Yesterday
I told you how I got started on eBay and how I finally figured out
where in the
heck I went wrong.
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| You can make money from eBay if you know how! |
If you want to really
get the lowdown on how all that happened, you can go back and read the previous
post here:
The
Reason Why eBay Is so Easy to Make Money From…
eBay
was instrumental in my getting started in Internet marketing, because it had so
much going for it.
For
one thing, you could know absolutely nothing about building a website and still
be able to set up a site on eBay in a reasonable amount of time. Since I already had some HTML experience to
begin with, eBay was an absolute snap.
All
I had to do was take pictures of the products I wanted to sell, make a brief
write up about them, and boom! -- I was in business.
The
other wonderful part about selling things on eBay, was the fact that you got
TARGETED TRAFFIC to your products. If
you had a website, you had to somehow drive traffic to your site that wanted
what you had to offer.
For
people just starting out, that meant shelling money out on ads, which sometimes required lots and lots of
money.
With
eBay, all you had to do was put your item on the auction block in the category
that was relevant. Once you did that it
was duck-soup getting people that were in your target market bidding on your
stuff.
Finding My Niche and
Making Money…Finally
So
after a few bad attempts at selling random stuff on eBay, my wife and I decided
to go into the embroidery business together.
And as I mentioned in my last post, I threw a rather wide net and started
making any kind of embroidered item that I thought people wanted.
Once
again the old marketing adage, “Marketing to everyone is marketing to no one.”
So,
my feeble attempts at making any kind of good money fell flat.
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| Our Master-Blaster Hat |
It
wasn’t until I came across the idea to mix two of my passions together that I
got the idea to mix embroidery with music.
I created Ellistrations music apparel.
I
made all of the digitized designs myself.
Hats for every type of musical instrument you could think of. Trombone hats, shirts, and jackets. Trumpet apparel, etc.
And
I must have been some sort of pioneer in the niche, because at the start,
people were fighting over my stuff.
I
remember designing an oboe hat and putting it up on eBay. It had a cool design with an oboe crossed in
front of it and it said, “Double Reed Disaster” in the design.
Two
or three women started bidding on it and it quickly escalated to $65. Man, I was elated. After wholesale the hat only ran me about
$6.00 total and I didn’t pay shipping because I had already included it in the
price. So, I made about $60 on just one
hat.
 |
| We even sold flute purses! |
I
started to make other hats and shirts as well. Sax hats, trombone shirts,
bassoon jackets and every other piece of apparel and musical instrument I could
think of.
I
digitized my own designs and came up with my own catchy slogans and ideas. Flute shirts that said “Fluteaholic”, Bagpipe
hats that said “Piping Hot”, and tuba hats that said, “Blastissiomo Con Forte”
on them. (That phrase is kind of a joke with brass players. It means blow the *$%@ out of the instrument
as loud as you can.)
How I Expanded on My
eBay Business
I
quickly recognized that there was real market for this music apparel stuff, so
I created the Ellistrations website.
Since
I’m cheap as they come, I decided to get the cheapest hosting plan I could find
and build the site myself. I needed a merchant
account, but during the year 2000 merchant accounts ran about $500 just to get
started.
I
searched the web extensively and found two alternatives: PayPal and another
site called 2Checkout. Since PayPal had
not evolved to a full blown merchant service yet, I needed a way for people to
pay by credit card if they wanted to.
That’s
where 2Checkout came in.
This site would process credit card orders for
you without the commitment or outlay of cash that you needed to get started.
It
merely took a percentage (2.5%) of each of your sales. All you had to do was go to the 2Checkout
site, type up the prices and label the merchandise, copy and paste the code
into your website and you could take credit card orders!
It
was perfect for a cheapskate lie Moi.
(That’s French, I think.)
A Huge Lesson in
Internet Marketing From the Trenches
Everything
was going real well, I was making sales from putting my stuff up on eBay and then
directing those happy customers to my website and making sales there.
It
worked perfectly. I was in business and
making money doing something I loved.
That is... for about a year…
For
some reason, I started losing sales on eBay; sales just weren’t coming in as
fast as they were before, and I was starting to feel the pinch. I did some
investigating, reading and searching.
Turns
out I had made a big miscalculation. You
see in business, if your idea is can easily be replicated, you’ll have competition
sooner or later. (Watch Shark Tank if you don’t believe me.)
I
started searching eBay and found out that other businesses were duplicating me
with much slicker marketing and material as well. They weren’t making high quality embroidered
apparel, they were cranking out silkscreen designs of all sorts.
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| Anyone can duplicate your business... if you aren't careful! |
Pretty
soon, I had at least 20 other businesses competing with the same types of ideas
as mine. It didn’t take long before burn
out and long hours multitasking took their toll on me.
So,
I made as much money as I could, socked the money in the bank and sold my
machine.
Turns
out that I made quite a bit of money from my little venture, better than I had expected,
actually.
But
the BIG IDEA I learned from this
was: If your business is easily replicated by others, you’ll have loads of
competition.
The key to creating a
unique, hard to replicate business is to figure out a way to make it so
complex, it will be difficult for other businesses to follow.
So I was pretty much out of the online embroidery business.
However, while running my business I discovered an easy way to make money that was
so lucrative, and easy to create, it blew my mind. This is an idea ANYONE can do if they put the
time and effort into it.
However,
I’ll tell you more about it in my next post.
Until
we meet again…
To Your Success!
Mark “Elmo” Ellis
"When it Comes to High-Response Copy - I've Got Your
Back!"
(859) 797-9560
elmo033057@gmail.com
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