During my recent hiatus from eBay and The Auction Rebel Darren Rowse wrote “5 Pick Up Lines to Get You The Girl - And Why Opening Lines Matter.”

While the focus of Darren’s blog is blogging, this post can teach us some lessons about writing auction headlines that will attract potential bidders attention and lead them to click through to check out your auction.

In part, Darren says:

• Does it interest them or pique their curiosity?
• Does it hook them into the topic?
• Does it create a need for them to read more?
• Does it promise a benefit of reading your post?
• Does it promise to entertain them?

Each of those questions are just as important for auction headlines as they are for blog posts. Reading Darren’s other posts in his “How To Make Your RSS Feed POP” will also offer some excellent insight into writing both auction headlines and descriptions.

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The Carnival Of eBay Sellers # 13 is now available on line. This week’s carnival has more submissions than any previous issue, with some excellent reading for anyone who sells, or is thinking about selling, on eBay. It can be found at the eBay Business Opportunities Weblog. Be sure to check it out.

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The auctions for the second week of The $1000 A Month Thrift Store eBay Challenge for February ended Monday night. During the second week of the Challenge I had twelve items listed on eBay. Of the twelve, six sold. Some of the unsold items will be re-listed while other’s I’ve already moved to my eBay store.

Here’s what my gross sales, expenses, and net profit look like after week 2. Once again, not all the items have been paid for yet, so it may be necessary to make some minor adjustments to the PayPal fees entry.

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For the last five or six days I’ve been almost completely away from the computer and anything eBay related due to personal reasons. Today, when I finally sat down to begin catching up with email, I found several readers had written asking basically the same question about the $1000 A Month Thrift Store Challenge.

“How many hours did I invest in the project and what did that convert to in terms of an hourly wage or dollars an hour earned?”

The answer was - I had absolutely no idea. I haven’t worked on an hourly wage basis since I had a part-time job while going to college forty years ago, so I don’t think that way. More importantly, I don’t believe thinking in terms of “dollars an hour” is a good way for someone who is self employed to measure their success or failure.

Many people who started what are now extremely successful businesses worked for one or two years, or even longer, without the business actually making a profit. If they had measured success or failure in terms of how many dollars and hour they were making, most would have quit long before the business became profitable and successful. Rather, they set goals of where they wanted the business to be at the end of six months, one year, five years, and judged their success by whether they met those goals.

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I’ve received several emails from readers asking if The $1000 A Month Thrift Store eBay Challenge would continue for February. I hadn’t given it any thought due to several family commitments in February, and commitments to the North Dakota High School Hockey Tournament later in the month. My plan had been to do similar challenges, one involving antique shops/malls and another involving garage sales, down the road a ways.

However, since a number of people expressed interest in seeing it continue, and because non eBay commitments will keep me from making many buying trips this month, I I’ll be in town most of the month so I’ve decided to continue the Challenge through February.

Since auctions for the first week of February have already ended, that means there is some catching up to do. Today we will cover the thrift shop items from the auctions that ended last Monday night and those currently listed on eBay for the second week of the Challenge.

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Week number twelve of the Carnival Of eBay Sellers is now on-line.

Submissions to the Carnival increased dramatically this week and, as usual, Tom Murphy has gathered together some additional interesting reads related to doing business on eBay.

Thanks to Ty Tribble for volunteering to host the Carnival for the month of February.

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All the thrift store items sold during the last week of The $1000 A Month Thrift Store eBay Challenge have now been paid for, and the final adjustments have been made to the PayPal fees for the last week.

The net profit from the Challenge is $919.52. That’s $80.48 short of my goal of $1000. All the final figures can be seen in the table further down the page.

Whether you view the Challenge as a success or a failure, there are some lessons that can be drawn by studying the actual figures in the table.

First, lets look at what it cost to make that $919.52 profit. Discounting the actual cost of inventory, my other costs totaled $204.75. A lot of people who write about ebay describe success as selling an item for twice what you paid for it - i.e., buy something for $10 and sell it for $20. While that may hold true when looking at each item you actually sell individually, if you look at the big picture that isn’t success at all.

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The two final free copies of “Profiting From Garage Sales” were drawn for this evening and the winners are Diane Randle and Terry Wellen. Thank you to all the readers who participated,

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It’s Super Bowl Sunday which means there will be very little eBay related activity around here today. Super Bowl Sunday is for the New York Times crossword puzzle, food, football, and friends.

For me, the game will be much more about the food and friends than it will be about football. I used to be a huge football fan, but I’ve noticed that over the last few years my interest has waned to the point where I’ve actually watched far less than a half dozen games this year. Looking back, I think the Vikings finally broke my heart one to many times. Whatever the case, the Super Bowl remains a “must-watch”, but now more for the gathering of friends than for the game.

Since I don’t really have a favorite team involved, I guess I’ll lend my cheering efforts behind The Indianapolis Colts simply to stay on the good side of friend Mike Fisher.

Much later today, many of us will be gathered around our TV sets watching the big game and as part of the festivities listeners will be deluged with statistics about the teams and the players.

With that in mind, I thought I’d offer some of my own totally irrelevant numbers and statistics of my own. Here we go:

• It is currently 8:10 AM CST
• It is 26 degrees below zero outside right now
• The wind chill factor is presently minus 41 degrees
• Our predicted high for the day is minus 6

I think I’d go back to bed if it weren’t for the fact I have fresh homemade cinnamon rolls in the oven that need to be taken out in about five minutes. Of course they need to be eaten also.

Whether you are a football fan or have other plans, enjoy the day and stay warm.

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Earlier this evening I logged into eBay Establishings, a Yahoo group that deals primarily with books and came across a question titled Very Large Swap Meet. The title caught my interest so I read the author’s question. Halfway through I was smacked along side the head with a red Coleman lantern.

In part she said:

“A few years ago we met a man that did a great business on ebay selling just certain things he found at swap meets like for instance: red Coleman lanterns.“

My antenna went up and I headed on over to eBay to do a little research using “red coleman lantern” as a search term and quickly found that red Coleman model 200A gas lanterns are hot (no pun intended).

Over the last three months the sell-through for the red 200A is a little over 80%. Subtract out the ones listed that are missing globes, pumps, tops, bails, or some other part, and that rate increases to well over 90%.

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