I've been busy planning out the new SaleHoo site and working on new features for Auction Inspector and Sky High Auctions , but I recently did a couple of articles and interviews:

• "How to Tell if Your Business Idea is Any Good" by Simon Slade
  
• Insights on Launching a New Product
  

 I've also been exploring a lot of new blogs and social media sites. It's a bit overwhelming to keep up with everything new out there, but I have been enjoying Twitter and Bebo a lot - just for fun. 

There's a little known feature that is hidden deep within PayPal, allowing you to opt-in to get a lower (2.5%) rate if you receive more than $3,000 in payments each month.

 Thanks to Scott Wainer for his excellent post on PayPal's secret merchant rate for this information! 

by Simon Slade

When you write sales copy, you've got to be smooth. It's important to careful that what you write doesn't set off people's alarms and make them run -- or click -- away.

Here are three copywriting mistakes that can kill your sales:

1. Having a "False Promise" In the Headline

The headline of an article or piece of copy is a promise. Sometimes beginners will bait readers with "juicy," but false, headlines just to try and get people's attention. This almost always backfires, because it makes people feel like they were tricked. Make sure that every line of copy you write supports the statement made by your headline.


2. Telling the Reader That You Know What They're Thinking

People don't like copy that is too assuming. Don't say things like "You're probably thinking that..." or "People like you never get upset by..." or else some of your readers might subconsciously take offense and enter into a disagreeable mindset. Your goals is create a smooth flow of agreement- "Yes!" "Yes!" "Yes!" -  to your statements, and one of the quickest ways to kill that flow is to claim you can read people's minds. You really don't know what people are thinking when they read your copy, so don't proclaim that you.


3. Making things too complicated.

People reading your copy are usually in a great hurry. Don't use jargon. Don't use complex sentences. Don't tell long stories. Omit needless words, sentences and paragraphs. The simpler you can make your case, the better. This doesn't mean you have to keep your copy short, as long copy often converts better - but rather, you should use a conversational tone and write as simple and "to the point" as you can.

by Simon Slade

For the past decade, eBay has dominated the market for online auctions. It is such a strong brand that the word "eBay" has became a verb that means "to sell by online auction," just like "google" means to look something up online. Traditionally, other sites have had tremendous difficulty breaking into the auction space.

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But this week's sellers' boycott on eBay gave some smaller auction sites a new window of opportunity.

Outraged over fee hikes and upset over changes to the feedback system on eBay, many of the power sellers on eBay have gone on strike this week. One of their biggest complaints is that instead of leaving negative feedback for buyers, they will have to fill out tedious complaints with eBay's Security & Resolution Center. While eBay has drawn criticism for hosting a few dodgy sellers, there are plenty of legitimate issues with buyers. I know for sure that a small segment of buyers take advantage of sellers by buying 100% genuine items and claiming they are counterfeit, demanding refunds, claiming items never arrived when they actually did, etc.

As eBay power sellers went on strike from February 18th to 25th, smaller online auction sites are reporting that business has never been better:

CozyBug is a local auction site that focused on selling things that are too big to ship - much like Craigslist. This week the site has boomed with a 4,400% increase in daily traffic.

MommyAuctions , a women's auction community, has seen the number of items for sale on the site boost from 2,500 to over 4,000.

New statistics show that auction listings on eBay are down 13% this week.

While I am glad to see more options for sellers and some competition for eBay, I personally think that eBay is still strong enough of a brand that it will have the upper hand in online auctions for a long time to come. Even if the current community of sellers were to leave the site entirely, there are thousands of new online sellers every week who could eventually take their place on eBay. Diversity is good. Competion is good. And only time will tell what's going to happen in the online market space.

Last night I found an interesting post arguing that running an affiliate program helps make good publicity for you.

In the world of online affiliate marketing, there are tons of "review" sites that rate the products with the highest paying commission as best – and they often have bad things to say about competing products that don't offer affiliate commissions.

I think that this article is true to a point, but I have also found out that having an affiliate program can cause people to say bad things about your product, too. Some affiliates will be so desperate for attention that they will make outrageous claims or say the program they are promoting is a scam (!) in order to get people to click through and take a look at their pitch. For example:

To be a successful affiliate marketer, you have to have thick skin and be prepared to let people's opinions and criticisms roll right off of you.  People are going to write, talk and blog about any product that is worth mentioning. There's no stopping that. Therefore, I think it's best to give people incentive to promote your product, sell for you, and say good things about it by offering an affiliate program. That way, you have some degree of influence - but never total control - of what affiliates and reviewers say about you.

What do you think?

Ebay recently announced that it will make major changes in the way that it handles feedback.  It will become impossible for sellers to leave negative or neutral feedback about buyers. Sellers that meet a list of positive criteria (fair shipping prices, accurate descriptions) will get lower listing rates, but many sellers believe they are getting socked with higher commission rates.

This is similar to what has happened with pay-per-click ads. A couple of years ago, Google announced a "quality score" for AdWords that penalized certain business models that it disliked. Google sharply hiked the prices on some types of websites, so things like e-books, shopping comparison sites, and lead-generation squeeze pages all became difficult to affordably advertise with pay-per-click.

For eBay's own sake, it's probably a good idea to try and improve the sense of security on the site. There have been a lot of abuses of the eBay system with outrageous shipping charges, misrepresented products and fraudulent buyers – so people are increasingly wary.

It's probably a bad idea for sellers and entrepreneurs to be completely dependent on one company's score or assessment of your business practices. Ebay is still a good way to sell products online, but it might be wise to consider diversifying your marketplace. You are always better off with your own website and alternate ways to drive traffic (aside from search engines and eBay listings), rather than depend heavily on just one company's policies and approval.

You don't want to put all your business eggs into someone else's basket!
 

In the online affiliate marketing world, new products, new offers, and new systems are being created all the time. Affiliates must constantly evolve or else get left behind.

As more and more people get interested in making money online, high search engines rankings are much harder to attain. In the past, some affiliates created sites with nothing other than banner ads and affiliate links to products they were promoting. To combat this, search engines (particularly Google) have gotten better at finding thin affiliate sites and weeding them out of the search results.

Say you have a resource site about snowboarding equipment. In the 1990's it was possible to rank your site with minimal content that had enough keyword-focused text. But search engines evolved and got smarter, and with the advent of "Search 2.0" they started looking at more off-page criteria - like the number of links pointing to a site. The newest major evolution is search technology, TrustRank, looks at how highly respected the sites that link to you are. So just one link from trusted authority site is possibly much more valuable than 1,000 links from low quality sites.

As Wikipedia rose up and became one of the highest ranking, most trusted general information sites, it bumped thousands of less-trusted affiliate sites off the front page.

But now there's a newer and bigger potential threat to your affiliate site's front page spot, Google's Knol:

Knol is the name for Google's upcoming user-generated content project that is similar to Wikipedia in some ways, but is different in others. Knol will feature single author-written articles on all major topics, but it will allow users to comment, rank and vote on these knowledge articles.

So in the near future, an affiliate site on a popular topic or brand will have to compete with Google's universal search (images, videos and maps in the search results), Wikipedia and also Knol - all of them will be taking up spaces in the "front row" of the search results.

Now is the time to get started on making your popular affiliate sites credible,  strong and trusted enough to compete.

I will blog here about random things from time to time. Mainly about things that interest me but if there is something you really want to me blog about just send me an email.

Hope you enjoy

Simon