How to win more eBay auctions for just a penny!
I have recently been doing a far bit of buying on eBay and in the past couple of weeks I have used a tactic which I have been using for years to win several auctions. Given how successful I find this ‘method’ even after so many years, I thought I would share it with my readers. // I had assumed that these days, my secret tactic was pretty obvious to eBayers and that it would be losing its effectiveness. My experiences over the past couple of weeks don’t support this assumption and it worked even when bidding against well established, long term/high feedback eBayers. Ok, so this is how it works. Let’s say you are bidding on an item which is worth about £50. The bidding is at £30 with a few minutes to go. Several bidders are interested and it looks like the item is going to go for what it is worth. When bidding on eBay, I always leave my bid until the closing seconds of the auction – some call this sniping but in fairness it’s just common sense, why show your hand any earlier than you need to? It is fair to assume that one or
Google Panda – Further Thoughts…
Hopefully you watched the video in my last blog post regarding the recent Google Panda updates? If not, you can take a look here. // Like many of you I’m sure, I have been considering how Panda has and will continue to affect my sites and it is clear that the way we all look at SEO in the future has changed dramatically. Before Panda it was enough to have pages of good quality, unique content and a few inbound links to your site in order to rank well in Google. Now, as the search engine becomes smarter, it is clear that this method of SEO is not going to be enough. Instead, Google are fine-tuning their methods of assessing the whole user experience on our websites. In other words, if the user isn’t having a good experience then why should your site be ranked highly in Google’s results? So how are Google able to assess user experience? Well although the algorithms etc that Google will be using are, no doubt, massively complex, the basics of how they can assess user experience is actually quite simple. Google has access to an absolute ton of data gained from both the way
How will Google Panda affect your business?
Many of you will have heard of Google’s ‘Panda’ update which was released earlier in the year and affected the search engine rankings of many, many websites. // Hot on the heels of Panda comes Panda 2.2 launched last week. Google is getting smarter at kicking poor quality websites out of their index and the days when you could throw up a bunch of domains with poorly written/researched articles and expect a boatload of visitors for free are long gone. Even well designed sites with ‘unique’ content are being affected and it is only going to get tougher as Google fine-tunes their new systems. Of course, Panda should be great news for Google’s users and should ultimately mean that their search results are more accurate and provide searchers with a better all round experience but if Google decide that your site is not what people should be looking for, how will it affect your business? The video below from SEOMOZ will help to explain the changes and things you might want to be doing from an SEO point of view – the rules have changed forever! If you own a website business, you really need to watch it… if(!navigator.mimeTypes['application/x-shockwave-flash'] ||
Buying websites online
I’ve been spending some time recently looking at the possibility of buying a couple of website businesses. Why? Well, I want to expand my portfolio but quite frankly, I am too lazy to start something from scratch! // Buying an established business means I can pick up a site which has an existing customer base and income stream without doing the hard work of building the site and doing the initial marketing (which is quite often the hardest bit). What I have discovered is that even finding a suitable website business to buy is an absolute nightmare! Although there are plenty of sites up for sale, you’ve really got to sort though the rubbish to find a gem. Not only that but there seem to be a lot of people out there who are quite prepared to try and mislead buyers if they think they can get away with it. Fortunately I have a wealth of online experience built up over 13+ years so I am probably better placed than many people to pick up on the areas where sellers may have been less than honest. Let me give you some examples of the type of thing I have seen
Google Adsense Revisited…
// I can’t believe it is nearly a year since I last updated this blog! Where does the time go? I was only reminded because an old subscriber of mine dropped me an email to see if I was still working online! The answer to this question is yes, most definitely however these days the majority of my online businesses have absolutely nothing to do with Internet marketing or showing other people how to earn a living online hence the fact that this site has become a little neglected. However I was prompted to add this quick post following the above email and also because of a promotional card I received through the post from those lovely people over at Google. The card was promoting Google Adsense (which I have been using since it was first launched) and was customized around one of my sites to inform me that I wasn’t using the maximum number of Adsense advertising blocks on some pages. This was true, I wasn’t! To be honest, the site in question is one which I haven’t done a thing with for years and just sits there kicking in a bit of Adsense revenue every month but it
