My First eBay Sale!!

I’m all excited about making my first sale on eBay. Although I’ve wanted for some time to try selling some excess stuff, I kept putting it off. What if I did it wrong? What if no one placed a bid? How would I know what to do?

It turns out that eBay anticipates all these worries and really tries to make it fool proof. The form to list the item for auction was quite understandable. The site kept me informed with details like how many people viewed the item and what the bids were.

I’d opted with a 7-day auction, though there are all sorts of time variations and sell-it-now to tailor your selling experience. The first four days there was only a 99 cent bid. It made me anxious that the pair of golf shoes might go for such a lowly amount. I had to remind myself that after 6 months of the shoes taking up shelf space, I’d been about ready to send them off to Goodwill.

Even 99 cents  would be something and the buyer would pay for the mailing. Finally a second bidder joined in and the price edged up to $13. This evening the auction ended and I briefly panicked. What now? Again eBay provided step-by-step instructions for printing the postage after buyer paid. I see on Paypal that eBay’s fee was 89 cents. Certainly seems modest.

The package is ready to go and already I’m thinking about what I’ll list next. WhooHoo, I can start clearing out all the odds and ends that we no longer use or need.

Branding My Civil War Articles

I’ve created over 30 lenses (web pages) on Squidoo about the Civil War and my great-great grandfather. On Squidoo, this is called a niche and it’s important to link all those together. That way a visitor to one of the lenses is likely to browse the provided links and end up reading several lenses.

In addition to luring them from one page to the next, I want to get credit for my expertise in this topic. Instead of putting “More about the Civil War” and listing my pages, I put “More about the Civil War by Virginia Allain.” This is my effort at branding.

To help with this, I commissioned a logo for my Civil War pages. I’m putting it at the top of my list of related lenses. Hopefully the graphic will emphasize the connection on all this information that I’ve written and curated. here’s my logo:

Civil War Topics for Squidoo

I now have a variety of these logos to use with my Squidoo niches. You can see them at Creating Your Squidoo Brand. They include gift guides, library topics, photography topics, Kansas topics, Squidoo tips and techniques, writing and publishing, and several more.