Any business opportunity is only as good as the plan you are working from. Making money through eBay may seem like an easy way to acquire some extra cash, and it is, but in the long run working with a simple plan will better prepare you for making the money you want. This doesn’t mean you have to go out and research a lot of market data, or poll potential customers, or collect relevant data on the product you are planning to sell – though these things may help. It means you need to come up with a plan to sell your products in such a way that the greatest number of people will be exposed to them with the least amount of cost to you.

This section has been designed to prepare you for what you need to do to make the most money with the least effort through auctions. The topics to be discussed are, Picking what you Plan to Sell, Making a Profile of your Expected Customers, Following Similar Auctions, and Advertising. By the time you have completed this section you will have a better understanding of the market, the products you are trying to sell, and how to turn that knowledge into profits.

Before you do anything else, you have to decide what you are going to sell. After all, you have to have a product to sell before you will be successful. Now it’s time to decide, out of all the possibilities, which item(s) you are going to sell.

Don’t think you are stuck with just one item to sell forever. Just pick an item so you can get your feet wet and understand all of the utilities and services that eBay and the other sites offer and find out if this is what you really want to do. Sooner or later you will decide you can handle three or four or more products. Follow what you feel comfortable with, start out reasonably and be careful not to get in over your head.

Once you have decided on some items to sell, test them with individual auctions to see how well they sell before you purchase a gross, or make twenty or thirty identical baskets, programs disks, or manuals. This will save you a lot of time and effort if your item ends up being not as popular as you’d hoped. It is always important to see how the market responds to what you are trying to sell. If the response is negative, or not as good as you want it to be, then change the way you are marketing materials or change what you are trying to sell. Come back later with more experience and retry some of the things you were unsuccessful with before.

The main component of picking what you are going to sell isn’t in deciding what the product will be, but in how you will best present it to the public. Choose something you actually like, something you believe in, something you may know a little about. Write up a description of it and be as creative as you want to be. The more people know about what you are selling the easier it will be for them to decide to buy it. There are a lot of people out there who will buy most anything if it costs less than $20.00. So, keep it simple and make it fun and enjoyable. Work isn’t supposed to be boring or hard, it’s supposed to be rewarding.

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Knowing to whom you are selling is just as important as knowing what to sell. There are literally thousands of potential products out there and none of them will appeal to everyone. Knowing some of the characteristics of your customers will give you an edge. This knowledge will help you determine how to market your carefully chosen products to them.

To begin with you must know who your target market is. If you are selling collectible toys then knowing that a possible target market might be technologically proficient men and women with a lot of extra money and little time on their hands is useful. Especially if what you are selling is hard to come by and currently very popular. On the other hand, if you are selling consumer accessories, like spare cell phone batteries, the market for these might be teenagers who spend a lot of time talking on their cell phones and then forget to recharge their battery. This information gives you a start to understanding of your potential customers.

Knowing your customers helps you to create effective listings and advertisements. This is important. You would not expect to sell a robot to an eighty-year-old man or woman who lives alone, doesn’t have any grandchildren, and doesn’t have any expendable income. Nor would you really expect to sell audio components to a housewife with three little children or eating utensils to a computer programmer who lives on sushi.

Write the answers down and use them when writing your listings and descriptions. Once you’re done, try your ideas out with one or two auctions and see how they work. If it doesn’t work as planned, try something else. Maybe you will need to ask more questions or maybe you will need to ask other people to help you. In any case it is important to know who your customers are.

Now that you know what you are going to sell and who you are going to sell it to, the next step is to see how other people are listing and advertising similar auctions. This is probably the easiest step because it’s not hard to bring up eBay and search for similar auctions. You will quickly see what items are being sold, for how much, who gets the most hits (people opening the listing), and the most bids. You will also see what the seller has done to make it stand out. Take notes. Opening and scanning different auction listings will allow you to see what the markets are and who the audience is and may even give you some ideas on how to sell your own products.

If you can learn from someone else and improve upon it, you are one step ahead in the game. Plus, by looking at other auctions you will begin to see some similarities. In many cases you will notice the pages of the most successful sellers all look like web pages, they all describe the product very well, and they are all using pictures. Each of these is important and using these ideas in your own listings will help more people decide to buy what you are selling. By following other auctions you can see what is successful and what is not and then mold yourself in that successful form.

The first step to advertising is in the way you put together your auction listing. It is important to always create a very clear, creative, and accurate description of what you are selling and accompany that with a good picture of the item. Make sure the description is easily understood and the picture clearly shows the product. This may mean doing some simple editing of the photo such as cropping it, lightening or darkening it, or adjusting the tint. This is easily done with photo software such as Microsoft Picture It.

Once you have a detailed write-up of the product and people can see what it looks like the next step is to get as many people to your listing as possible. This can be accomplished by using descriptive titles for your listings and by using buzzwords in the title and description. Buzzwords stand out and bring attention to the item and may include words like: Amazing, Exciting, Rare, Unique, One-of-a-Kind. The list entirely depends upon you and what you think will bring more people to your auctions. You may also want to test some of these buzzwords to see which ones are the most effective.

After you’ve created a description and a title that stands out, the next step is to make sure a lot of people see it. Try using a bold font for the title and making sure it is in color (both items cost slightly more). You might also try featuring the item on the main page or in the item’s category, or in the Gallery. Any way you can potentially get more customers to your listings and still make money is a great way to sell your items online.

Now that the product has been advertised with a clear and convincing listing it is time to tell other people what you are selling. To do this you might begin compiling an e-mail list of people who are interested in what you are selling. You can go to newsgroups and add a post that states what you are selling with a link back to your listing. Some newsgroups frown on this so be sure you know the rules before you start posting.

Finally, you might create your own website and list everything you are selling there so that visitors can go to your auctions or buy directly from you. To be successful at selling online you want as many people as possible to know about your auctions and you want them to tell other people. Be creative in how you let them know about you and watch as the money begins to roll in. Create business cards, have a link to your website on all of your e-mails and talk to people. Tell everyone you meet about your website and your auctions. The more people that know about you, the more potential customers you will have.