PLUS: How to use eBay for front-end sales and make the biggest profits later

PLUS: Give shifty eBay customers their own back!

‘Flipping’ describes buying items with the intention of re-selling them at a higher price, sometimes with work done to make an item more valuable, and frequently by promoting the item unchanged in a different marketplace or with a bonus item to justify a higher price.

Countless different products can be flipped, including websites and domain names.

4 easy ways to turn a huge profit on newly acquired domain names

Flipping domain names is one of the currently most popular ways to make money online, and it can be extremely easy and also very profitable, if you know how it’s done!

This article will help you get started in this new and very exciting business, which can generate huge profits in very short time, even without heavy investment or experience or skills of any kind.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Identify current big-price sales like ‘giftideas.co.uk’ (fetched £25,743.12 at Sedo.com), then consider buying other suffixes not currently registered for ‘giftideas’.

• Study high-price domain name sales and look for other word combinations that mean much the same thing as the main body of a high-price domain. For example, for ‘skincareproducts.net’, which fetched $9,000 a few years back, you could look for other word combinations meaning much the same as ‘skin care products’, and you might consider registering all available suffixes. Consider ‘skin care treatments’, for example, or ‘skin perfection creams’.

Please note those ideas came from the top of my head and I have not looked at whether they are available to purchase or already registered to someone else.

• Look for UK-English-language alternatives for domain names with high price American spellings: take ‘colorlasercopier.com’, which fetched $1,000 at Sedo – is ‘colourlasercopier.com’ available to register I wonder?

As for the ‘color/colour’ combination, seek UK-English and other language alternatives for high-price domain names featuring words like ‘color’, ‘center’, ‘humor’, ‘favorite’.

• Look for American-English-language versions of domain names for recent high-price .co.uk or other suffix domains and work the last idea all over again, only this time in reverse.

How to use eBay for front-end sales and make the biggest profits later

When you make a sale on eBay you should keep your buyer’s name and address and look for additional items to offer that person later. That’s because research shows around one in five customers ultimately become regular buyers. This happens in mail order, on the Internet, by direct mail, and on eBay.

That, in turn, means if you don’t follow up on past buyers you’re effectively forfeiting 20% additional profit on every sale.

So imagine you sell a book on eBay, for example, and you sell 100 copies every month. Over the year that’s 1,200 customers. Of that number, 240 could become regular buyers of similar and sometimes unrelated book titles. That is IF you locate something else for those people to buy!

The most important thing to know is that the initial book – or other suitable product – must lend itself to back-end selling. For books, that means titles with long-term appeal, such as making money from property, fishing, or bringing up children.

Other items with long-term, continuous appeal include health and beauty products, retirement plans, art and antiques, and collectibles.

This is what you do next:

1) Record names and addresses of first-time buyers and enquirers to promote goods to later. But next time you will be selling outside of eBay, without breaking any rules, and without paying listing or final selling fees.

2) Obtain another product that might interest people buying or enquiring about one of your products on eBay.

3) Send an email promoting that product. Tell recipients where to obtain the product and provide a link to the appropriate sales page. Some email programs let you include your PayPal button for payment in the body of an email containing the sales letter.

How simple was that?

Give shifty eBay customers their own back!

One of the most prolific buyer scams happens where someone has a damaged item – one they may have had and used for years or the scammer has broken the item and can’t get their money back from the seller. So they bid on a similar item on eBay, which when it arrives is swapped with the damaged item.

The damaged item is returned to the person selling the perfect example and eBay is told that person in selling damaged goods. In many cases eBay will refund the buyer to avoid further aggravation.

The scam works and leaves sellers heavily out of pocket, and the conman or woman in possession of a brand-new item in place of another that may have originally cost them little or nothing.

My friend came up with an answer to this problem, in the shape of one of those pens the police use to mark bicycles, vehicles and other valuables, and with a code that only appears when held against a specific kind of ultra violet light.

Many enlightened eBay and other marketplace sellers mark all expensive items this way: when items are returned without the mark, the perpetrators are reported immediately to eBay and sometimes also the police.

Involving the police is heavy handed but there are some very unscrupulous buyers out there, like the man who bought a 105-year old box I had listed which was originally used to store stereo photographs. It was in perfect condition and carefully packed when posted out but the message came back: ‘Either refund on this broken item or else!’

I asked for the box to be sent back and I had to pay return postage. When it came back the item bore no resemblance at all to the one I sent out. It was not the same box: just an inferior and badly damaged similar item.

So how do you mark your items without being spotted (giving the game away and certainly without diminishing their value)?

Let the London Metropolitan Police explain: ‘For antiques or other valuable property which might be devalued or spoiled by visible marking, there’s an invisible ultra-violet marker. Burglars cannot see it, but if something marked is stolen we can identify it with a special ultra-violet lamp. UV markers are available from most good DIY stores and stationers at around two pounds. It’s important to remember that UV marking fades and will need to be renewed every so often.‘

Tip: Make just a tiny mark where it won’t easily be spotted by anyone else, such as in a crevice or inner part.

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Finally, a few weeks ago I promised a free report about using articles to promote your own and other people’s products. That report is almost finished and will be with you very soon.