% fixed price and 40% auction format, he said.

The most recent change is that Paypal which is 35% of eBay's sales now has developed the technology behind TwitPay, the new Twitter addition that allows Twitter users to send money to another Twitter user using TwitPay. Go to TwitPay for details.

Getting Targeted Twitter Followers

Do you Twitter. If you have any kind of business, you need to market it on twitter.com. There are many and varied ways to market on Twitter, but we'll start with the first one.

First you need to get targeted followers to your Twitter tweets. There are a number of ways to do that, but here's how I do it. My way isn't the faster or easiest, but it may be the most effective. Here it is:

1. Begin by locating several other Twitter members who have similar business' to yours. If you eBay, then find sellers on Twitter who you respect or you know are active in marketing their ebay business. If you do something else, find people in that genre on Twitter. All you need is one to start.
2. Go to that Twitter member's page by clicking on their Twitter ID.
3. Click on their 'Followers' link in the upper right of the page.
4. Now this is the most important part. Mouse-over each ID in the list one-by-one to see each person's Bio. Look at the bio to see if that person is involved in your area of interest. If you ebay, do you see the word 'eBay' in their bio? If so, click to follow them. If your genre is selling jewelry, look for people who may be interested in jewelry, etc. For instance, I sell many things for children (clothing, toys, books, CDs,...), so if I see someone who appears from their bio to be a mom of small children, I click on them too, even though the word 'ebay' doesn't appear in the bio.
5. The other thing to watch for while going through the list of followers are Twitterers who you know and respect in your genre. Make a note of their Twitter ID and repeat this process with their list of followers.
   
6. You have just followed these people. Most will soon follow you.

There are other ways to find targeted followers, but this is perhaps the only way to create a list of super-targeted followers for your future marketing related tweets.

Watch for my next blog on this subject for tips on using Twitter to get your message to your followers. Hope this helps.

Ken

eBay Live 2008 Chicago

I promised you a report of my trip to eBay Live in Chicago this past June 2008, but I've been struggling a little with how I feel about the trip, hence my foot dragging has us all the way into the end of July already. My apologies for that. So here goes....

This was my third eBay Live in three years. I attended the eBay Live in Las Vegas in 2006 and Boston in 2007. Las Vegas was amazing. I had never been there before and it's a very exciting town. And eBay Live itself was very exciting with so much education there for the taking. I soaked up seminar after seminar and visited almost every booth on the Solutions Hall floor, which is where all the exhibitors are located. I was like a bird flying around with no one telling me I had to go here or there. The one thing missing was that I didn't know anyone. So, while that gave me freedom to do what I wanted, it was somewhat of a lonely existence. But I wouldn't have missed it for the world and it helped me immensely as an eBay seller. Probably, the highlight was hearing Janelle Elms present her Ebay Stores 101 class. More about Janelle later.

In Boston, my sister (goneantiqueing) flew up from Tucson for her first eBay Live. We had the advantage of staying with our other sister who lives an hour outside of Boston. The crowd was a little smaller at Boston, but that was to be expected because Las Vegas has more glitz than most other U.S. cities. Here I was a little pickier about which classes to take and which Solutions Hall vendors to visit. I also had made some eBay friends in the past year and took time to meet up with them during the three days. Boston was another great success for me both personally and for my eBay business. I grew again as I began hearing about becoming an Education Specialist and how websites like MySpace could help my growing eBay business.

I have mixed feelings about eBay Live Chicago. There seemed to be a cloud hanging over the convention. I guess that cloud could have been called "Upset Powersellers." In February, eBay's management made several rules changes that were designed to bring in more buyers to the eBay arena, but to do so meant making some changes that disadvantaged some sellers. eBay said the changes only hurt "bad" sellers. Not everyone was in agreement with that statement. Being neither a powerseller or a "bad" seller, I didn't have a problem with the changes, and even some of my powserseller friends told me that by and large they would make more money after the changes than before. Still there was this aire of discontent wafting about the corridors and seminar rooms from a small, but vocal group. In addition, attendance was down from the previous year and the back half of the Solutions Hall had no vendors.

I said I had mixed feelings and that is because I was there with a group of very 'positive' eBayers. About five months before eBay Live, I joined Janelle Elms' new group called OSI Rock Stars. I am so excited about being part of the Online Success Institute Rock Stars. About 25 of the members (Janelle calls us Rock Stars) were able to attend eBay Live in Chicago. It was like a mini Rock Stars convention within a convention. We had special events, our own T-shirts and goodie bags. But the best part was being able to meet all these super talented people and talk about eBay in real time. You see, Janelle has filled this group with many multi-talented eBayers that are the most positive people you'll ever meet. These folks, along with Janelle herself and other experts, have created over a thousand hours of webinars, podcasts, and video classes for the OSI members only. And as members of OSI Rock Stars we help each other in the extensive online forum. Well, I guess you can see why I really enjoyed this latest eBay Live more than the others.

Oh, remember I mentioned promoting your eBay business on MySpace. That was just the tip of the iceberg. Between what I learned at eBay Live this year and what I am learning at OSI Rock Stars, now we have Blogging, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Del.icio.us, Technorati, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Squidoo, YouTube, Bumping, etc. Yes, these are all ways to increase your success on eBay.

How about your Auction Progress? Are you keeping up? Leave a comment and tell us which eBay Live you liked best and what you are doing to improve your eBay success.