Craft Business Ideas
Issue Number 5, July 31, 2000============================================================
IN THIS ISSUE
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1. Selling your crafts at online auction sites (part 2)
2. Keeping up with search engine news
3. Subscription Management
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1. Selling Your Crafts at Online Auctions (part 2)
by James Dillehay
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Last issue, I wrote about online auction sites for
selling crafts. Here's more tips for organizing your
auction activities:
As your auction sales grow, you will find yourself inundated
by emails from customers, shipping invoices and more details.
Organize your growing work flow with:
* A set of standard or canned email replies ready for
commonly asked questions such as the terms shown on your
auction. Yes, people will email you for information that is
already clearly available on your pages.
* Specific payment and shipping terms should be listed
clearly in your auction. For instance, who pays shipping?
What methods of payment will you accept - money order,
credit cards, personal checks, etc.? Will you ship
outside the U.S.? Do you provide insurance?
* Organize fulfillment so that all orders can be packed and
shipped quickly. Have your shipping supplies, labels and a
postage meter or scale.
* Record all your auction sales to measure results.
Software for use with auction sites
To be successful with auctions, you must post multiple
auctions and post frequently. Multiple posting by hand
would be a nightmare so here are alternatives that will
save you time and money.
For listing multiple items or many auctions, you can save
descriptions in a word processing or notebook file, then
cut and paste text to the "list your auction" pages at
the auction sites.
Ebay, Amazon, and Yahoo auctions provide "bulk loaders"
for loading multiple items or auctions at once. Other
software programs accomplish bulk loading to auctions.
When looking at auction software, check for the following
functions:
* automatic online entry of multiple listings
* write ad copy once, then recycle it
* conduct large number of sales campaigns a day
Because of the rapid changes in the Internet industry, you
need ways to keep up with trends and reviews of auction
sites. Check out the following sites that offer newsletters
and articles:
http://www.auctionwatch.com/
http://www.auctiontalk.com/
http://www.internetauctionlist.com/
This article is excerpted from the book:
Sell Crafts Online.
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2. Keeping Up With Search Engine News
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Since search engines account for the majority of visitors to
your web site, it pays you to keep up with how the different
engines work and any changes they make in their policies.
Search Engine Watch web site offers many free and useful
articles on search engines including which ones are the most
popular and how they rank your pages. Though there is free
material throughout the site, a paid subscription gets you
more in-depth studies and reports you can use to boost your
rankings in the engines.
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3. Subscription Management
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