Red Ink Diary

Time and money are two things everyone feels they do not have enough of. This is not a new phenomenon (def.#2) there are many sayings about both time and money.

The subject of time management is as fresh today as as it was 300 years ago. Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790) gave us both “Time is money” and “Never leave that till to-morrow which you can do to-day.” He is also credited with “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Smart fella!

Dr Steven Covey, internationally respected author, leadership authority and teacher said “The challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves.” and ” The key is in not spending time, but in investing it.”

Auntie May, insignificant middle aged ex eBay small seller, thinks time is a non renewable resource, when it is gone it’s gone.

It is easy to be so overwhelmed by the demands of everyday life that you don’t ever really get anything else done. While it is important to recognize your own procrastination signals and techniques; we all have them and you need to know them to overcome them; there are a few simple tricks to becoming more productive. I am going to share three that work for me, I hope that you will share yours.

Set and write down your goals

It is believed that the act of writing focuses the most powerful part of your mind, the sub-conscious. It doesn’t seem to matter what you write your goals on or what you do with them once written, the mere act of writing achieves the purpose. Allowing your sub-conscious to work at your goals while your conscious mind is doing other things.

There are many different goals, from the ‘I want to be rich’ kind to ‘I want to double my sales this holiday season.’ Life time goals, short term goals, intermediate goals or steps that will move you closer to a larger goal. Write them all down. I want to get the laundry folded today is a target not a goal.

Small bites

Make your targets small, achievable. Break down large or overwhelming targets into little easy ones. Folding a huge pile of laundry somehow becomes much less effort if you aim at folding all the underwear, then the jeans, tee shirts etc. Making the putting away into more separate ‘jobs’ allows you to feel a sense of accomplishment at each step. Maybe even reward yourself with a little break. I will make coffee after this point. Set a time limit on your rewards or they will magically turn into procrastination plays. Do not ask me how I know this.

Lists

I am a firm believer in the positive power of list making. A list will help focus your mind and set a definite target.

Do not ever feel that you have to get through everything on your list today, that will simply add stress. Stress is an inhibitor (def.#3).

Make a new list every day, anything left over from yesterday can go on your new list. Remember, small bites. Put everything on your list, it might read breakfast, shower, dress, blog, fill dog water and so on. You don’t need to do things in list order but each time you finish a task, cross it off your list. You will be amazed how good it feels to cross something off your list! If you think of something you need to do, add it to your list, and remember, small bites.

Now I get to cross ‘blog’ off my list and go eat breakfast!
Y’all come back!

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Anyone can upload their product to Google. Doing it correctly and getting it found is the trick, followed by getting it seen before your competition’s items. So, as a small or micro-seller what can you do to improve your ranking?

First, the obvious

• Title - use key phrases, this is organic search. “Suggested maximum length of 70 characters”. For example the angel Christmas ornament shown below was listed for a long time as “Repro Victorian Die Cut Embossed Christmas Angel Ornament” all of which are good accurate describing words, but many do not rank high on searched words. I am hoping that using “Christmas Ornament Swedish Angel Tree Candle” will do better.
• Price - lower ranks higher among comparables
• Description - 150 characters and spaces will be your ‘hook’, what appears in the Google Shopping search. Use the key words and phrases you couldn’t get into your title, do not repeat within the first 100 characters and spaces. Bullets seem to gain brownie points. As an example here are the first 150 characters and spaces in my ad. “Large angel or Saint Lucia carrying a lighted candle and a Christmas tree This is a beautiful old fashioned paper ornament reproduced from an antique” note that I have eliminated commas and periods to be able to get in the word “antique”. Rules for Google Checkout Buy Now buttons are a little different, you put your 100 character description into the button maker so what you write next to the picture has very little weight.

No duplication: this is a new Google rule. You may list the same product on many venues, your website etc. but Google will reject the listing, even with different price, description, title etc. The policy is very clear.

“We do not permit duplicate products in the same account or between multiple accounts. If products are available on multiple sites under the same ownership, one site must be chosen to exclusively submit those products. For example, if you own two websites that sell the same product, you may not submit that product for both sites, regardless of pricing or promotional differences.”

Attributes!

Attributes are simply data written in a form Google can access and translate.

Here is where it gets tricky. Google has very strict rules and they are (oddly) not very good at making them easy to find. Here is a complete list of all attributes defined by Google Product Search in the new Merchant Center.

Some attributes are required, leave them out and your product is out. If you are selling on a Marketplace venue that submits feeds to Google they should, if they know what they are doing, submit the information you have included in your listing.

• condition - choose from new, used or refurbished
• description - Google says “Text, up to a maximum length of 10,000 characters. Ideally greater than 15 characters and 3 words. Do not include promotional or boilerplate text, such as “Free shipping!” or “Click here now!”
• id - A unique alphanumeric identifier for the item i.e your SKU If you sell on Bonanzle the site allocates an identifier if you do not.
• link - The URL of the web page associated with the item. This should not forward to another URL; it must point directly to the target page.
• price - fixed price only, use this format  4.95 or 20.00, free items do not appear in Google Product Search.
• title - Google does not like all CAPS, non relevant symbols like exclamation points, asterisks, more information is found in Editorial Guidelines

The not so secret search boosters

1. Offer Google Checkout; this should not come as a surprise. The argument that you only offer PayPal because it is required on eBay will cost you ranking on your website items.
2. Use the optional payment_accepted and payment_notes attributes in your website feed. On Bonanzle, which does xml feeds, add this at the bottom of your listing. [[ payment_accepted:Visa payment_accepted:Cash payment_accepted:Mastercard payment_notes:Google Checkout]] Be sure to leave no space on either side between the colon and the attribute but do leave a space between multiple attributes, which (on Bonanzle) must all be enclosed in the one set of brackets.
3. Reviews - Think of Google Checkout Reviews as Google Feedback. As Bonanzle sellers we all need to get into the habit of completing Google Checkout reviews on our eligible purchases on the site. They carry an incredible amount of ranking weight. The more sellers with positive reviews we have on Bonanzle the better we will all do.

To enable reviews on purchases check off the review box when you make a payment. Google will email you a review form after you have had time to receive the purchased item. To make reviews on past Google Checkout purchases and learn more about the Google seller review process click here.

Y’all come back!

Christmas Ornament Swedish Angel with Tree and Candle $5.00
Large angel or Saint Lucia carrying a lighted candle and a Christmas tree This is a beautiful old fashioned paper ornament reproduced from an antique. A complex die cut (with interior cuts, not just around the outside) she is printed on both sides, embossed, and has a gold hanging cord.

Shipping to anywhere in the USA is included in the price.

Size approximately 5-3/4′ tall and 4″ across

In my post Selling Made Simple last week I looked at the basic anatomy of a sale.

Today I am thinking about the importance of titles. The title of your listing is one of the most important ingredients of a successful listing. A successful listing is one which results in conversion. Conversion is what happens when your potential buyer finds and buys your offering. He or she is converted from a looker to a buyer.

Finding
The internet is huge. There are billions of items for sale out there. Search engines sort through them and present results to queries.

Search engines do not ‘read’ the whole listing, they do not ’see’ photographs or javascript. Some take the first 250 characters, others even less, 120 or 150.

The paragraph above has 158 characters and spaces.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an industry, search engines, particularly Google, constantly change the way they index results. They have to because the SEO experts spend all day trying to get their clients to the top of the search results. When they succeed it is good for their clients but not necessarily good for the integrity of the search process. If the search engine does not produce satisfactory results searchers will go to a different engine so the whole process is a continual to and fro. Search engines are not all the same, but there are some rules that apply across the board.

Do Not

• Use all CAPS
• Use special characters like “, /, ~, for example if you use w/out it will be read as a word so unless someone specifically searches for w/out it is wasted space
• If~Your~Title~Looks~Like~This, or If/Your/Title/Looks/Like/This it will be read as one word. What is the probability of someone searching for that word?
• Make every title the same, even if the products are very similar.
• Use ‘rare’ or ‘unique’ unless it really is, most things are not!
• Use site specific abbreviations off that site. An example would be BIN used off eBay.

Do remember

• Titles do not need to be complete sentences or even grammatical
• Use words that describe your product
• Find words that are likely to be searched
• Think about words and search for them to see what results you get
• If there are two different spellings for a word use one in the title and one in the description. eg. Post Card, postcard

There are free keyword search tools, Google is easy to use.

Keyword spam will not make you popular.
Using the same word over and over again is keyword spam. The classic example is WII WII WII, this may work like a charm for a short while but it will end up getting you into trouble, Another classic example of keyword spam is

“New Sony headphones for your iPod phone camera laptop TV!”

The item listed is not any of those devices, and yet it will appear whenever searchers want to buy an iPod, a phone, a camera, a laptop etc. That is irritating to buyers and may get your listing removed at some venues.

Blackhat SEO can get you blacklisted. If it looks dishonest or tricky you probably don’t want to go there.

First Impressions

It is important to remember that although we want our listings to be found, we are not writing listings solely for search engines. Your title and description plus your photographs give a first impression to your potential buyer. As buyers get more sophisticated and/or tired of looking their attention span grows shorter. The back button gets used quicker!

Blurry pictures, miss-spellings, incomplete descriptions and eBay style ugly Terms of Service are common and they are all turn-offs.

Turn on your sales and
y’all come back!