Recently I’ve been reading two newer blogs that relate to selling on eBay that, if you haven’t already found them on your own, you may find interesting.

Lizard Wisdom is less than two months old and so far appears to be targeted at people primarily interested in selling wholesale and drop-shipped items.

As most of you know, I’m not a big advocate of that business model, but the blog contains some pretty good post related to selling on eBay in general. I get the impression that Marshall and Joli have actually made this business model work for them so if this is an approach some readers are interested in taking, then this is a blog you may want to put in your RSS reader.

A couple of their general selling posts to get you started are The Benefits Of Opening An eBay Store and Finding The Right Product To Sell On eBay.

Daryle Lambert has been writing The Guy In The Red Tie since last October. While the blog isn’t specifically about selling on eBay, it is about making money with antiques and collectibles.

A lot of what Daryle writes about concerns higher quality pottery, glass, and art work. Some of these areas are ones I personally deal quite heavily in, but don’t write much about here, because you don’t come across them that often and you can get hurt in with them if you don’t really know what you are doing.

I’ve talked on the phone with Daryle a few times and he is someone who knows what he’s talking about. While his posts aren’t a one-stop complete education on these kind of items, they usually provide information for further reading and study, making them excellent jumping-off points for anyone wanting to learn more about any of these kind of antiques.

The Guy In The Red Tie is just part Daryle’s “31 Club” membership site. I’m not a subscriber to the membership site, so I have no idea of the quality of the content inside, but if readers are interested in exploring quality antiques on their own, the blog itself is a great place to get started.

Photo by Geordie Mott

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With less than one month remaining until 2008, here are six tips to insure you eBay business hits the ground running in the New Year.

1. Develop your goals and action plan for 2008 during December. Don’t wait until January 1st arrives. Too often we have good intentions of doing this early in January, but February 1st arrives, and we shrug our shoulders and think - ‘I’ll do it next year.’ Don’t let yourself get caught in that trap. Put the remainder of December to good use.

2. Set specific goals. ‘Make more money than last year’ or ‘list every week’ doesn’t cut it. Be specific about dollar amounts; number of listings each week; how many hours a week you will spend on research; how much time you will devote to inventory procurement; etc.

3. Define monthly checkpoints for each of your goals. Break each of your 2008 goals down into smaller, bite-sized, monthly goals. These smaller short-term goals will act as checkpoints to help you determine how you are progressing toward your longer year long goals. Without these its too easy to ignore your longer 2008 goals. Again, this needs to be done in December before 2008 gets here.

4. Develop a step-by-step, week-by-week plan for the month of January now. Many people set goals for the upcoming year. Unfortunately, too often, when January 1st arrives, they are not sure what to do. The result is they do nothing and within a few weeks the goals they spent time developing are forgotten.

Having a step-by-step plan for each week in January does two things. It allows you to know exactly what actions you need to take to start achieving your goals; and, it gets you in the habit of working toward your goals on a weekly basis. By the time February arrives you will have developed the habit of doing something each week to reach your longer-term goals.

5. Find someone who will hold you accountable for your goals. When you are the only one who knows what your goals for 2008 are, it’s way to easy to slack off and let what you need to do slide. The solution to this is to find someone who will hold you accountable for them.

Check in with them on a regular basis (monthly is good, weekly is better) so you don’t fall behind on your journey. An ideal situation would be to find someone who also has specific goals for 2008 and each of you can be accountable to the other.

6. Start now! Use the remainder of December to get your goals in place and you will be ready to hit the ground running when 2008 arrives. When everyone else is trying to recover from the Holiday hangover, you know that you are ready to take the first steps toward building a more profitable eBay business in 2008. You will be thankful you did it.

Photo by Jonathan Whiteland

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As of Sunday evening The Auction Rebel has a new look. With the new theme there are some added features and some areas of the blog have been moved around. Here’s a brief explanation of what to expect and where to find it.

Archive Page - An Archive page has been added to the blog to unclutter the right sidebar. This new page contains easy to follow links to all the posts on the blog sorted by both category and the date of the post.

New RSS Reed links - There is a new location for the RSS feed to the right of the title that makes it a little easier to subscribe to the RSS feed or to get all blog posts delivered directly to your email box.

Category Navigation Bar - A new category navigation bar has been added directly below the title of the blog to make it easier for readers to access posts in specific categories.

Featured Articles - A Featured Articles section has been added. New featured articles will be posted once a week. These articles will normally be longer, in-depth, articles delving into specific aspects of doing business on eBay.

Right below the current feature article is a row of five small pictures. These represent the last five feature articles and clicking on any of them will pull that article into the larger section above the photos.

Recent Videos - Being able to easily add video to the blog was one of the primary reasons for the design change. In the future you will find video tutorials relating to various aspects of selling on eBay and Amazon here. The first tutorial should appear in about one week. Until then, the current video is there just as a placeholder.

Recent Posts - Directly below the video area you will find short recaps and links to the ten most recent post made to the blog.

On the right side bar there are slots for a total of 4 advertisement. Since this blog isn’t clogged up with affiliate links to various products, I thought I’d see if I could sell enough advertising each month to pay for the hosting fees.

Below that is a tabbed section that, depending upon which tab you click, displays the ten most popular posts, the ten most commented upon posts, the ten most recent Featured Articles, or a tag cloud for the blog.

Lower down there are drop down category and archives menus. Again, these were put in place to unclutter the side bar.

Under those are two lists - Related Sites and Information. Related Sites is the same as the old Blog Roll. Information right now contains mostly administration links, but I’ll be removing those and adding links to various eBay selling information.

I encourage readers to take a minute and let me know what you think of the new layout in the comment section below.

Photo by Matt Seppings.

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