and Londonderry NI and are getting settled in now, so hopefully you will forgive me for not posting to the blog in awhile.I wanted to talk about auctions this time as we have been to a couple of them since being here but I think I'll save it for next time.
This blog will be about what I am learning and who I am learning it from about Social Networking. Apparently this is very important! I listen to some incredibly informative podcasts on my ipod (when I am having my daily walk) including Auction Wally,
(you can see his feed on the right panel on this page) and
Tips From the Top by the Savvy Seller,
(also see her podcast feed and her blog ). You can also listen to these podcasts on the computer, you don't have to have an ipod. There is a tremendous amount of information to be had from podcasts. If you want information about them and where they are leave me a comment.
OK, so where have I been and what have I been doing? I've learned to add widgets and badges and all kinds of other neat devices into this blog spot. See all that fancy stuff in the panel? Well I put that there, ain't I clever? it does take some time to do and if you want details again leave a comment and I'll do a blogpost on How To Do some of this stuff ....... I've had my own avatar created and I use it and the same user name on all the sites I belong to. It's called Branding. So my avatar is the little tiny picture of a statue of The Three Graces - (see again the panel where my stuff is) and my username is Retro Chick, in different variants because I wasn't fast enough to claim it in some places. I had to go with hyphens, Retro-Chick and underscores, Retro_Chick. This is one of the things you want to do as soon as possible .... claim your user name and keep it the same. Also choose your color scheme and keep it as close as possible in all the venues in which you will have a presence.
So what do I mean by Social Networking? Well it means you have a presence on one or more sites where you interact with others, such as Facebook and sites where you can sell and interact such as Bonanzle http://www.bonanzle.com/
and sites that are geared to your chosen genre - for me it's
I Antique Online, http://www.iantiqueonline.com/ (see my badge in the panel) and sites that are associations dedicated to your selling interests - for me its
which is a really cool site where you can make what is called a Lens, a one page website that you can develop with lots of helpful ready made apps and you can have make it about anything you like. You can make money with these lenses by having links to items for sale on Amazon, eBay and others. It's called affiliate marketing. You can also promote your own website or list items for sale. I've just started to use it, I have my very first lens (see my Badge on the panel) and look forward to making more.
Basically what you want to do is get yourself out there and known. People, hopefully, will start checking out your stuff. They will click on your links, they will check out your suggestions of people to listen to and just get to know you. This blog was my first venue to start building a list of friends who will like what I have to offer, one of the things you want to do is offer something extra, an add on bonus, extra content, that's the way e-commerce is going to work in the future. You can't just stick things onto a web page and forget about it. It will just sit there. You have to promote your items at all your selling venues and get people to have a look. Also check out their booths, lenses, pages, blogs, etc.
Now the question arises - how does one have time for all of this? I am lucky in that I am not working outside the home right now and have all day to play around, but really I want to focus on selling as much as possible. Networking is very important but you don't want to spend all your time posting to forums and reading blogs. To tell you the truth I haven't figured it out yet. I've decided to treat it as my job, spend X amount of hours a day learning and building the business, so I think I'll have to allot X hours to posting to my social networks, X hours for this blog, X hours for learning the nuts and bolts of e-commerce, things like Google feeds, attributes, key words, RSS feeds, widgets, badges, etc., X hours for taking pictures and uploading photos of new items and X hours for researching new items each week.
Basically what you want to do is get yourself out there and known. People, hopefully, will start checking out your stuff. They will click on your links, they will check out your suggestions of people to listen to and just get to know you. This blog was my first venue to start building a list of friends who will like what I have to offer, one of the things you want to do is offer something extra, an add on bonus, extra content, that's the way e-commerce is going to work in the future. You can't just stick things onto a web page and forget about it. It will just sit there. You have to promote your items at all your selling venues and get people to have a look. Also check out their booths, lenses, pages, blogs, etc.
Now the question arises - how does one have time for all of this? I am lucky in that I am not working outside the home right now and have all day to play around, but really I want to focus on selling as much as possible. Networking is very important but you don't want to spend all your time posting to forums and reading blogs. To tell you the truth I haven't figured it out yet. I've decided to treat it as my job, spend X amount of hours a day learning and building the business, so I think I'll have to allot X hours to posting to my social networks, X hours for this blog, X hours for learning the nuts and bolts of e-commerce, things like Google feeds, attributes, key words, RSS feeds, widgets, badges, etc., X hours for taking pictures and uploading photos of new items and X hours for researching new items each week.
One thing I have found is that if you sign up for a forum make sure you follow it by linking it to your email account. This way you will see right away when someone has responded and can then either read it in the email or click on the link and it will take you straight to the posting. Then you can decide if you want to respond to it and you won't miss anything. Nothing worse than starting a forum or discussion or asking a question and then never coming back - people may start thinking you are a bit flaky! That is not the kind of branding you want for yourself!
I have so many interests that I could spend all day looking around the Internet, (I can't imagine why anyone could be bored if they have Internet access) so if you are like me it's too easy to get sidetracked. I make a list of what I want to accomplish and if I start to get sidetracked I'll stop and write down (on my handy notebook always sitting next to my computer) what it is that interested me and where to go back and look for it later, also I add it to my favorites.
So I had better go now, perhaps I ought to make these blog posts shorter, attention spans and time allotments are short. Do let me know what you think and if I should go into depth about how to do some of the things I've mentioned here. CHEERS!
I have so many interests that I could spend all day looking around the Internet, (I can't imagine why anyone could be bored if they have Internet access) so if you are like me it's too easy to get sidetracked. I make a list of what I want to accomplish and if I start to get sidetracked I'll stop and write down (on my handy notebook always sitting next to my computer) what it is that interested me and where to go back and look for it later, also I add it to my favorites.
So I had better go now, perhaps I ought to make these blog posts shorter, attention spans and time allotments are short. Do let me know what you think and if I should go into depth about how to do some of the things I've mentioned here. CHEERS!
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