The Online Biz Guy: February 2008

Sunday, February 10, 2008

The Book " eBay Income"

"An excellent resource for all those who want to become serious eBay sellers!" --Angela Adams, Editor

“Cheryl Russell has done a great job of explaining all the ins and outs of becoming an eBay seller.” --Jackie Ness, Editor

The above are a couple of positive reviews noted on the book "eBay Income: How Anyone of Any Age, Location, and/or Background Can Build a Highly Profitable Online Business with eBay"
eBay has changed the way products and services are purchased all over the world. Daily over 1.5 million online customers and providers log on to bid and sell virtually anything that can be bought or purchased. In 2006 eBay sellers are estimated to post $22 billion in sales. There are businesses earning $1 million a year selling products on eBay today. It is estimated that more than half a million people make full-time incomes just with their eBay business.

eBay also allows you to run a business that requires no advertising costs. This expertly written new book will show you how to take advantage of this business phenomenon and arm you with the proper knowledge and insider secrets. Filled with actual examples and antidotes from real eBay entrepreneurs, this book is as engaging as it is informational. eBay is a level playing field—it doesn’t matter how old you are, what nationality or income level, whether you own a business now or not, what your background is, or where you are located.

Start making money on eBay today!

The book starts with a complete overview of how eBay works. Then you are guided through the whole process of creating the auction and auction strategies, photography, writing copy, text and formatting, managing auctions, shipping, collecting payments, registering, About Me page, sources for merchandise, multiple sales, programming tricks, PayPal, accounting, creating marketing, merchandising, managing e-mail lists, advertising plans, taxes and sales tax, best time to list items and for how long, sniping programs, international customers, opening a storefront, electronic commerce, buy-it now pricing, keywords, Google marketing, and eBay secrets; everything you will ever need to get started making money on eBay!

About the Author
Cheryl L. Russell holds Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science degrees from Winona State University in Minnesota. She first began using eBay as a casual buyer and began selling while home raising her two youngest children. In addition to occasionally selling on eBay and being a full-time mother, Cheryl puts her education to work by freelance writing. She enjoys reading, designing custom dresses for her daughters and other creative pursuits. Cheryl and husband Fred Miller live in southwest Wisconsin with three daughters, six pet birds and a pair of chinchillas.

Get hold a copy now. You will not regret it.

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Saturday, February 9, 2008

Picking a Domain Name

Today I am going to share with you an interesting article I came across on picking a domain name. This article was written by Sam Harnett MSc mBCS of http://www.pixeko.com.

Your domain name should be descriptive of your business and easy for people to remember. Take the time to carefully consider your domain name and find will serve the long term needs of your business.

Why Should You Register Your Own Domain Name?

Register your domain name as soon as you decide upon the name of your internet business. The worst thing that can happen to you is for your domain name to be purchased by a competitor who gets wind of your business name and holds the domain for ransom! You can use a web address that your Internet server provides you, However this doesn't give the most professional impression. And what if your internet service provider changes the format in which their sub domains are issued and all you search engine optimization work is geared towards the old format? Having your own domain name allows you complete control over things like sub domains, domain forwarding and email addresses'.

It is worth spending a bit of money registering your own domain and paying to have it hosted. You will also receive email addresses that contain your domain name; this looks very professional and is a great advertisement for your site as your sites address will essentially be included with every email you send.

Make your domain name something easy for people to remember and not too complicated. It should be something people can type into their browser by memory. Therefore is should be as short as possible,

Choosing a Domain Name for Search Engines

Currently, search engines place high importance on the domain name asregard to keywords it contains. Therefore, using descriptive domain names like the above can help in achieving good rankings. Each word in your domain name should be hyphenated as this allows the search engine to differentiate between them.

However, don't place too much emphasis on search engine optimisation at the expense of confusing your customers.

Don't make your domain name too long, your customers wont be able to remember it. If you do decide to hyphenate your domain name, buy the same version of the domain name without hyphens, in case your customers forget the hyphens. You can have as many domain names as you like pointing to the same site, this is called domain parking.

For example: Imagine a company that sells luxury holidays in Spain.

I would buy luxury-spanish-hoidays.com and host my website on that domain. This helps search engines distinguish between the words.

I would also buy luxuryspanishholidays.com and forward it to the above domain. That way, if my customers forget the hyphens, they can still find my site.

In addition to purchasing the hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions of your domain name you may also want to purchase the various top level domains (.com, .net, .co.uk, .es) in order to protect your domain name from potential competition buying its variations in the hope of poaching your customers.

Choosing a Web Designer

A common mistake made by many new businesses as well as existing businesses looking to expand their business online is to hand responsibility for their web project off to a consultant or design firm without first making that they are qualified for the job and understand the requirements and expectations of the company they are working for.

Your web designer should have the chance to consult with all of your staff who will be involved in the maintenance of the website. You should also provide them with as much promotional material, press releases etc as possible in order to maximize their understanding of your business.

Use your designer only to convert the information to Web language, design the graphics and page layout, and create the necessary scripting for things like a user response form. Someone in-house or a volunteer should be able to make regular changes to the site without needing assistance of the web designer; therefore, the designer should create pages that allow these changes to happen easily.

What to look for in a Web Designer

Someone who

If he or she is a professional, provides you with references of satisfied clients
Provides you with examples of online work
Is committed to carrying over your printed publications "style" into the Web site design
Speaks in as non-technical terms as possible
Is committed to creating a site that someone in-house or a volunteer can make regular changes to without needing assistance of the designer
Is willing to work with staff and volunteers in the Web site development, listening to their wants and needs for the site
Turns over ownership of all graphics created for the site to you
Has a history of working with mission-based organizations, understanding such organization's limited resources, unique needs and community focus
Understands how to make a site

The Article source is

http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sam_Harnett

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Form Submissions Without Submit Buttons

By William Bontrager

When you want a form that can be submitted without requiring the rather prominent submit button, this article shows you how, with several methods:

Submitting a form with a regular link.
Submitting a form when a checkbox is checked.
Automatically submitting a form.

This article contains step-by-step instructions with code examples. I think you'll find it easy to follow.

The article assumes you already have a working form that is submitted to a CGI program in the conventional manner, with a submit button. When you see "/cgi-bin/script.cgi" in the examples, substitute the URL of your CGI program.

If you don't already have form and CGI program, consider Master Feedback from http://willmaster.com/master/feedback/ to have the submitted information sent to you via email, or Master Form V3 from http://willmaster.com/master/formV3/ for a program that can also store form information in a database on your server.

Submitting a Form With a Regular Link

With this method, you can cause a form to be submitted when the user clicks on a regular link, which can be a text link or an image link.

This requires two steps.

First step, the form —

Give your form a name. This is done in the FORM tag itself:

<form
   name="MyForm"
   method="POST"
   action="/cgi-bin/script.cgi">

Second step, the JavaScript —

Create a link containing the submit command:

<a href="javascript:document.MyForm.submit();">
Click to submit the form
</a>

Optional third step —

You can remove the submit button or, to be kind to the few non-JavaScript browsers that visit your site, put it between NOSCRIPT tags:

<noscript>
<input type="submit" name="Click here">
</noscript>

The above will display the submit button only when non-JavaScript browsers visit the page.

Submitting a Form When a Checkbox is Checked

We'll use a checkbox to demonstrate how to cause a form to be submitted when the user does something with a form field. When the checkbox is checked, the form submits.

(Actually, the submission occurs when the checkbox is clicked, which would be a check if it was previously unchecked or would be an uncheck if it was checked.)

This requires two steps.

First step, the form —

Give your form a name and add the checkbox. The checkbox would probably have instructive text. Example:

<form
   name="MyForm"
   method="POST"
   action="/cgi-bin/script.cgi">
<input
   type="checkbox"
   name="MyCheck"
   onClick="DoSubmission();">
   Check when done with form

Second step, the JavaScript —

<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript"><!--
function DoSubmission() {
document.MyForm.submit();
}
//--></script>

Put the JavaScript anywhere on your page, in the HEAD or BODY area, above or below the form.

Optional third step —

As in the "Submitting a Form With a Regular Link" section, above, you can remove the submit button or keep it between NOSCRIPT tags for non-JavaScript browsers.

Automatically Submitting a Form

If you only want to log CGI environment variables, and/or set a cookie, a form submission without actually sending information to the CGI program could be appropriate. Otherwise, the form should have information to submit before it is submitted, whether automatically or by manual click.

In other words, we'll have to figure out a way to get information into the form before it's automatically submitted.

Information that's available to put into the form are things like the current web page URL and the time zone information from your visitor's computer. The latter is a way to determine which geographical time zones your visitors are at — except those who have incorrect clocks and/or time zone information specified for their computers.

This requires two steps.

First step —

Put a form with a name into your web page. There must be one hidden field for each item of information you want to automatically fill with information and submit, current URL and time zone offset are in our example:

<form
   name="MyForm"
   method="POST"
   action="/cgi-bin/script.cgi">
<input
   type="hidden"
   name="ThisPageURL"
   value="">
<input
   type="hidden"
   name="TimeZoneOffset"
   value="">
</form>

You'll need to add a hidden field to let your CGI program know the URL of the "thank you" page it should use.

Put the form anywhere in the BODY tag. It won't be visible, but it will cause the browser to print a blank line.

Second step, the JavaScript —

Somewhere below the form, put the following JavaScript code:

<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript"><!--
document.MyForm.ThisPageURL.value = document.URL;
var x = new Date();
document.MyForm.TimeZoneOffset.value = x.getTimezoneOffset();
document.MyForm.submit();
//--></script>

When the page is loaded, the JavaScript will automatically fill in the form with the web page's URL and the time zone offset information from your visitor's computer, and then automatically submit the form. After processing the form information, the CGI program presents a "thank you" page.

The time zone offset is the number of minutes plus (West) or minus (East) of Greenwich Mean Time.

Optional third step —

Because the automatic submission of the form will load a different page (don't have the "thank you" page be the same page, re-loaded, or it will submit the form each time the page loads, in an infinite loop), you may want to put your automatic form submission page into an IFRAME tag. The "thank you" page can then be an image or other content that you want to display on the page.

To make an IFRAME tag, put this into a web page (a web page different than the web page with the automatically submitted form):

<iframe
   height="300"
   width="200"
   src="WebPageContainingAutomaticForm.html">
</iframe>

Adjust the URL so the web page containing the automatically submitted form loads into the IFRAME tag. And adjust the height and width to accommodate the "thank you" page.

The web page with the automatically submitted form will load into the IFRAME and, after automatic submission, load the "thank you" page.

(Netscape versions 4.# and earlier don't recognize the IFRAME tag. It's ignored, as if it wasn't there — no extra space, no content, nothing.)

Notes

If you decide to test several of the above examples on the same web page, give the forms different names. Otherwise, the browser is likely to become confused about which information belongs to which form.

Have fun with the examples. Once you're familiar with how they work, you can decide whether or not they can be adapted to your unique requirements.

Will Bontrager

Copyright © Bontrager Connection, LLC

About the Author:

William Bontrager Programmer/Publisher, "WillMaster Possibilities" ezine mailto:possibilities@willmaster.com

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