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Wednesday, April 18, 2007

eBay Online Tips

eBay.com Online Auction Tips
eBay.com, the worlds largest online auction site, continues to dominate the online shopping world. With over 27 million active users buying and selling everything from web hosting to small towns. What's next? Planets for sale on eBay? There's no place in the galaxy like
eBay! Review these basic tips for eBay.com buyers and sellers before bidding or selling.

eBay.com Buyers' Tips
on eBay.com, it is normally to the buyer's advantage to pay with a credit card, whether via PayPal or direct or with an escrow service. Most credit card companies offer their cardholders some type of protection against fraud. Never pay using a check or money order, if possible. Online fraud is increasing according to
consumer advisor Clark Howard. Leave eBay.com feedback only after receiving the product and addressing any issues you may have with the seller via e-mail. Use the numerous "My eBay" resources to keep track of your bids and offers and get e-mail notifications on your bids. The eBay.com community forums are the probably the best source for help available on eBay.com. Due to the huge volume of help requests, don’t get your hopes up for a human to respond back to a you and certainly not by phone.

Watch the eBay.com feedback very closely. This is most important in judging seller credibility. If over 5% of the feedback remarks are negative or neutral, consider purchasing from another seller. Don't buy from eBay.com sellers with under 10 feedback ratings if possible. Be especially careful of anyone with negatives on large ticket items. Be mindful of eBay.com sellers who consistently have a high percentage of 0 eBay.com feedback bidders. Some eBay.com sellers may be artificially running up the market for their item, hoping you will be the high bidder. Pay promptly. You will receive higher praise from eBay.com sellers.

Always leave eBay.com feedback. Some eBay.com buyers with over 100 comments stop leaving eBay.com feedback, thinking that with such high numbers, they have achieved sellers nirvana. This could create a problem over time. Don’t get emotional with eBay.com bidding. Set the price you are willing to pay ahead of time and stick with it. Be like Mr. Spock and don't give in to emotion over logic. Respond to all questions from inquiring eBay.com bidders promptly.

eBay.com Sellers' Tips
Always list a photo in your eBay.com auction, even if it’s a stock picture from the Internet. List concise specs and details of your eBay.com item in the description. Is the item you're posting on eBay new or just opened and never used or in fair condition? These seemingly small details can often make the difference in a higher bid for your product. Mention comments in your follow up e-mail after your eBay.com auction is closed. Example: I sent your item today via Priority mail. I hope you enjoy it. I appreciate any positive ebay feedback you may want to leave and I plan to do the same for you as well. Send the merchandise only after you have received payment for your eBay.com auction item, even if it’s from a family member. Leave comments only after the eBay.com buyer confirms receipt of the product, either via e-mail or the eBay.com comments form.

eBay Tips

These Ebay tips will make your pockets jingle, jangle, jingle -- enjoy !
#1: Keywords you put in your item description are the key to your Ebay success. Put in any word or phrase that legitimately pertains to your item, a word or phrase a potential bidder might type as his search word or phrase. For example, I list a lot of celebrity items--mostly magazines, sports cards, photos--& often, I begin my description by saying, for instance, "The pride of Hoboken, New Jersey, Frank Sinatra became a big . . ." -- see how I squeezed in his name & state, both words that might be searched for by local collectors. Your choice of keywords is limited only by your imagination.
It pays to take an extra 10 minutes to do a thorough description of your item. Don't settle for doing a paragraph. Many times, when I see an item with a paragraph description, I just laugh & bid on it, knowing that I can do a better job of listing it than the seller did.

#2: Do this today. This is the best thing an Ebayer can do! Ready to get free Ebay advertising & get more traffic to your auctions? Here's how:
Go to ebay.com and click on "Site Map" near the top of the page. Then, under the "Services" heading, click "About Me." Go through the 1, 2, 3 steps to create your own "About Me" page (it's fast & easy). Once your "About Me" page is up and running, you need to start being at least an occasional message poster on the various Ebay message boards. These are found by going to ebay.com, clicking on "Community" at the top of the page, and scrolling down to "Discussion, Help, & Chat," links to the message boards.
You can either add a comment to an on-going discussion or start a new discussion of your own. And any time someone reads any of your comments, an icon link to your "About Me" page will be available to them. Ebay users are curious creatures, and they will be curious about you . . . and your auctions, so they will click on your "About Me" link and be presented with all your auctions.
These message boards perform like neon-lit billboards for your auctions; but be careful, because they are quite addictive!

#3: Sellers--specialize! Devote most of your activity to 1 or 2 areas, such as sports cards or whatever. When you specialize, you slowly gain knowledge of your field, & if you do it long enough, you acquire expert knowledge, & you will have, as a bidder or as a garage sale browswer, a good idea of what an item is worth & whether or not you might auction it for a profit.
Specialization has other benefits. You get more repeat customers, & people spread the word about how "So-and-so" (you!) might have this or that item, & that So-and-so is trustworthy. (I've even had a couple regulars tell me that one of the first things they do each day is check my auctions because I list what they bid on.)
Customer service, always crucial, is even more crucial to a specialist, because you want the good word spread about you, not the bad. Tend to these customer service details by wrapping items securely, double-checking every address you write, shipping promptly, & refusing to gouge anyone on postage.

#4: Sellers, be seasonal. If there's a holiday coming up, mention it in your item description; and if you are able to couple that holiday with some hot item, even one having nothing to do with the item you're listing, include that, too; for instance, at Christmastime, I close my listings with: "Have a Harry Potter Christmas." This will bring Christmas browsers & Harry Potter browsers to your item.
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#5: When typing the item description for your listing, try to type numerals instead of spelling out numbers; for instance, type "16" instead of "sixteen." This is because a lot of potential bidders do searches for single items from a set, like card 16 from a set of 250 trading cards. People looking up items having nothing to do with what you're selling might have their eye caught by your listing, just because they have numerals in common. And the idea is to get as many eyeballs on your listing as you can.
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#6: (This could also be called Ebay 101, but many don't realize it.) Don't list an item and set the minimum bid as $10. Because of the way Ebay's fee schedule is set up, if you list it as $9.99 instead, you will save money. Nor should you list anything with a minimum bid of $25, $50, or $200; always shave a penny off these figures, and you will save each time!
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#7: If you aren't already signed up with an online payment service (such as Paypal), join one now. Here's why. Every time you purchase an Ebay item through one of these services, you save the price of postage to send payment. And as a lister, in each of your listings, you can point out how using a service will save potential customers the price of a stamp to mail their payment; that might be just the incentive to turn a potential bidder into a satisfied customer. Those stamps will add up to dollars in a hurry.
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#8: In your contact email you send out to your winning bidders, always close by saying that a blank email from them will let you know that they got your email all right. Then add, in parentheses, that if they put the letter "K" in the subject line of their blank email to you, you will occasionally (maybe once a month) send them an email telling them when you have up for bid items similar to the one on which they bid. You will be surprised at how much extra traffic this can bring your way.
Save the "sent" contact message and use it later for other winning bidders, changing only the things that change with each auction: the auction item number, the winning bidder's email address, the total of his bid plus postage, etc. It will save you time.
If your email system has such a feature, familiarize yourself with the "signature": a brief statement that automatically adds itself to the end of your outgoing emails. Make your email signature a link to your auctions! If your email system doesn't have the signature feature, find one that does. You might wish to try hotmail.com or yahoo.com.
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#9: ( Two basic tips counted as one): (14a.) Use a spell checker of some sort to check all the words used in your item description. Whenever an Ebay user clicks the box beneath the search box, the box saying "Search in title & description," that turns every word in your description into a keyword (words used by people doing searches for items), instead of only the keywords in your title. A misspelled keyword is a squandered opportunity. (14b.) Learn a little HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) to jazz up your listings. It's not that difficult, and it's fun.
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#10: Do searches for items similar to the ones you put up for auction. You can learn plenty from your competition. What do the listings of these other sellers have that yours don't? Can you improve on something they do?
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#11: Buy in lots (more than one item per auction, say, 25 baseball cards at once) and sell individually (one card/item at a time). You just get more money that way; trust me.
Search suggestions:baseball lotfootball lots(Notice the use of singular and plural.)
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#12: When you sell items in lots, be sure to mention in your listing how much the buyer will save on postage buying in lots instead of individual items; do the math & show the actual savings.
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#13: Put something friendly at the end of your auction listings. It can be anything from "Thanks for looking" to "Please email me about any questions you might have about this item." This builds confidence and a sense of goodwill--repeat customers.
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#14: At any hour of the day, go to Ebay and do a search for old. The variety of items this search brings up is unlimited, and you can add variety to your inventory by snagging something no one else has even spotted yet. It's always fun to find things to resell that you had never even considered before. Further . . . search for old (my favorite search word). Study the search results returned. Often you can find items that haven't been listed very wisely. Let me give you an outrageous example. Suppose you did a search for old, and in the results was an item listed as Old Book. You notice there are no bids, and there are only two minutes left in the auction. You click on the link and discover it is a signed 1st edition of Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath"! You get it for practically nothing. Now wouldn't you be able to list it on Ebay yourself and sell it for a nice profit by choosing your keywords carefully? You could use Signed John Steinbeck book or any combination of more descriptive and specific keywords. My sister uses this trick to buy EVERYTHING she sells on Ebay. She says it's a lot of fun for her because she gets to be creative in seeking out these items and once again while relisting them.
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#15: When composing your item title, whenever you can, include the words old, vintage, and sexy. These are traffic builders and some of the more popular search words other than proper nouns. Think up some others!
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#16: Hang it on the wall! If you will be selling what you consider to be a quality item, consider using the gallery feature eBay offers. It's only $0.25, and you would be surprised at how many bidders use--and use exclusively!--the "Gallery Items Only" search feature. This way these "Gallery Items Only" eBay searchers will be a part of your pool of potential bidders, and your item won't be passed over by them because it's not featured in the gallery. So, hang it on the wall! (But not for items you are listing for a quarter.)
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#17: I skip bidding on a lot of auctions because of excessive postage. Don't gouge and alienate your customers by charging excessive postage. Charge only what it costs to mail plus enough to cover the true cost of your package, & no more. The lower your postage, the more bidders you will have, thus more money in your pocket.
Give bidders an option to buy insurance; that can save everyone headaches if something goes amiss; and when that inevitable something does go wrong, you, as seller, will be able to ask: "Was the item you bid on insured?" That will put you in a position of bargaining strength when something is lost in the mail. (Personally, I gave up offering insurance because too many bidders were wanting to insure $2 items, & the insurance form you have to fill out on a claim is so long; just being honest here.)
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#18: Your eBay search has led you to what you think might be the bargain of the century. You were looking for something you might buy on the cheap and sell for a nifty profit--but will you be able to?
For me, a good rule of thumb is that an item is worth (in pure cash only, sentimental value isn't considered in this example) as much as it goes for on eBay. In taking my own advice, I always check what an item I'm considering bidding on might actually return. Here's how:
Say the item I'm considering is a 1963 Topps Roger Maris baseball card. I do a search for:
1963 Topps Roger Maris
Then eBay returns my results, a list of links for that item. Now comes the trick. Down the left column of the page it says "Completed Items." Click that, and it will take you to a list of links for completed auctions of that Roger Maris card, giving you a firm idea of what you might expect to be able to sell the card for if you were to bid on one and try to resell it.
You could accomplish the same thing by bookmarking a current auction and waiting for it to end--up to 10 days!--but why do that when the info is right at your fingertips, and you need to know how much to bid right now?
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#19: Always have an image of your item for potential bidders to view. Many people pass on bidding for an item they don't get to see first. This also helps limit the number of items you have returned to you because you failed to describe them accurately enough to please those tough customers out there, saving you return postage in the process. Also, an item with an accompanying image just naturally gets more "hits" because many people search only gallery listings. A scanner can pay for itself very quickly. If you just can't afford one and are auctioning a relatively valuable item, let a copy company make a scan for you. If you don't show images, you are losing bidders/money. If you have a scanner, more people are bidding on your items.
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#20: Cutting down on the number of items returned to you is easy. You need only be thoroughly descriptive in your item descriptions (showing an image of the item always helps too). Leave nothing out. If there is a tiny crease in the item, say so. To omit mentioning these things frustrates customers and gives you an air of not being trustworthy, and those customers will avoid your future listings like they were Typhoid Mary. Reading a longer description is much better than a bidder having to repackage the item you sent and send it back to you.
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#21: If you are searching on eBay to bid on a particular item, wouldn't it make good sense to find it misspelled in its listing? After all, since it's misspelled, that means less people will find it--thus less bidders, less competition for the item. That saves you money! Here's how to do it:
Say you were looking for a 1964 Topps Roberto Clemente baseball card. Here's what you can type to find all the misspelled listings of items for 1964 Topps Roberto Clemente:
1964 Topps Roberto Cle* -Clemente
A person might run into trouble spelling "Clemente" once he reached the first "e," so you put a "wild card" (that little star symbol above "8" on your keyboard) right there. The reason for the "-Clemente" is that you are looking for misspellings, and this "-Clemente" gets rid of all the correctly spelled listings.
You might get no results at all. You might wind up with a bunch of results for Roberto Alomar. To get rid of those unwanted results, after "-Clemente" you would need only skip a space and type:
-Alomar
You get the idea.
Here's what you would type to find misspelled Hank Aaron items (all items, not just a specific year and brand):
Hank Aa* -Aaron
Again you will get some unwanted results, but if you weed through them, you might just find an Aaron item no one else has discovered yet and pick it up for a song!
Play around with that "wild card" (*); it will match any character or group of characters from where you place it in a word all the way to the end of that word.
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#22: If you find yourself unable to sleep during the wee hours, say, 3:00 in the morning, do yourself a favor and cruise eBay for a while in search of bargains listed (foolishly!) to close at this time. When everyone else is asleep, that is the time to snag a bargain. Go to ebay.com. Search for the item you want, maybe 1972 Topps. A list of items will be returned to you. Click one of those links, maybe the one that says 1972 Topps 50 different cards. Right beneath the item title and number is a link to that broader category to which the item belongs. Click on it. You get another list of links. Find near the top of the page where it says "Going, Going, Gone." Click that and be taken to a list of items that are ending relatively soon. Why not place a bid? After all, everyone else is sleeping. Final bid prices are automatically lower because of a lack of bidder competition, and that can mean tremendous savings for you.
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#23: Do a search for auction items that are to be listed for three days only. Your searches might be:
3-day3 dayThree dayThree-day
You might want to add an "s" to them. Then you can refer to my tip #18 and see what you might expect to resell the item for. Then, if you feel you can reauction it for a nice profit, list it for 10 days and see what it goes for. If you got it for a bargain after 3 days, you might auction it for a killing if you let your auction run for 10 days.
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#24: Unless you can't help doing otherwise, list your items in Prime Time (9-11pm Eastern, 6-8pm Pacific). To list at any other time is costing you bids. The closing moments of your auction is when your item listing "bubbles up" to the top of more eBay searches, even searches not directly related to the item you have up for bid, so try not to have your auctions end (they end exactly 3, 5, 7, or 10 days after you list, right down to the second) while the majority of your potential customers are sleeping or are at work. Don't rely on that one poor sap shopping at 2:00 AM to find your item, because if he does, it will just be a bargain for him.
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#25: In your item listings, use simple words that everyone knows.
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#26: Feedback is important. But don't let someone's having a negative or two keep you from bidding on one of their items. All sellers run into that customer who is impossible to please no matter how far they bend over for him. And someone may have given them a vengeance feedback, one that had nothing at all to do with the actual transaction.
So unless someone has a disproportionate amount of negative feedback, you might consider giving him or her the chance to please you as a customer. It's up to you. They just may have the bargain of the century for you. And they will be eager to rehabilitate their "tarnished" image of having negative feedback. However, do be wary, and show good sense in all your transactions.
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#27: When you leave feedback, as a bidder or as a seller, always mention--specifically--what item was exchanged (not the item number, something like "...the great Lady Diana magazine"). That way, people viewing feedback will see what item you just acquired that they might like to own. And if you have sold an item, maybe they will think you have one more that they can purchase. It gives feedback viewers a chance to see what kind of merchandise you bid on or sell. This trick can make all your customers' and sellers' feedback act as a more active link to your items than some static feedback that says nothing but "Great deal. A+++." And while the link to the item expires after some 30 days, your mention of the item will remain till Doomsday. This is a "red-letter" bonus because most Ebayers aren't doing it . . . yet! (Just check anyone's feedback & see.)
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#28: Pocket $10 or 10 cents at a time as an
Ebay affiliate.It can really add up over a year's time!

eBay Prohibited Items

Prohibited items
eBay in its earliest days was essentially unregulated, but as eBay grew, it found it necessary to restrict or forbid auctions for various items. Note that some of the restrictions relate to eBay.com (the US site), while other restrictions apply to specific European sites (such as Nazi paraphernalia). Regional laws and regulations may apply to the seller or the buyer. Among the hundred or so banned or restricted categories:
Tobacco (tobacco-related items and collectibles are allowed)
Alcohol (alcohol-related collectibles, including sealed containers, as well as wine sales by licensed sellers are allowed)
Drugs and drug paraphernalia
Nazi paraphernalia
Bootleg recordings
Firearms and ammunition
Used underwear and dirty used clothing
Teacher's editions of textbooks including homeschool teacher's editions.
Human parts and remains
Live animals (with certain exceptions
Certain copyrighted works or trademarked items.
Lottery tickets, sweepstakes tickets, or any other gambling items.
Military hardware such as working weapons or explosives.
Virtual items from massively multiplayer online games.
Many other items are either wholly prohibited or restricted in some manner.

Unusual sale items
In June 2005, the wife of Tim Shaw, a British radio DJ on Kerrang! 105.2, sold Tim's Lotus Esprit sports car with a Buy It Now price of 50 pence after she heard him flirting with model Jodie Marsh on air. The car was sold within 5 minutes, and it was requested that the buyer pick it up the same day.
In May 2005, a Volkswagen Golf that had previously been registered to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (who had been elected Pope Benedict XVI) was sold on eBay's German site for €188,938.88. The winning bid was made by the GoldenPalace.com online casino, known for their outrageous eBay purchases.
In September 2004, the owner of MagicGoat.com sold the contents of his trash can to a middle school language arts teacher, who intended to have her students write essays about the trash before it was cleared away by a well-meaning janitor.
Water that was said to have been left in a cup Elvis Presley once drank from was sold for $455. The few tablespoons came from a plastic cup Presley sipped at a concert in North Carolina in 1977.
A Coventry University student got £1.20 for a single cornflake.
A man from Brisbane, Australia attempted to sell New Zealand at a starting price of $.01AUD. The price had risen to $3,000 before eBay closed the auction.
One of the tunnel boring machines involved in the construction of the Channel Tunnel was auctioned on eBay in 2004.
A man from Arizona sold an air guitar on eBay for $5.50.
A group of four men from Australia auctioned themselves to spend the weekend with the promise of "beers, snags, good conversation and a hell of a lot of laughs" for AU$1,300
Disney sold a retired Monorail Red (Mark IV Monorail) for $20,000
The German Language Association sold the German language to call attention for the growing influence of Pidgin-English in modern German
In late November 2005, the original Hollywood sign was sold on eBay for $450,400.
In February 2007, after Britney Spears shaved all of her hair off in a Los Angeles salon, it was listed on EBay for $1million USD before it was taken down after some considerable controversy.

Charity auctions
Using MissionFish as an arbiter, eBay allows sellers to donate a portion of their auction proceeds to a charity of the seller's choice. Some high profile charity auctions have been advertised on the eBay home page, and have raised large amounts of money in a short time. For example, a furniture manufacturer raised over $35,000 for Ronald McDonald House by auctioning off beds that had been signed by celebrities

eBay Intellectual

Intellectual property in auctions
Holders of intellectual property rights, have claimed that eBay profits from the infringement of intellectual property rights. eBay has responded by creating the Verified Rights Owner (VeRO) program, which provides to rightsholders expedited auction takedowns and private information on eBay users, but has likewise been criticized. In June 2004 the jeweler Tiffany & Co. sued eBay claiming that eBay profits from the sale of counterfeit Tiffany products. As of July 2006, a trial date has not been set. In September 2005, eBay's privacy practices relating to its VeRO program came under scrutiny when WNDU-TV reported that the Embroidery Software Protection Coalition was accusing United States buyers, identified by eBay, of copyright infringement, and demanding monetary settlements. eBay's privacy policy warns that eBay may disclose personal information on the request of any VeRO rightsholder investigating illegal activity; in comparison, competing service Yahoo! Auctions may disclose personal information in response to a subpoena or court order. Although, according to a University of Notre Dame law professor, there is no legal basis, in the United States, for copyright infringement claims against buyers, eBay's VeRO program may have allowed the ESPC to obtain private information without judicial oversight.

Some manufacturers have abused eBay's VeRo program, through which copyright and trademark owners can quickly protect their rights, by seeking to prevent all sales of their products on eBay. In November 2006, a U.K. High Court ruled that a VeRO rightsholder's takedown request to eBay constituted a legal threat under design patent law. Since groundless legal threats under design patent law are unlawful, the ruling holds that groundless VeRO takedown requests based on design patents are also unlawful. Further, the text of the ruling appears critical of the VeRO program in general: "It is entirely wrong for owners of intellectual property rights to attempt to assert them without litigation, or without the threat of litigation, in reply."

Customer support
A source of frustration for some eBay users is that despite the company's size, it offers no customer support by phone, instead referring all ordinary members to its online help features. Apart from a library of self-help resources, these features consist mainly of e-mail contact forms and "Live Help," which lets users chat with customer service representatives via instant messaging. In fact, most visitors to the eBay site will not find any company phone number listed at all. eBay does, in fact, have a phone support department, but that service is limited to members of the rank "Gold PowerSeller" and above, the company's term for members who sell at least $10,000 worth of goods per month on the site. The phone number for that service is kept closely guarded, though ordinary users persistent enough to discover it will usually be offered help as a one-time courtesy.

Other eBay controversies
Other notable controversies involving eBay include:
In May 2000, eBay seller Kenneth Walton auctioned an oil painting on eBay for $135,805, due to speculation that it might be the work of California modernist Richard Diebenkorn. Walton pretended to know nothing about art and claimed to be surprised by the price the painting fetched, and the auction attracted international media attention. In several investigative reports by The New York Times, it was revealed that Walton was in fact an experienced eBay art dealer with several unhappy customers, and that he had colluded with two other eBay sellers to bid up each other's auctions. The Times described this as a "shill bidding ring". Walton and his cohorts were banned from eBay and eventually convicted of fraud by the federal government in the first ever prosecution for shill bidding on eBay.
On 28 May 2003, a U.S. District Court jury found eBay guilty of willful patent infringement and ordered the company to pay US$35 million in damages. The plaintiff was MercExchange, which had accused eBay in 2000 of infringing on three patents (one of which are used in eBay's "Buy It Now" feature for fixed-price sales, 30 percent of eBay's business and growing). The decision was appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC). The CAFC affirmed the judgment of willful infringement, and reversed the lower court and granted a permanent injunction. eBay appealed the permanent injunction to the U.S. Supreme Court, which on May 15, 2006 found an injunction is not required nor automatic in this or any patent case where guilt has been established. The case was sent back to the Virginia district court for consideration of the injunction and a trial on another MercExchange patent the inventor claims covers the remaining 70 percent of eBay's business model. (see EBay v. MercExchange). This case has been particularly controversial since the patents involved are considered to be business method patents. (See also Software patent debate)

On 28 July 2003, eBay and its subsidiary PayPal agreed to pay a $10 million fine to settle allegations that they aided illegal offshore and online gambling. According to the settlement, PayPal between mid-2000 and November 2002 transmitted money in violation of various U.S. federal and state online gambling laws. eBay's announcement of its acquisition of PayPal in early July said that PayPal would begin the process of exiting this market, and was already doing so when the ruling occurred. These offenses occurred prior to eBay's purchase of PayPal.
On 17 December 2004, Avnish Bajaj, CEO of eBay's Indian subsidiary Baazee.com, was arrested after a video clip showing oral sex between two Indian students was sold online. The company denied knowing the content of what they were selling (because it is a venue, not a retailer) and removed the offensive material as soon as they became aware of it. The Indian government attempted to make the case that Bajaj had violated India's IT Act, which forbids "publishing, transmitting or causing to publish" obscene material, even though the actual material was never published on Baazee's servers. eBay supported Baazee's defense.

On 14 June 2005, eBay removed auction listings for originally free tickets to the Live 8 charity auction amid hundreds of complaints about such auctions. Normally, selling of charity tickets is legal under United Kingdom law. In 2005, the Australian National Rugby League tried unsuccessfully to persuade eBay to prevent scalpers from selling Grand Final tickets online. On 18 December 2006 eBay won a court case against Creative Festival Entertainment in Australia, allowing sellers to on-sell (or scalp) tickets for the Big Day Out concert. The case was won due to the big day out organizers not being able to fully enforce an anti-scalping policy printed on the back of the tickets. The presiding judge described the decision as "unfortunate".

Some have criticized the emphasis eBay places on its subsidiary PayPal as a method of accepting payments. eBay discourages sellers from using independent money-wiring companies such as Western Union and MoneyGram (Moneybookers is now allowed instead), stating that it prohibits or discourages certain forms of payment in order to reduce fraud. On the U.S. eBay, while sellers may accept such payments, they are prohibited from advertising them as a payment option. A similar policy applies to mailing cash as a payment option. Certain non-U.S. branches of eBay allow sellers to advertise wire transfers or mailed cash as payment options, provided such methods are not the only payment options the seller accepts.
In late 2006 a change in eBay's policy which showed less information about sellers once auctions reached a certain value has been criticised for making shill bidding much harder to detect. This change is to the potential disadvantage of buyers and of significant advantage to unethical sellers who, sometime with the aid of accomplices, may artificially inflate the price of an auction. An investigation by The Sunday Times in January 2007 uncovered substantial evidence of shill bidding. eBay's decision to hide much information about bidders once an auction reaches a particular price have opened it to accusations of encouraging shill bidders by making them significantly harder to identify. The case has been put that it is in eBay's interests to protect high turnover sellers who profit from shill bidding since they generate substantial income for eBay. There are claims that this change in policy, favouring unethical sellers over buyers, has significantly weakened eBay's reputation both amongst buyers and ethical sellers.

eBay Controversy and Critisms

Controversy and criticisms
eBay has its share of controversy, ranging from its privacy policy (eBay typically turns over user information to law enforcement without a subpoena)[citation needed] to well-publicized seller fraud. eBay claims that their data shows that less than .01% of all transactions result in a confirmed case of fraud. However, eBay states that their stated fraud statistic both undercounts and overcounts fraud.

Fraud
A major fraud-prevention mechanism for eBay users is its feedback system. After every transaction both the buyer and seller have the option of rating each other. They can give a "positive", "negative", or "neutral" rating and leave a comment no longer than 80 characters. So if a buyer has problems, he or she can rate the seller "negative" and leave a comment such as "never received product". Learning the system and examining a seller's feedback history is a buyer's best protection.
Weaknesses of the feedback system include:
Small and large transactions carry the same weight in the feedback summary. It is therefore easy for a dishonest user to initially build up a deceptive positive rating by buying or selling a number of very low value items, such as e-books, recipes, etc., then subsequently switching to fraud.
A user may be reluctant to leave honest feedback out of fear of negative retaliatory feedback (including "negative" in retaliation for "neutral").
Feedback and responses to feedback are allotted only 80 characters each. This can prevent users from being able to fully list valid complaints.
Accounts with good feedback can be hijacked by phishing giving a con artist the appearance of an excellent trading history. This problem is particularly prevalent in certain areas, such as digital cameras.
Although Ebay protects sellers from getting a negative feedback from a deadbeat buyer (once the non-paying bidder case is decided in the seller's favor), they do not offer the same protection for a buyer who gets a deadbeat seller.
When a user feels that a seller or buyer has been dishonest, a dispute can be filed with eBay. An eBay account (whether seller, buyer or both) may be suspended if there are too many complaints against the account holder.
Many complaints have been made about eBay's system of dealing with fraud, leading to its being featured on the British consumer rights television program Watchdog. It is also regularly featured in The Daily Mirror's Consumer Awareness page. The complaints are generally that eBay sometimes fails to respond when a claim is made, and since eBay makes its money on commissions from listings and sales may not be in eBay's interest to take action against large sellers.

Frauds that can be committed by sellers include:
Receiving payment and not shipping merchandise
Shipping items other than those described
Giving a deliberately misleading description
Shipping faulty merchandise
Counterfeit or bootleg merchandise
Selling stolen goods
Inflating total bid amounts by bidding on their own auction with "shill" account(s), either the seller under an alternate account or another person in collusion with the seller. Shill bidding is prohibited by eBay and, in at least one high-profile case involving Kenneth Walton (and his accomplices Ken Fetterman and Scott Beach) has been prosecuted by the federal government as criminal fraud.
Frauds committed by buyers include:
PayPal fraud: Filing false shipping damage claim with the shipping company and with PayPal.
Credit card fraud, in the form of both stolen credit cards and fraudulent chargebacks.
Receiving merchandise and claiming otherwise
Returning items other than received
The buyer sends a forged payment-service E-mail which states that the buyer has made a payment to the seller's account. An unsuspecting seller may ship the item before realizing the E-mail was forged.

Other controversial practices of users
Sellers of inexpensive items may benefit from inflating the shipping cost while lowering the starting price for their auctions, because some buyers overlook the shipping cost when calculating the amount they are willing to spend. Since eBay charges their fees based on final sales price without including shipping, this allows sellers to reduce the amount they pay eBay in fees (and also allows buyers to reduce or avoid import fees and sales taxes). This is called "fee avoidance", and is prohibited by eBay policy, as are excessive shipping and handling charges. A danger to the buyer in such cases is that in the event of defective merchandise, the seller may claim to have met his refund obligations by returning only the minimal purchase price and not the shipping costs. Sellers sometimes charge fees for use of PayPal as well. Although this is officially banned by eBay and PayPal and is against some local laws as well as violating merchant agreements with Visa, Mastercard and Discover, eBay does not police for this and will only look at it if the auction is reported. Therefore inexperienced users often wind up paying these illegal and unenforceable fees.
Auction sniping is the process of watching a timed online auction, and placing a winning bid at the last possible moment (often literally seconds before the end of the auction), giving the other bidders no time to outbid the sniper. Some bidders do this manually, and others use online services and software designed for the purpose. While disliked by many eBay users, sniping is not against eBay rules.
Burying shipping charges or undesirable terms in a large amount of text.

eBay Profit and Transactions

Profit and transactions
eBay generates revenue from a number of fees. The eBay fee system is quite complex; there are fees to list a product and fees when the product sells, plus several optional fees, all based on various factors and scales. The U.S.-based ebay.com takes $0.20 to $80 per listing and 5.25% or less of the final price (as of 2007). The UK based ebay.co.uk (ebay.co.uk offices) takes from GBP £0.15 to a maximum rate of GBP £3 per 100 for an ordinary listing and from 0.75% to 5.25% of the final price. In addition, eBay now owns the PayPal payment system which has fees of its own. Under current U.S. law, a state cannot require sellers located outside the state to collect a sales tax, making deals more attractive to buyers.
The company's current business strategy includes increasing revenue by increasing international trade within the eBay system. eBay has already expanded to almost two dozen countries including China and India. The only places where expansion failed were Taiwan and Japan, where Yahoo! had a head start.

Acquisitions and investments
In July 1998, eBay acquired Cincinnati, Ohio based online auction site Up4Sale.com.
In May 1999, eBay acquired the online payment service Billpoint, which it shut down after acquiring PayPal.
In 1999 eBay acquired the auction house Butterfield & Butterfield, which it sold in 2002 to Bonhams.
In 1999 eBay acquired the auction house Alando for $43 million, which changed then to eBay Germany.
In June 2000 eBay acquired Half.com for $318 million, which was later integrated with the eBay Marketplace.
In December 2000 eBay acquired the Precision Buying Service portion of Deja.com.
In August, 2001, eBay acquired Mercado Libre, Lokau and iBazar, Latin American auction sites.
In July, 2002 eBay acquired PayPal, for $1.5 billion in stock.
On January 31, 2003, eBay acquired CARad.com, an auction management service for car dealers.
On July 11, 2003 eBay Inc. acquired EachNet, a leading ecommerce company in China, paying approximately $150 million in cash.
On June 22, 2004, eBay acquired all outstanding shares of Baazee.com, an Indian auction site for approximately US $50 million in cash, plus acquisition costs. Baazee.com subsequently became eBay India.
On August 13, 2004, eBay took a 25% stake in Craigslist by buying out an existing shareholder who was once a Craigslist employee.
In September 2004, eBay moved forward on its acquisition of Korean rival Internet Auction Co. (IAC), buying nearly 3 million shares of the Korean online trading company for 125,000 Korean won (about US$109) per share.
In November 2004, eBay acquired Marktplaats.nl for €225 million. This was a Dutch competitor which had an 80% market share in the Netherlands, by concentrating more on small ads than actual auctions. Marktplaats is the Dutch word for Marketplace.
On December 16, 2004, eBay acquired Rent.com for $415 million in cash (original deal was for $385 million of the amount in eBay stock plus $30 million in cash).
In May 2005, eBay acquired Gumtree, a network of UK local city classifieds sites.
On May 18, 2005, eBay acquired the Spanish classifieds site Loquo.
In June 2005, eBay acquired Shopping.com, an online comparison site for $635 million.
At the end of June 2005, eBay acquired the German language classifieds site Opus Forum.
In September 2005, eBay bought Skype, a VoIP company, for $2.6 billion in stock and cash.
In April 2006, eBay invested $2 million in the Meetup social networking site.
In April 2006, eBay acquired Tradera.com, Sweden's leading online auction-style marketplace for $48 Million.
In August 2006, eBay announced international cooperation with Google. Financial details have not been disclosed by either party.
In February 2007, eBay acquired online ticket marketplace Stubhub for $307 million.

eBay Items and Services

Items and services
Millions of
collectibles, appliances, computers, furniture, equipment, vehicles, and other miscellaneous items are listed, bought, and sold daily. In 2004, eBay launched its Business & Industrial category, breaking into the industrial surplus business. Some items are rare and valuable, while many others are dusty gizmos that would have been discarded if not for the thousands of eager bidders worldwide. Anything can be sold as long as it is not illegal or does not violate the eBay Prohibited and Restricted Items policy. Services and intangibles can be sold too. Large international companies, such as IBM, sell their newest products and offer services on eBay using competitive auctions and fixed-priced storefronts. Regional searches of the database make shipping slightly faster and cheaper. Separate eBay sites such as eBay US and eBay UK allow the users to trade using the local currency as an additional option to PayPal. Software developers can create applications that integrate with eBay through the eBay API by joining the eBay Developers Program. As of June 2005, there were over 15,000 members in the eBay Developers Program, comprising a broad range of companies creating software applications to support eBay buyers and sellers as well as eBay Affiliates.
Controversy has arisen over certain items put up for bid. For instance, in late 1999 a man offered one of his
kidneys for auction on eBay, attempting to profit from the potentially lucrative (and, in the United States, illegal) market for transplantable human organs. On other occasions, people and even entire towns have been listed, often as a joke or to garner free publicity. In general, the company removes auctions that violate its terms of service agreement within a short time after hearing of the auction from an outsider; the company's policy is to not pre-approve transactions. eBay is also an easy place for unscrupulous sellers to market counterfeit merchandise, which can be difficult for novice buyers to distinguish without careful study of the auction description.
eBay's
Latin American partner is MercadoLibre.


eBay Stores
HQ Community Building lobby, with PEZ dispenser display wall.
Since their introduction in 2002, eBay Stores have opened up ecommerce for eBay sellers and a way to have access to over 200 million shoppers worldwide.
eBay stores can be set up in a few minutes with subscription fees ranging from $15.95 for the basic store to $49.95 for a features store to $499.95 for an anchor store. The stores can be customized by the owner in various ways and sellers can showcase their items in the eBay store and sell at a fixed “buy it now” price.
eBay stores also offers several tools for promotion such as a newsletter, search engine keyword management, listing fees and a referral credit for external links coming in to the eBay store.
It is also possible for users to customize the look and feel of the eBay Stores to use their own HTML and images to better brand their eBay Store. This feature has greatly aided many "Mom and Pop" brick-and-mortar locations nationwide.

eBay Express
In April of 2006, eBay opened its new eBay Express site, which is designed to work like a standard Internet shopping site to consumers with United States addresses.(eBay Express) Selected eBay items are mirrored on eBay Express where buyers shop using a shopping cart to purchase from multiple sellers. The UK version was launched to eBay members in mid October 2006 (eBay Express UK), and differs from the US version by only offering brand new items from pre-vetted business sellers. The German version was also opened in 2006 (eBay Express Germany).


eBay Blogs and the eBay Community Wiki
In June of 2006, eBay added an
eBay Community Wiki and eBay Blogs to its Community Content which also includes the Discussion Boards, Groups, Answer Center, Chat Rooms and Reviews & Guides.

Turbo Lister
Turbo Lister 2 is a software tool designed by eBay to streamline the process of creating large numbers of listings. It is provided as a free download for
eBay users.

eBay

eBay Inc, is an American Internet company that manages ebay.com, an online auction and shopping website where people and businesses buy and sell goods and services worldwide. In addition to its original U.S. website, eBay has established localized websites in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Poland, Austria, France, China, Japan and New Zealand. eBay Inc also owns PayPal, Skype, and other businesses.







Origins and early history
The online auction web site was founded in San Jose, California
on September 3, 1995 by computer programmer Pierre Omidyar as AuctionWeb,[1] part of a larger personal site that included, among other things, Omidyar's own tongue-in-cheek tribute to the Ebola virus. The very first item sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer for $14.83. Astonished, Omidyar contacted the winning bidder and asked if he understood that the laser pointer was broken. In his responding email, the buyer explained: "I'm a collector of broken laser pointers." The frequently repeated story that eBay was founded to help Omidyar's fiancée trade PEZ Candy dispensers was fabricated by a public relations manager in 1997 to interest the media. This was revealed in Adam Cohen's 2002 book and confirmed by eBay.

Chris Agarpao was hired as eBay's first employee and Jeff Skoll was hired as the first president of the company in 1996. In November 1996, eBay entered into its first third-party licensing deal, with a company called Electronic Travel Auction to use SmartMarket Technology to sell plane tickets and other travel products. The company officially changed the name of its service from AuctionWeb to eBay in September 1997. Originally, the site belonged to Echo Bay Technology Group, Omidyar's consulting firm. Omidyar had tried to register the domain name EchoBay.com but found it already taken by the
Echo Bay Mines, a gold mining company, so he shortened it to his second choice, eBay.com.















Friday, April 13, 2007

ADBRITE, MAKING MONEY

ADBRITE, MAKING MONEY, I’ve mentioned AdBrite and Text-Link-Ads as options to make money from your website or to buy advertising to bring in traffic and raise your PageRank. A third option targeted specifically at the blogosphere is BlogAds.
BlogAds operates much like the other two services except they target only blogs and not general websites. This is a nice niche and as you can imagine makes for a powerful advertising method. Blogs in general have more sway with their audience because of the personal, human-to-human relationship bloggers enjoy with their readership. Generally if a blogger recommends a product or service, his or her audience will take the recommendation as word-of-mouth rather than perceive it as advertising, especially if the blogger has a reputation for honesty, integrity and experience in his or her chosen field. Placing an ad on a blog won’t quite have the same effect but it may enjoy more credibility than placing the same ad on a commercial website.

From the bloggers point of view BlogAds offers another method to monetise their audience. BlogAds won’t take just any blogs on board, there is a screening process and they will take a 30% cut of each advertising sale. BlogAds state that the average blogger makes $50 per month and the lucky few make as much as $5000 per month. The system offers a simple submission form hosted by BlogAds so you don’t have to do much once you are approved to join the network. You copy the “Your Ad Here” code onto your blog and any interested advertiser can click through and purchase an add. Delivery and payment are automatic and you can manually approve all advertiser applications. BlogAds also allows you to write your own sales copy that is displayed to potential advertisers which is a nice touch, allowing you to personalise the selling process and carefully pitch what your blog is about. If you are interested in trying this method on your blog you can
view the submission details.

While not appearing nearly as professionally branded as AdBrite or Text-Link-Ads, BlogAds does have it’s appeal. It looks like a simple blog itself and feels more like a human being is running the show rather than a corporate entity, a no doubt important selling point to attract bloggers that value community over commercialism. BlogAds stresses the community nature of it’s network to potential advertisers and warns them that a standard advertisement like you would run on a site like MSNBC.com may not perform as well on blogs. Blog advertising rewards creative and savvy advertisers that can connect and empathise with the community they are trying to reach.
No doubt as more and more blogs are added to the BlogAds network it will become very appealing to advertisers to leverage this advertising method. I expect many bloggers will look to systems like this to form the bulk of their revenue strategy and hopefully over time it will reward popular blogs with enough funding that they can rely on it for a living. For the time being it offers small-time bloggers perhaps enough money to supplement hosting costs, but you certainly should not be thinking about quitting that day job just yet!

ADBRITE TIPS

ADBRITE TIPS, I’ve recently become impressed with the potential for making money from a website by selling text link ads. During May I generated over $250 USD from selling text links on my blogs just from the brokerage service provided by Text-Link-Ads.com. It’s not a huge amount of money but it’s cash I didn’t have before. If you are aiming to become a full time blogger then any extra sources of income helps, so you may want to try selling text links yourself.
John Webster from AdBrite Guide contacted me about his new website aimed at helping publishers and advertisers maximize their return from another text link broker, AdBrite.com. AdBrite offers a similar service to Text-Link-Ads.com, brokering deals between website publishers and advertisers. As a blog publisher this means you can leave the selling of your advertising inventory to companies like AdBrite while you just work on making the best blog you can. All you have to do is add your site to their system, place some code on your site, then watch the money roll in (theoritically at least!). Of course factors such as how much traffic you have, what industry your site is in, your site’s PageRank (What is PageRank?) and where you place the add code will determine how much you make, but as I said, anything is better than nothing, so it’s worth a try.

John kindly offered a list of tips for me to publish to help you get the most out of
AdBrite as a publisher and an advertiser. I’m posting the tips for AdBrite publishers (those wanting to make money from text links) here. The AdBrite advertiser tips (those wanting to generate traffic from buying links) are posted on my other blog, Small Business Branding.

Tips To Maximize Your AdBrite Income
ADBRITE TIPS, Never start your pricing too high. It is better to error on the low side and get advertisers hooked, because then they will be willing to pay higher prices for your inventory when the pricing increases. Make sure your placement is worth buying, the popular sellers in the marketplace tend to be sites with the most premium inventory. Spend some time tagging your site and giving proper demographic information. In your site description provide ideas of advertisers that you think might convert well. You know your audience best. AdBrite is more successful if you sell a FEW premium placements as opposed to just MANY backfill placements.

Hard code all placements because of the concreteness of â€Å“your ad here”. Putting AdBrite in rotation doesn’t perform as well. Allow a ramping period. AdBrite is a tool to help sell your own inventory, and think of it as a virtual salesperson for you. Any salesperson needs some time to gain traction. Just like an auction, the beginning price is never the final price. Entice advertisers with specials. You have full control to set pricing so make occasional specials to entice advertisers. Enable AdBrite’s auto pricing which will raise automatically as inventory sells, and lower itself as vacant inventory sits unsold. You can find more
AdBrite publishers tips and AdBrite advertisers tips at AdBriteGuide.com

ADBRITE


AdBrite
AdBrite,
Inc. is an online advertising firm based in
San Francisco, California. It was founded by Philip J. Kaplan and Gidon Wise. Kaplan is also the founder of the website Fucked Company.
AdBrite serves ads on more than 40,000 websites and is the 10th largest ad network on the Internet, according to
Media Metrix. AdBrite was founded in 2004 and is backed by Sequoia Capital, having raised $12 million in two rounds of funding.


About Us
AdBrite powers the world's most trusted and transparent marketplace for digital advertising. AdBrite served ads on 988,698,347 pageviews, from 43,789 sites. These numbers reflect yesterday's activity. They may fluctuate up or down each day, as some sites become inactive (zero pageviews) and others become active. This fluctuation is normal, as long as the general trend is upward :)


History
AdBrite was started by Philip Kaplan and Gidon Wise in 2002. They were looking for an easy way to sell advertising on their websites and blogs, and decided to place a small "Your Ad Here" link on each site to connect advertisers to an order form. AdBrite's simplicity spread through word-of-mouth, and within the first two years, more than 1,000 sites were using AdBrite to sell ads. The duo officially incorporated the company in 2004 and teamed up with Sequoia Capital, who’d previously funded companies including Google, Yahoo, and Apple. Since then, thousands more advertisers and publishers (see real-time stats, above) have entrusted AdBrite to manage their online advertising needs.



What can AdBrite do for me?
Advertisers
-Reach millions of users across a whole lotta sites
-Target your ads by keyword, site, or geography
-Run text ads, or get guaranteed traffic and branding with our innovative Active Interstitial ads
-Enjoy full transparency—see the stats before you buy
-Optimize your campaign with our easy-to-use online tools and conversion tracking pixel


Publishers
-Monetize your site with complete control over your pricing
-Approve or reject ads
-Sell directly to your users with our "Your Ad Here" link, our dedicated page created just for your site, and our in-house sales team
-Customize your ads for seamless integration into your site's design
-AdBrite works great by itself, or alongside ads from other networks (Google, Yahoo, etc.) or your own sales team
-Through a small snippet of HTML placed on your site, we handle ad serving, billing, customer service, and sales


Want to get started?
Advertisers, start by creating your ad—choose from

keyword targeted text ads or active interstitials, or browse the marketplace to find your target site or sites.

ADSENSE HIGHER EARNIGS

Have you ever looked at your ad reports and noticed that your channel data and your aggregate data don't match, even for the same date range? You're not alone -- we often receive emails from publishers who are concerned about this issue, and we're happy to clarify what's going on. Depending on how you've set up your channels, you'll see a larger number of page impressions, clicks and earnings in your channel reports than your aggregate reports for any or all of the following reasons:
Your ads are being tracked on multiple URL channels.Let's say you've set up 2 URL channels - one to track example.com and to track www.example.com/page. The URL channel example.com will track clicks and impressions from all subdomains, subdirectories, and subpages of example.com. As a result, one click on www.example.com/page will be tracked on both of your URL channels, which means you'll see two clicks recorded in your channel reports. However, your aggregate reports will show you the correct number of clicks, one, with no data duplication. You can learn more about how URL channels will track specific pages in our
Help Center.
Your ads are being tracked on both a URL and a custom channel.Now let's suppose you have a URL channel for example.com and a custom channel called Example Homepage, which you're using on the homepage of example.com. When you receive a click on the ad unit tagged with your Example Homepage custom channel, it will also be tracked on your example.com URL channel. Just like above, this means that you'll see two clicks logged in your channel reports, but only one in your aggregate reports.
Your ads are being tracked on multiple custom channels.So you've taken advantage of our
new feature, and you're tracking each of your red leaderboards with 2 custom channels -- one called Red_ad_units and one called Leaderboards. One click on a red leaderboard will be tracked in both of your custom channels, so you'll see twice as much data when you compare your channel reports to your aggregate reports.Of course, this doesn't mean that you shouldn't set up multiple URL and custom channels to track specific pages and ad units. But if you'd like to view the overall performance of your account, visit your Advanced Reports page, select the Aggregate Data radio button, and click Display Report -- you'll then see your reports without any duplicate data.Now get tracking (correctly)!

ADSENSE COST REVENUE

It's an oft-seen question from publishers: Are we earning revenue for ad impressions or for ad clicks? The answer is that it depends on whether cost-per-impression (CPM) ads or cost-per-click (CPC) ads are appearing on your pages. By default, CPC ads will show on your site and you'll generate earnings for valid clicks on those ads. However, your ad units will display CPM ads when advertisers bid specifically on your site using site targeting, and for those ads you'll generate earnings with each valid impression. Please keep in mind that CPM earnings are not the same as the values you see in your eCPM column; your eCPM is only a reporting feature that can help you compare ad performance.To determine which type of ad you displayed on specific days, you can follow these instructions to generate a report. In your Advanced Reports, the ad type 'Site' refers to CPM ads, and 'Contextual' refers to CPC ads.Want to show more CPM ads on your site? It's not possible to request CPM ads, but you can help advertisers get interested in your site by customizing your Onsite Advertiser Sign-up landing page. Advertisers can then create campaigns targeted specifically at your site, directly from your site. And don't forget to focus on quality, placement, and size -- take a look at some important tips from the AdWords team on what advertisers look for in site targeting their CPM ads.Remember: keep publishing that high-quality content and the advertisers will come to you.

ADSENSE PIN NUMBER STEPS


As you may know, one of the steps to receiving your first payment is to verify a Personal Identification Number (PIN). We'll send this PIN via standard postal mail once your earnings have reached $50, and then you'll need to enter it into the PIN Information Page of your account.Many concerned publishers ask whether they'll need to complete the PIN process more than once -- such as before receiving every check, or every time they generate $50 in earnings. Fortunately, the answer is no. You'll only need to enter in a PIN once per account, and we'll send it to you the first time you reach $50 in earnings.If you've reached $50 in earnings and haven't yet entered in your PIN, you'll see a box at the top of your Payment History page labeled 'Required Action'. Click on the 'Please enter your PIN' link to review detailed information about the date your most recent PIN was generated, and when you can request a replacement should you need one. Once you've verified your PIN, you should no longer see this language on your Payment History page.If you have more questions about our PIN process, you may wish to review our PIN guide or visit our Help Center.

ADSENSE FORMULA TIPS

Google Adsense tips, as explained in Why are ads displayed on this site?, most of the pages on this site display text ads from Google's AdWords program. To display these ads, a site must join Google's AdSense program. Joining is free, but not all sites are eligible to join. Once you're accepted, however, it's very simple to place the ads on your pages and to start generating revenue for your site. AdSense will serve ads that are generally very relevant to the content of a particular page. Here are some tips based on my experiences so far with the AdSense program. Google
Adsense Tip #1: Don't put ads on empty pages.
When I reworked my site, I built a skeleton set of pages that had no content, just titles and some meta tags. I displayed ads on those pages, however. Although all you see are public service ads at first, the very act of displaying ads on a page causes the AdSense web crawler to quickly fetch that page for analysis. A page with good content will thus begin showing relevant paying ads fairly quickly. If you don't have any content, then, Google will have to guess as what your page is about. It may guess wrong, and so the ads that it displays may not be relevant. You'll have to wait until Google re-crawls the site for the ads to correct themselves. Here is what Google had to say when I asked them about how often the AdSense crawler updates a site.

Thank you for taking the time to update your site. New ads will start appearing on your site the next time our crawler re-indexes your site. Unfortunately at this time, we are unable to control how often our crawlers index the content on your site. Crawling is done automatically by our bots. When new pages are added to your website or introduced to the AdSense program, our crawlers will usually get to them within 30 minutes. If you make changes to a page, however, it may take up to 2 or 3 weeks before the changes are reflected in our index. Until we are able to crawl your web pages, you may notice public service ads, for which you will not receive any earnings. It's better to flesh out the page before you start displaying ads on it.
Google Adsense Tip #2: Don't be afraid to ask questions. If you're wondering about something, don't be afraid to ask Google. So far, they've always responded to my questions within a working day. There are email addresses to use, depending on the type of question, homeopportunitybusiness@yahoo.com
Google Adsense Tip #3: Avoid non-English characters on English pages. This one is a bug, to be honest. My surname is French, and I prefer to write it out correctly with the accent grave on the first "e". Every page on my site would then include at least two accented letters, because my name shows up twice in the footer. On some pages my name shows up two or three more times. Normally, this wouldn't be an issue. But on some pages the presence of the accented characters is enough to cause AdSense to display non-relevant ads in French. This happens whether the browser indicates a preference for French or not. When I reported this to Google, this is the answer they gave me:

"Hello Eric,Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention.We are currently working as quickly as we can to address this problem. As soon as we have more information for you, we will email you again.We appreciate your patience.Sincerely,The Google Team"

Until this is resolved, I've decided to strip out all accents except on the pages that are actually in French.

Tip #4: Check your keyword density. Although Google doesn't release exact details as to how they determine the ads to serve on a given page, they do tell us that it's the text content of the page that matters, not the meta tags. Before serving ads on a page, then, you might want to check its keyword density. A good, free tool for doing this is found here:
http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.htmlThis lets you fine-tune the page before exposing it to the AdSense crawler.More AdSense TipsYou can find more AdSense tips in my Make Easy Money with Google blog. Here's the complete list so far:
AdSense Tip #6: Carefully craft blog or forum pages

ADSENSE MULTIPLE AD UNITS

Multiple Ad Units, another way to increase ad revenue is to use multiple ad units. According to Google’s TOS you are allowed to post up to three ad units per page. Similar to standard search results the highest paying ad units will be served first and the lowest being served last. If there is enough of an ad inventory, place all three ad units. However you should pay attention to the payouts. Current assumption is you get 60% of the revenue (on a $0.05 click you get $0.03). So if a click from the third ad unit is only paying between 3 to 5 cents you may want to omit it from your page. This is one are where giving your ad units channels does have value. If one ad unit is getting a higher percentage of click throughs you’ll want to make sure the highest paying ads are being served there. TIP:Use CSS positioning to get your highest paying ads serving in the location with the highest CTR.
Adsense in RSS, with the growth of blogs and RSS feeds you’re starting to see adsense included in the feeds now. IMHO this doesn’t work, and here’s why:

1. You only get to place one ad unit.
2. You have no control over finding the ’sweet spot’ for the ad unit.
3. The ads are usually poorly targeted (this is getting better).
4. People develop ‘banner blindness’.

I know people like being able to read full postings in their feed reader, and there are at least a dozen other reasons for full posts from pleasing your users to mobile offline computing, all of which are completely valid. However if your website depends on generating adsense revenue to survive, then bring them to the site and show them the ads there.

ADSENSE MANAGING URL'S

Managing URL’s and channels
Adsense channels is one area where it’s really easy to go overboard with stats. You can set up URL channels to compare how one website is doing to another. You can also set up sub channels for each URL. If you wanted to you do something channels like this:domain1.com - 728 bannerdomain1.com - 336 blockdomain1.com - text linkdomain2.com - 728 bannerdomain2.com - image bannerdomain2.com - 336 blockdomain3.com - 300 blockWhile this is great for testing and knowing who clicks where and why, it makes your reporting a little wonky. Your total number will always be correct but when you look at your reports with a channel break down things will get displayed multiple times and not add up to correct total. Makes things pretty confusing, so decide if you really need/want that level of reporting detail. TIP: At the very least you want to know what URL is generating the income so be sure to enter distinct URL channels.

Site Design and Integration
Once you know you are going to put adsense on your website you’re going to have to consider where to put it. If this is new site it’s easier, if it’s an existing site it’s more difficult. While there are some people who will be able to do it, in most cases I’d say if you just slap the adsense code in, you’ll end up with a frankensite monster (props to Tedster of WMW for the buzzword). While every website is different, Google has published some heat maps showing the optimal locations. No surprise that the best spots are middle of the page and left hand side. Now I’ve done really well by placing it on the right, but you should know why you’re doing it that way before hand, and be prepared to change it if it doesn’t work out.Google has also has published a list of the highest performing ad sizes:

-336×280 large rectangle
-300×250 inline rectangle
-160×600 wide skyscraper

From the sites that I run, I do really well with the 336 rectangle and 160 skyscraper. My next best performing ad size is the 728 leaderboard, I don’t really use the 300 inline rectangle too often. So really it depends on how well you integrate these into your site. Placement can have a dramatic effect on performance. TIP: When working on a new site or new layout you may want to give each location it’s own channel for a little while until you understand the users behavior. Another ‘trick’ that can increase your CTR is by blending your adsense into your body copy. For example if your body copy is black, remove the adsense border and make the title, text, and URL black.TIP: Try changing all of your page hyperlinks to a high contrast color (like dark red or a bold blue) then change the adsense title to the same color.

The one area where I’ve found blended ads don’t perform as well is forums, especially ones with a high volume of repeat members. Regular visitors develop banner blindness pretty quickly. One ‘trick’ to keep the ads from being ignored is to randomize the color and even the placement. As with any of the decisions about location, placement and color it’s a trade off. How much do you emphasize the ads without annoying your visitors. Remember it’s better to have a 1% CTR with 500 regular visitors as opposed to a 5% CTR with 50 visitors. TIP: For forums try placing the adsense ads directly above or below the the first forum thread.

Using ImagesOne of the latest ’secrets’ to make the rounds is using images placed directly above or below an adsense leaderboard. This has been used for a while but came out in a digital point forum thread where a member talked about
quadrupling their CTR. Basically you set up the adsense code in a table with four images that line up directly with the ads. Whether or not this is deceptive is fuzzy and very subjective. Obviously four blinking arrows would be ‘enticing people to click’ and be against the adsense TOS. However placing pictures of 4 laptops over laptops ads isn’t, so use your best judgment here and look at it from the advertiser or Google’s perspective. If you have a question as to your implementation being ‘over the line’ write to adsense and ask them to take a look. As far as using the images, I’ve done it and can tell you it definitely works. You get the best results when the images ‘complete the story the ads are telling’. For example if you have ads about apple pies, use pictures of freshly baked apple pies, instead of granny smith, Macintosh, pink lady, and braeburn apples. TIP: Don’t limit yourself to using images only on that size ad unit, it works just as well with the other sizes, like the 336 rectangle.Added:I got a little criticizm for this and rightly so, as I wasn’t specific as I could have been. Do not use very identifiable brand name or products for your images. Use generic non-specific stock images whenever possible and appropriate

ADSENSE TIPS

General or NicheYou can build your website around general topics or niche ones. Generally speaking niche websites work better with adsense. First off the ad targeting is much better. Secondly as you have a narrow focus your writing naturally becomes more expert in nature. Hopefully this makes you more authority in your field. If this is your first try at building an adsense website, make it about something you enjoy. It will make the process much easier and less painful to accomplish. You should however make sure that your topic has enough of an ad inventory and the payout is at a level you are comfortable with. You may love medieval folk dancing, but the pool of advertisers for that subject is very small (in fact it’s currently zero).

Once you’ve gotten the hang of how Adsense works on a website, you are going to want to dabble in some high paying keywords, you may even be tempted to buy a high paying keyword list. This does come with some dangers. First off the level of fraud is much higher on the big money terms. Secondly there is a distortion of the supply and demand relationship for these terms. Everyone wants ads on their website that make $35 or more a click, however the number of advertisers who are willing to pay that much is pretty limited. Additionally the competition for that traffic is going to be stiff. So, don’t try to run with the big dogs if you can’t keep up. If you have to ask if you’re a big dog, then chances are, you’re not. I have used a high dollar keywords report from
cashkeywords.com and was pleased with my results (see cash keywords free offer recap).

New Sites, Files and MaintenanceWhen you’re building a new site don’t put adsense on it until it’s finished. In fact I’d go even farther and say don’t put adsense on it until you have built inbound links and started getting traffic. If you put up a website with “lorem ipsum” dummy or placeholder text, your adsense ads will almost certainly be off topic. This is often true for new files on existing websites, especially if the topic is new or different. It may take days or weeks for google’s media bot to come back to your page and get the ads properly targeted. TIP: If you start getting lots of traffic from a variety of IP’s you will speed this process up dramatically. I like to build my sites using include files. I put the header, footer and navigation in common files. It makes it much easier to maintain and manage. I also like to put my adsense code in include files. If I want/need to change my adsense code, it’s only one file I have to work with. TIP: I also use programming to turn the adsense on or off. I can change one global variable to true or false and my adsense ads will appear or disappear.