Archive for October 2006
Tips For Finding the Perfect Lip Color on eBay
Many women are discovering just how tricky it can be to buy their cosmetics online. There are so many different kinds of cosmetic goods available as well as the people supplying them and at first you may feel overwhelmed by the options available to you. However, there are many things that you can do to [...]
Making Every Penny Count on eBay
We have all seen them. Those auctions that have a Buy It Now price of a penny for an eBook, wallpaper, screen saver, or some other digital product. So what’s the deal? Why would anyone waste their time, money, and energy creating auction listings for a penny? Heck they are losing money (even if they [...]
How To Get Great Deals on eBay
The huge internet marketplace known as eBay has definitely taken the world by storm. While it’s no secret you can find great buys on eBay, many people who are new to the whole internet shopping mall concept are a little unsure where to begin their bargain hunting. Thankfully, there are a few general guidelines to [...]
The Best eBay Sources May Be Local
We all have seen the ads and infomercials on TV from the like of Dave Espinosa and others, hawking their Ebay reseller kits and proclaiming how many people make substantial incomes off of Ebay. Is it possible? Yes, there are quite a few people out there that their entire income source is derived from auctions [...]
Entrepreneur: It’s inevitable when you meet someone new that the first question out of their mouth is, “So, what do you do?� For those of us with normal jobs, the answer’s pretty straightforward. But what if your livelihood revolves around doing something that freaks most people out? Death is a serious business, but few people [...]
Excerpt from Success: One Day At A Time by John C. Maxwell Look at your day. How do you spend it? What ruts have you gotten yourself into that you could easily break yourself out of? What poor habits are eating valuable minutes of your life every day? What impact can a few minutes make? [...]
North County Times: When Bob Visotcky came up with the idea for his invention, he was confident it was a winner. The device is akin to a night light, but it’s designed to fit real estate “For Sale” signs, illuminating them for an extra three to five hours each evening. Since he introduced his Listinglight [...]
Halloween is An Entrepreneurial Haunt
Jim Hopkins in Small Business Connection: Haunted houses, those annual attractions that have long been fundraising sources for non-profits, increasingly are the province of entrepreneurs. And tonight, of course, is their big night. Industry data are hard to pin down, my colleague Craig Wilson wrote recently. Still, Craig notes, “some in the haunt world say [...]
Business Pundit: Northeastern University has a collection of podcasts on entrepreneurship. The focus is more on technology entrepreneurs than non-tech.
Biz Tool: Office Accounting Express 2007
BetaNews: Upping the ante against Intuit, Microsoft has released a new accounting software package for small and home businesses. The most alluring feature of the offering may not be its Outlook-like interface and Office integration, but rather its price: free. Office Accounting Express 2007 is largely a basic accounting suite aimed at those who currently [...]
This week’s Carnival of Marketing is up at James D. Brausch’s blog.
Buyers Sensitive to eBay Glitches
eBay shoppers are complaining that the “favorite searches” feature is broken. On the eBay discussion forum devoted to search issues, a buyer posted, “I have a list of Favorite Searches stored on My eBay. I use them once a week to check for stuff. I always get many hundreds of results. Today they all give [...]
eBay A Major Sorce For Home School Curriculum
Home-schooling always has thrived on its ability to be flexible and adapt to changing circumstances. Today is no different. Over the past 10 years, home-schooling has grown rapidly. There are more than 2 million home-schooled children, up from an estimated 1.2 million in 1995. Home-schoolers represent about 3 percent of the school-age population. Growth has [...]
Microsoft Releases Accounting Software For eBay Sellers
Upping the ante against Intuit, Microsoft on Monday released a new accounting software package for small and home businesses. The most alluring feature of the offering may not be its Outlook-like interface and Office integration, but rather its price: free. Office Accounting Express 2007 is largely a basic accounting suite aimed at those who currently [...]
HP Expands User Options with PayPal
HP will offer PayPal as a payment option at the HP Home & Home Office Store, the company announced on Thursday. “Adding PayPal as a payment option gives our customers more choices and even greater convenience,” said Sam Taylor, senior vice president, Consumer Direct, HP. Stephanie Tilenius, vice president of merchant services for PayPal, said, [...]
Internet TV Coming Soon to Skype
The creators of Skype and KaZaA plan to launch an internet television service. The service will be free to consumers due to advertising. The founders say that judging by the popularity of YouTube the timing is right for internet television. Â Janus Friis, who co-founded Skype, said that the group already is in negotiation with a [...]
Tips On Choosing What to Sell on eBay
You have finally made the decision; you want to earn some serious cash from the world’s #1 online auction site, eBay. Congrats. eBay, well those seeking to make purchases on eBay, paid for all new fishing equipment and my entire year of fishing, the first year I started buying and selling on eBay. The first [...]
Relics Boycott eBay On All Saints Day
Tired of seeing sacred body parts for sale on eBay, the International Crusade for Holy Relics (ICHR) is calling for a boycott of the online auction house on Wednesday – All Saints Day. Centuries ago, the day was set aside to honor Catholic saints, to celebrate their lives and to revere their relics. What better [...]
Entrepreneur: With more than 2 billion items listed on eBay in the past year, and close to $50 billion sold, the sheer size of this online marketplace can be overwhelming. Fortunately, as eBay has grown, the company has worked hard to make it easier for new sellers to get started and be successful. Here are [...]
The Story Behind One Minute Manicure
Chuck Huckaby: She originally just wanted to make money while staying at home with her children. Today that ambition has created a business with $20 million in sales. It’s the One Minute Manicure. She got the business going with about $5,000 in cash in 1999. Her products are available online and through major retail outlets [...]
Yearly Business Planning Is Vital Organization Tool
Rhonda Abrams: Fall is a perfect time to take stock of your direction, set goals, and milestones for the coming year. That’s the time when we have traditionally developed an annual plan in my company. But this year, during the summer, we conducted a thorough marketing plan session, so we put off the business plan [...]
Unusual Businesses Ideas That Work: August 2005, Jermaine Jones paid $1,000 to buy 411Hype.com, a website about all things hip-hop. He beefed it up–added some forums about fitness and health, for example–and managed to boost traffic by a couple thousand unique visitors, to 7,000 a month. Then, in late March, Jones put the site up [...]
Unofficial Craigslist Book Blog: It’s an open marketplace; people come to sell their products/services while others hope to find the best deal on something they want to buy. As Craigslist becomes even larger and busier, connecting buyer and seller can be difficult. Hence the emergence of a new business online, the Craigslist broker. This person’s [...]
Shippers Deliver Small-Business Bonuses
Miami Herald: Morris Mays — county employee by day, inventor by night — excused himself to change into the costume he sometimes dons to sell the toothbrush-sterilization system he created. Emerging in a sharply pressed black tuxedo, he asked: “Do you get it? I’m dressed to kill.” If Mays’ germ-killing outfit is a bit unexpected, [...]
Episode #8 of the Business Opportunities Weblog podcast is up: Mike Garrison, vice-president of the Referral Institute and co-author of Truth or Delusion? Busting Networkings Biggest Myths, is on the show and shares some of his networking tips.
PayPal Inc. 2-year-old campaign to diversify its transaction-processing business beyond the online auction marketplace of its parent, eBay Inc., is starting to show results. Some 37% of the processor’s payment volume in the three months ended Sept. 30 came from merchants outside of eBay, up from 32% in the year-earlier quarter, according to operating statistics [...]
No More Cubes: Not all of us are in the garage trying to build the next great software. Some people want to create something more simple and traditional. Often the media talks about Venture Capital and Angel Investors like that is the only way to get money for your business, but what is often ignored [...]
Unusual Businesses Ideas That Work: Rabbit Movers markets itself as an anomaly in an industry with a bad rep, capitalizing on a staff of artistic types, word-of-mouth referrals, and a Web site that posts positive customer testimonials and descriptions of extra services traditional moving companies don’t usually offer. Rabbit’s founder, former itinerant writer Shawn Lyons, [...]
More Buyers Turn To Web For A Set Of Wheels
USA Today: Thanks to the Internet, you no longer need nerves of steel to buy a car. and it doesn’t matter whether you’re shopping in the new or used car markets. More than 80 percent of consumers surveyed this year by consulting firm Capgemini said they used the Web during the buying process, twice as [...]
Don’t Get Stalled at Startup
Entrepreneur.com: If you’re like most new or wannabe business owners, you want to hit a home run right from the start. And who can blame you? You’re probably investing the majority of your life savings in your business, so you need it to succeed, right? Here are eight guidelines you’ll want to follow to help [...]
BusinessWeek Smallbiz: Walt Disney was at a local carnival with his grandkids when he was inspired to create Disneyland. A cold winter day of skating got Chester Greenwood thinking up earmuffs. And Bill Bowerman saw in his morning waffles the design for the Nike Waffle running shoe. Eureka moments — those sudden bursts of inspiration [...]
From Goofy Podcast to Real Business
Ad Age Digital: A year ago, Los Angeles improv artists Douglas Saline and Kent Nichols were out of work and nearly destitute. Today, as creators and operators of the “Ask a Ninja” website and podcast, they run an expanding media property selling ad space at $50 CPM to companies such as Sony and Warner Bros. [...]
Jeff Cornwall: A common practice in writing business plans is to offer three scenarios: most-likely, best case and worst case. When I see worst cases presented in most business plans, they are almost always not the worst case scenario. They are most often a less optimistic variation of what the entrepreneur thinks will actually happen. [...]
Great Big Small Business Show Podcast
Work at Home Chuck pointed to a great new podcast today: If you’re into Small Business Podcasts, you’ll love browsing the archives of the Great Big Small Business Show to hear the lastest information from the “trenches� of small business survival. Here’s there website: The Great Big Small Business Show
How to Come up With a Great Product Idea
American Inventor Spot: Ever wonder how inventors come up with those great ideas? Myra Per-Lee developed, manufactured, and marketed about a dozen products in a ten year period, most on her own with very little start-up capital. The most successful of her inventions, massage tools for adults, animals and infants, known as Nukkles®, Nuzzles®, and [...]
Vapps Introduces Premium Skype Conference Calls
Vapps introduced a premium version of its VoIP conference-calling service for Skype users Tuesday, adding the ability to record, download, and moderate calls of up to 500 participants. The Hoboken, New Jersey-based company introduced free conference calls for Skype users in June (see Vapps, Skype Free Conferences). In September, Vapps expanded the free service to [...]
French Canadians Get Bilingual Enchanced Acess
Anyone wishing to buy or sell items on eBay Canada can now do so in either French or English, or bilingually, the on-line auction house announced today. At the top of each Web page, eBay has placed a toggle that will allow the buyer to search for items in either English or French. Sellers have [...]
eBay Has Made Selling Almost Effortless
With more than 2 billion items listed on eBay in the past year, and close to $50 billion sold, the sheer size of this online marketplace can be overwhelming. Fortunately, as eBay has grown, the company has worked hard to make it easier for new sellers to get started and be successful. Here are 10 [...]
ShopNBC Expands By Selling on eBay
ValueVision Media, Inc. (Nasdaq: VVTV) an upscale television home shopping and Internet retailer, extends its auction business into the world’s largest auction marketplace with the launch of ShopNBC on eBay. ValueVision will sell samples, products used on air, returns, and discontinued products through eBay. “ShopNBC’s unique products and great values will now be available to [...]
BuySafe Moving Beyond Just eBay
BuySafe extended its ecommerce bonding service beyond eBay to merchants’ own websites in June. The company will now offer merchants the option of letting buyers choose whether to use the bonding service on transactions, in which case the buyer pays the BuySafe fee instead of the merchant. BuySafe’s Bonded Shopping program qualifies eBay, Overstock.com, and [...]
Now Get More With Skype Gold 2.0
Skype on Monday announced the “Goldâ€? release of its eponymous Voice over IP (VoIP) communications software for the Macintosh. Skype for Mac 2.0 is now available for download. Skype 2.0 for Mac supports free audio and video calls to any other Skype users, regardless of what platform they’re running Skype on. You can have conference [...]
Singer Sells Song Lyric On Ebay
Evening Standard: Jonathan Haselden was desperate to get his music noticed, so he decided to try selling lines from his track Roller-Coaster on the internet auction site. But when the 25-year-old posted the auction for the lyric: “And when you’re lost, you’ll always be found” for a starting price of 6p, it sparked a frenzied [...]
The Orlando Sentinel: We’ve all been there before. In need of a mental-health day. In need of a couple more hours to sleep off that horrible hangover. Or just plain in need of a day away from thinking. But who wants to wake up at the crack of dawn to avoid talking to the boss [...]
Entrepreneur Daily: Snap, a cafe in Washington, DC , has done away with cumbersome coins and bills and accepts only plastic . The owner loves her new Point-Of-Sale model since she rarely has to go to the bank, she doesn’t have to make change, she can trust that her employees aren’t pocketing any cash, and [...]
Business Insurance Is Good, but Corporations and LLCs Are Better!
Corporate Bee: Business liability insurance is a must for virtually every business. Even if you think the risks of a lawsuit are slim to none, the possibility still exists. A client slips and falls on an icy sidewalk, a customer’s order is not delivered on time, or an employee is involved in an auto accident [...]
Mercury News: Juggling appointments can be tough enough for a busy startup founder, but that isn’t stopping a growing number from a more extreme balancing act: launching a second company and sometimes a third while still working on their first. Take Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson of the popular online news-ranking site Digg, who last [...]
Want To Be An Entrepreneur? Start At Local Library
Star-Gazette.com: Every year, more than 500,000 entrepreneurs start new businesses throughout the country, often with little money beyond what they can borrow on credit cards or from family and friends. But how and where can aspiring small-business owners learn what licenses they need, conduct market research, learn how to secure financing and do all those [...]
It’s Never Too Early To Start Thinking Like An Entrepreneur
CNNMoney.com: Cody Chang and Jonathan Mohan didn’t even know what an entrepreneur was when they signed up for a class on business and entrepreneurship at their local YMCA. But the two high schoolers did know they were intrigued by the free classes offered by FutureWorks to ninth and tenth graders interested in starting a business. [...]
What is it about Skype that causes so many different institutions from universities to developing nations to worry? Actually, that’s not a real tough question to answer. It’s peer-to-peer telephony system is disruptive to established competitors, and its usage is difficult to monitor. The latest to jump on board this bandwagon is the country of [...]
Turn Your Images 3D For Higher eBay Sales
Most sellers agree that photographs are vital to the success of online sales whether on eBay, other auction sites, or on their own websites. Virtual Iris, an eBay certified developer, offers a product that gives your pictures that extra “wow” factor: 3D imaging. Irisize (http://www.irisize.com ) converts multiple shots of your item into 3D interactive [...]
