The Ebay to Go

LOCATION: O'neils Pub, Heathrow Terminal 3, London, UK

As I mentioned in my last post I had found a good supplier for printing and distribution of my images and have now eventually done something about trying to sell a few.

I have always had an account with ebay so I just logged into this as normal and have put up two images for sale. I've decided I will try different styles of imagery over the next few weeks and maybe play with different size prints. My first attempt is 2 abstract images printed to A1 size and supplied rolled in a tube ready to frame.

IMAGE 1 LINK
IMAGE 2 LINK

I have started them at a relatively low price and have put them up for 7 days.

I don't really know much about pushing ebay sales so for this instance i'll see what happens

I'm now off away to Monreal for 3 weeks and have taken my camera and laptop with me. Any decent photos I take and I will probably put oe of two of them on Ebay as photos are the next thing I want to try.

If anyone has had any experience selling imagery on Ebay any tips would be extremely helpful. I will be trawling the net when I get a chance looking for ideas and see what others have had luck with.

Will post again soon,

Ian.

The Fact of Online Life.....

LOCATION: Uk, London, Plumstead, My Flat, In Bed!!

My first post for 10 days!

So what happened and what have a learnt..

Basically my life took over for a bit and with work / trying to sell my flat and general things I just have not had time to pay attention to the blog or my online businesses.

I'm not giving up though!! Everything still is happening, I guess it's just inevitable that every now and then a few days will be missed. I'm off on holiday to Canada for 3 weeks on Tuesday so posts will still be sparadic for a few weeks. Best thing to do is subscribe on the top right of this page (if on the website) and then you should get any posts via email.

What have I learnt in my absense?
• No blogging / promotion = no traffic
• No traffic means that I have not had 1 click on Adsense for the whole week. So no cash earnt

My ideas are still just as active.I need to return from holiday and start making them real. Like I said cafepress is on hold right this second but i'm still starting my links website for which i'll post some details soon and i've just arranged some prices for print and distribution of my photographs so I can sell these through ebay and eventually through my own website and hopefully this will be a really good and fun way of linking in my love of imagery and photographs with the money making online.

Ciao for now. Will blog soon.

forest.........

Update

LOCATION: UK, My Flat, Plumstead

As you can see i've updated the header but friends have been asking me what the site actually is when i direct them so I have to think of a new strapline so it's obvious what the this site is all about.

I've also been reading various bits, swapped a few links and gained some help and tried installing various bits from feedblitz including a very handy subscription tool, so please subscribe if you want my blog by email. I'm still trying to fully work out what and how to use the blogroll and syndication list.

On donation... I decided to add this little link. It's hidden down under my profile at present and will stay there out of the way until I feel I have any content worth donating for then I will move it up near the top. The whole side bar is getting cluttered and unorganised so soon I will smarten everything up. The donation tool was easily added using paypal and since I already had an account I just set it up straight from that. The blogger template tool makes it really easy to add in code and stuff so i'm grateful that I don't have to fully undestand things at this early stage.

The Google Adsense and Textlink Ads buttons that have been newly added are more revenue making buttons. I don't know much about them as yet and not sure if i'll keep them. I guess if they generate anything they can stay.

Statcounter is working great. I open it about twice a second just so I can stare at the map and see where people have been looking from!!

I tried to contact the charity WWF about getting a free banner on my site but sadly they replied with the following email:

Thank you for your email.

We are happy for you to link to our website, however due to the many
requests we receive, we are unable to set up a reciprocal website link.
Please note that you are unable to use our logo, and that your link must
not imply any endorsement of your website on WWF’s behalf. I am sorry,
but we are unable to provide banners or photos for you to use for your
link.

Thank you for your interest in WWF.

Yours sincerely

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Supporter Relations Coordinator

Supporter Relations Team

So I guess maybe what i'll do is start a small charity links column in the sidebar as i'd imagine most charities will reply with similar rules.

Hopefully this weekend i'll set up the Cafepress site and upload my first design. When this is in place i'll make sure to write a post about the signing up process and uploading and how I plan to promote my items.

I guess that's it all for now, been a pretty boring few days for blog info but interesting for my knowledge expansion. It's great to be getting comments and help from people I don't know. It means that the blog is working.

Blog soon,
Forest.

Bye Bye Sitemeter

Debbie from Blatherings left a comment pointing to her article showing that Sitemeter was acting with a third party to track users so i've switched right away from that and taken her advice to use statcounter.com. On the face it looks pretty much the same as Sitemeter. My favourite bit is viewing a world map and seeing where all your recent visitors have come from!! I'm sure the novelty will wear off. At present my visits sit at around 30 and i'm sure i'm at least 10 of them, ha ha!!

My First Steps, Adsense, Stats and some small promotion

LOCATION: UK, Train from Hastings to London.

Adsense was my first port of call so I went to work setting this up right away Joining was easy, setting up was easy and now i've been accepted and showing ads on this blog, as you can see.

The fact that blogger has simple links to set up Google Adsense made it a a breeze and even checking my account now i've started to reel in a tiny amount of revenue although I can't tell you too much about it apparently because of the Terms and Conditions. I don't want to be kicked off yet now do I?

I tried going to various Charity websites that I would like to support such as WWF, Born Free and Amnesty International and did not have any luck finding any banners that I could use for my website so I will need to decide which one I want to display and will email them today in the hope that they will send me some HTML code to put it. Blogger makes it really easy to add in little banners and things because the templating system just displays all this in boxes. I'm considering starting my links site in the form of a blog as the pages are so easy to create but i'm not sure if I can use a blog for this purpose, i'll have to read their Terms and Conditions, again obviously!!

I also spent some time reading various articles. Two articles on the blogger help were useful, the links are http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42377&topic=8934, http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42376&topic=8934 and an article by this guy http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/how-to-make-money-from-your-blog/, again here is the link gave me a better insight into a few things and the need to keep track of visitors and stats kept arising. After some searching around and reading a few forum posts I decided to join www.sitemeter.com and www.google.com/webmasters which both seem to give me quite detailed reports about various hits and things. I guess i'll write more on this when I fully understand it all.
Google also offered me the chace to submit my web page so that it's search engine could add it to the database and it's stats will let me see how many times people have hit it through a search and things, I think!!

Lastly I started the promotion on a very small scale. I posted my blog on the blogger forum here http://groups.google.com/group/blogger-help-share/browse_thread/thread/c91ee5f12fb7dcd6/92fbd71c7bf96ed6?q=brand+new+blog&rnum=2#92fbd71c7bf96ed6 and logged into my myspace.com account and sent ot my first bulletin asking people to come and join my blog.

The fact that after a very little amount of effort I have managed to earn a small amount has given me the immediate hope I need. Maybe this fantasy can be acheivable.

Next job is working out how people can subscribe to my blog and how I can tell who is subscribed. I'm becoming obsessed with who is looking at me. The article by Steve Pavlina also suggested I add a donate button, i'll have to decide if I think this is too cheeky at this early stage.

I'll keep you posted on my progress.

Forest.

£0

LOCATION: UK, Train between London and Hastings.

So here it is! Hopefully the start of my new online life. I'm going into this blind. If the stories are to be believed alot of hard work will eventually pay off with the possibility of earning an income online.

I'm 25 now and have been working since I was 16 as a Graphic Designer for print work and have only briefly scratched the surface of anything web related. Obviously like most 20somethings i'm fairly addicted to checking my email and surfing the net. My dream is to find a way of working from the internet with no office, no one to go and see and no ties as to when I work. I hope that I will be able to take my work anywhere where a wireless network or internet cafe lurks. The streets of Bali, a North American Lumberjack town or a sleepy Somerset village. I no longer want constraints of where I work but I am willing to work.

So I know I now have an extremely steep learning curve. It's going to be in my nature to steer towards ideas that somehow relate to imagery and graphics but I am hoping to try out various different money making strategies and hopefully put fingers in several pies to try and spread the chances of hitting on something good.
I guess my aim will be £1000 per month, if I reside at my mothers house in Liverpool (uk) then this should be enough to enjoy travellinga around and give me the freedom I crave. If I can acheive this (ever) I will have amazed myself but who knows, you just have to try these things. For now i'll make my next few weeks an aim to get something above £0.

As you can see this blog needs a lot of formatting and designing to make it more than just the template and that will definitely be one of my first jobs. I've also been surfing around the web and on first inspection it seems that Google Adsense seems to be the number 1 earner for most people so i'll be looking at incorporating that into this site and hopefully any other sites I start working on. I've also made a promise that wherever I feature money making advertisements I will always feature a free advert to one of the charities that I care for.

So, How exactly am I going to start. I have a swarm of various ideas blowing around my head and have been reading snippets here and there. So firstly I need to nail down a few serious ideas and start implementing them.

One of the first ideas I will work on are a few designs on a site called cafepress.com. Cafepress let's you sell merchandise featuring your designs and place a mark up on there product. They give you the webspace, print and distribute your items for free or a small premium cost depending on what kind of service you want from them. I particularily have one T-shirt design in mind but will try and find a few others around the theme and upload them, then start the promotion. Actual earning from this site seem to be sketchy from reading testimonials but if it's a few dollars as a start and becomes pretty easy to maintain then it will be a start.

I also have an idea for a links website for which i'll post more details later. This will be a basic site manually run by me at the start and featuring Google Adsense and a few other affiliate and pay per click schemes if possible. Details will follow when I have purchased the web address and started putting everything together.
Right now, i'm full of all the enthusiasm and none of the knowledge! Research will be key to this being a success and hopefully if anybody else reading this is interested in pursueing the same destiny then maybe my coming posts will be a help and maybe they can point me in the way of some helpful information. I will also be searching around and linking to other blogs and articles that I find helpful.

Wish me luck!!!!
Forest.