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Here's
What I Use To Help my eBay Selling
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by:
Brian McGregor
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I
get many requests about the systems I use in running my own eBay and
internet business.
To give you the answer in one place, here is the software which I use
daily in my own business.
I should point out that much of my own activity is now to do with
selling digital information via eBay and from websites i.e. ebooks and
software, which is why some of the software programs I use are
concerned with this activity.
General productivity
Shortkeys
This is lovely utility which saves me hours of time each week. It is
perfect for those occasions when you are required to key in information
to websites. For example, how often do you key in your name and
address, or a username and password, or an email address?
With Shortkeys, you associate 3 or 4 unique keystrokes with a string of
frequently used information. Let's suppose I want to have a shortkey
for my email address, and I set this as ##z1 in Shortkeys. Whenever I
am required to key in my email address, in Outlook, on web forms, in
Word documents etc, I just type in ##z1 and Shortkeys instantly
replaces that with my email address.
There is an uncharged version called Shortkeys Lite which has a limit
of 30 items. The full version of Shortkeys allows you an unlimited
number of items.
You can get it here: http://www.workwinners.com/nlrshortkeys.htm
Download Accelerator
If you regularly download ebooks or software, and it seems to take
forever, you will find Download Accelerator is a useful addition to
your portfolio. Download Accelerator increases download speeds by up to
300%, regardless of the speed of your internet connection. I don't know
how it does it, but I guess 89 million users can't be wrong!
You can get Download Accelerator on 14 day test here:
http://www.workwinners.com/nlraccelerator.htm
Ebook Production
Acrobat Adobe
I create all my ebooks in pdf format as this file can be read by anyone
with Acrobat Reader, and this includes Mac users too. The way I create
an ebook is to write it in Microsoft Word first. Once I'm happy that
the Word version is exactly how I want it, I use an integrated
converter which takes the Word file and converts it automatically into
a pdf file. This conversion preserves everything which appeared in the
Word document, including headers/footers, page numbers and web links.
You can read all about Adobe Acrobat here:
http://www.workwinners.com/nlracrobat.htm
If you are considering developing your own ebooks using Acrobat, the
most cost effective way of purchasing it is to buy online from Adobe's
US site, and select the download option. To buy the download version
this is the place to start:
http://www.workwinners.com/nlracrobat_dl.htm
At 167 Mb, Acrobat is quite a large software product. If you would
therefore prefer to buy the boxed CD version, the cheapest way in the
UK is to get it from Amazon.
http://www.workwinners.com/nlramacrobat.htm
ebook Covers
It is a fact that showing your ebook in 3D form so it looks like a book
really helps to boost sales. Compact Draw is the software I use to
create my ebook covers. You can try it for 30 days here:
http://www.workwinners.com/nlrcompact.htm
Website creation and maintenance
Website design
I use Macromedia's Dreamweaver to design websites, and indeed to create
eBay auction description pages. Dreamweaver is a premium web design
product, and unless you're going to do serious website design I
wouldn't advise you to acquire it.
It comes in boxed form, and Macromedia will channel any UK purchasers
to a UK based reseller. The cheapest way in the UK is to get it from
Amazon. http://www.workwinners.com/nlramdream.htm
Image Manipulation & Optimising
I use Paint Shop Pro for picture manipulation and for optimising. This
is important for auction pictures, as eBay have a size limit of 50KB on
any pictures which you want to upload to their Picture Service.
The authors, JASC, have just released Version 9 of this software. I
find Version 8 is perfectly acceptable for everything I want to do, and
it's cheaper than Version 9.
You can't now buy Version 8 from the author's USA site, which is
unfortunate as this was the cheapest way of buying the product before
Version 9 came out.
The good news is that Version 8 is currently half price at the author's
UK site, as you can see here: http://www.workwinners.com/nlrpsp.htm
It's available for trial at the UK site, and I recommend you test it to
see if you can work with it.
Website upload
Cute FTP is probably the best known FTP software. I have used it for
several years and have been very satisfied with the software.
http://www.workwinners.com/nlrcute.htm
Website hosting
ProWebSpace are excellent and reasonable web hosts which I have now
been using for over a year. I transferred to them from another host
with whom I was having lots of problems. Now, I have a better service,
and it's at one third the price! Of course, you can get web space for
nothing from a variety of ISPs. Take a look at http://www.freeisp.com
You only need companies like ProWebSpace if you intend to "go
commercial" in your internet activities. If you do, it's important to
have a paid service as this gives you the right to kick b**t if ever
you experience hosting problems. If you would like to know the hosting
company who I moved from, email me. If you think you need professional
hosting, this is definitely where I would start.
http://www.workwinners.com/nlrpws.htm
Newsletter and other Mailings
As my newsletter has grown, I've tried various ways of managing my
mailing lists. I currently use Press-Manager, and have found their
service to be very easy to set-up and to use. It's a web based service,
and all mailings are performed from their site. This means there's no
software to be installed, I can manage my mailings from any PC and my
ISP no longer bears the mailing load.
http://www.workwinners.com/nlrpm.htm
Autoresponding
You may know that the use of autoresponders is one of the keys to
marketing on the internet. I use Promasoft, and have found it can
easily handle everything I want.
http://www.workwinners.com/nlrpsoft.htm
I hope this glimpse into the systems and services I use has been
helpful.
Good luck in your own internet business developments and in your eBay
selling.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian McGregor specializes in showing website owners how to make more
money from their sites by applying inventive and original use of eBay.
For a free copy of ‘The eBay Traffic Funnel’ which shows you how to use
the power of eBay to make more money with your website, visit
http://www.more-auction-sales.com/websites
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