A: If Fred Sanford were alive today, Alex, I'm sure he'd be earning his ripple money by selling quality junk on eBay. While it's also true that one man's junk is another man's treasure (I have a garage full of treasure to prove this point), your chances of building a profitable business selling "junk" on eBay (or anywhere else, for that matter) are slim to none.

While there is a lot of junk reasure for sale on eBay, it is typically sold by individuals who have "I break for yardsales!" bumper stickers on their cars and not serious business people.

For serious entrepreneurs, however, selling on eBay can be a good way to start a new business if you are willing to put in time and energy required to make business a success. eBay is also a good option for existing businesses to expand their reach by selling online.

Everyone from small used car dealers to giant companies like Dell Computers have discovered that eBay is an excellent place to hawk their wares simply due to huge number of folks who visit eBay site on a daily basis. Nowhere else on earth will you find such a large pool of potential customers.

Consider these numbers: · There are nearly 69 million eBay users who spend $59 million every day. · Most eBay sellers are home-based businesses that sell every- thing from porcelain dolls to locks of Elvis' hair to $100,000 Mercedes convertibles to $5 million dollar vacation homes.

· Every minute of every day more than 150 new items are listed for sale, more than 500 bids are placed, and seven new people register to shop on eBay.

· At any given moment, eBay is conducting some 12 million auctions, divided into about 18,000 different categories.

· About two million new items are offered for sale every day, and 62 million registered users scour site to find them. · One company is grossing more than $5 million dollars a year selling brand new pool tables on eBay. Their eBay store is so profitable that they have closed their retail location and now sell solely online.

That's right, $5 million dollars from sale of pool tables: proof that you can sell just about anything on eBay if you know how to do it.

Be aware, however, that eBay is no magic bullet. As any eBay Power Seller (a seller who sells a minimum of $10,000 in goods per month) will tell you, building a profitable eBay business takes hard work and requires long hours, and often financial rewards do not make it worth effort spent.

When it comes down to mechanics of it all, running an eBay business is no different than running a brick and mortar business. You still have same considerations regarding product selection, inventory purchasing, product pricing, inventory management, order processing, fulfillment, customer service, etc.

Word Count: 800 Wrap: 65 characters/line

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Warm Regards, Herman Drost

******************************************************************* My Top 12 Web Site Marketing Strategies by Herman Drost

If you don't create a successful strategy for marketing your web site, you can't build a profitable online business. It's therefore imperative to drive thousands of visitors to your web site, then convert them to paying customers.

How do you accomplish this?

Use several marketing strategies

Don't put all your eggs into one basket by only employing one marketing strategy. You could see evidence of this during latest Google update in which many commercial web sites which once had top rankings, dropped out of existence, thus instantly losing sales.

By creating more than one strategy to market your web site, you can soon see which one works best by attracting most visitors.

Market with consistency

Set up a clear daily, weekly, monthly and yearly marketing plan for your web site and stick to it. It is lifeblood of your business.

Test marketing

Continually test all your web site marketing strategies to see which one works best. Eliminate those that are not profitable.

12 successful marketing strategies:

Search engine optimization

Here are locations where you should include your most important keywords or keyword phrases:

1. Meta tags (invisible) Title tag Description tag Keyword tag Alt tag

2. Page content (visible) Weave your best keywords throughout content of your pages. Focus on first 250 words on your page and only use one to three keyword phrases per page of content. Include keywords in your H1 tag (main title) and H2, H3 tags (subheadings) as well as hyperlinks in your site or and in outgoing links.

Search engines and directories

3. Submit to major search engines - Google is currently main search engine to get listed in. If you get listed there, you will also get listed in AOL, Netscape, and Yahoo and it's still free. This may change in near future as competition heats up. Other free listings also include directories such as ODP. Do a search on Google to seek out your niche directories ie for sunglasses, look for sunglass directories.

Here are other search engines to submit to: