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  • A Beginner’s Guide to the Different eBay Auction Types.

    A Beginner's Guide to the Different eBay Auction Types.

    Over the years, eBay has introduced all sorts of different auction types, in an effort to give people more options when they buy and sell their things on eBay.

    For every seller who doesn't like the idea that their item might sell for a far lower price than they intend, there's another who wants to shift hundreds of the same item quickly. eBay tries to cater to all tastes. This email gives you an overview of the different kinds of auctions and their advantages for you.

    Normal Auctions.

    These are the bread-and-butter of eBay, the auctions everyone knows: buyers bid, others outbid them, they bid again, and the winner gets the item. Simple.

    Reserve Auctions.

    Reserve auctions are for sellers who don't want their items to sell for less than a certain price – a concept you'll know about if you're familiar with real auctions. They work just like normal auctions on eBay, except that the buyer will be told if their bid does not meet the reserve price you set, and they'll need to bid again if they want the item. If no-one is willing to meet your price, then the auction is cancelled, and you keep the item.

    Fixed Price ('Buy it Now') Auctions.

    Buy it Now auctions can work in one of two ways. You can add a Buy it Now button to a normal auction, meaning that buyers can choose either to bid normally or to simply pay the asking price and avoid the whole bidding process. Some sellers, though, now cut out the auction process altogether and simply list all their items at fixed price. This lets you avoid all the complications of the auction format and simply list your items for how much you want them to sell for.

    Recently, eBay added a twist to fixed price auctions: the 'best offer'. This means that buyers can contact you to negotiate a price, which could be a good way to get sell some extra stock at a small discount. The only downside to reserve and fixed price auctions is that you pay a small extra fee to use these formats. In general, it is more worth using reserve auctions for higher-priced items and fixed price auctions for lower-priced ones – but remember that you can combine the two formats.

    Multiple Item ('Dutch') Auctions.

    These are auctions where you can sell more than one of a certain item. Dutch auctions can be done by bidding. Buyers bid a price and say how many items they want, and then everyone pays the lowest price that was bid by one of the winning bidders. If you have trouble getting your head around that, then don't worry – everyone else does too! These auctions are very rare.

    What is more common is when a seller has a lot of one item, and lists it using a combination of two auction types: a multiple-item fixed price auction. This just means that you can just say how many of the item you they have, and offer them at a fixed price per unit. Buyers can enter how many they want and then just click Buy it Now to get them.

    Now that you know about the different types of auctions, you should make sure that the items you plan to sell don't violate eBay's listing policies. The next email will let you know what's allowed and what is a big no-no.

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  • All About Auto Responders

    Throughout the Internet, autoresponders make for an excellent promotional tool.  Although the technical name is an autoresponder, other known names include auto email, mailbot, and email responder.  An autoresponder is a great way to save time, as it responds to any message with an automatic response.

    Autoresponders can vary from messages that go through email to scripts that are programed to run on servers.  All types of autoresponders work the same, as they will automatically send a message out when a message is received.  Depending on the message they receive, they will send out the correct return message.  This can be determined by the script or the email address.

    Although they are great for promotional reasons, they are also widely abused all across the Internet.  Autoresponders are great to use for your daily tasks, as they will basically do all of the work for you.  On the other hand, they can also be quite disastrous on those who happen to come in contact with them.

    When you submit your website to search engines, directories, or classifieds, you should never attempt to use an autoresponder address.  Most of these website types use autoresponders themselves, when they send out their messages.  If their autoresponder happens to send a message out to your autoresponder, they will continue responding – which can be very annoying.

    When you decide to subscribe to an email or ezine you should always use your valid email address and never use the address for your autoresponder.  If you use your autoresponder to subscribe, chances are you’ll have your subscription revoked.  It can be very annoying if a group sends out emails, only to find that your autoresponder keeps sending return messages.  For that very reason, you should never use your autoresponder address to subscribe to anything.

    Autoresponders can be great to use, although they can also be a hazard as well.  Often times, with subscriptions groups or ezines, it can be very hard to locate someone who is using an autoresponder. In most cases, those who use an autoresponder don’t have the same reply or from address as they did when they signed up.  In cases such as this it can take quite a lot of time and effort to locate the address.

    If you take care of your autoresponder and don’t use it to annoy others or sing up for email subscriptions, it should treat you well. An autoresponder can do a world of good for your business, saving you a lot of time and effort.  Autoresponders are easy to set up and easy to use, which is great news for anyone who isn’t technical with the Internet.  For the price they cost and how easy they are to operate – autoresponders can make your Internet business easier than ever before.

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  • Folksonomy

    Folksonomy

    A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and translating tags to annotate and categorize content; this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. Folksonomy, a term coined by Thomas Vander Wal, is a portmanteau of folk and taxonomy. Vander Wal explains some of the characteristics of folksonomies by identifying two types: broad and narrow. A broad folksonomy is the one in which multiple users tag particular content with a variety of terms from a variety of vocabularies, thus creating a greater amount of metadata for that content. A narrow folksonomy, on the other hand, occurs when a few users, primarily the content creator, tag an object with a limited number of terms. While both broad and narrow folksonomies enable the searchability of content by adding textual description – or access points – to an object, a narrow folksonomy does not have the same benefits as a broad folksonomy, which allows for the tracking of emerging trends in tag usage and developing vocabularies. Folksonomies became popular on the Web around 2004 as part of social software applications such as social bookmarking and photograph annotation. Tagging, which is one of the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 services, allows users to collectively classify and find information. Some websites include tag clouds as a way to visualize tags in a folksonomy. However, tag clouds visualize only the vocabulary but not the structure of folksonomies, as do tag graphs.

    An empirical analysis of the complex dynamics of tagging systems, published in 2007, has shown that consensus around stable distributions and shared vocabularies does emerge, even in the absence of a central controlled vocabulary. For content to be searchable, it should be categorized and grouped. While this was believed to require commonly agreed on sets of content describing tags (much like keywords of a journal article), recent research has found that, in large folksonomies, common structures also emerge on the level of categorizations. Accordingly, it is possible to devise mathematical models of collaborative tagging that allow for translating from personal tag vocabularies (personomies) to the vocabulary shared by most users.

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  • How to Check an eBay Seller’s Reputation (and Why You Should Do It).

    How to Check an eBay Seller's Reputation (and Why You Should Do It).

    When you buy something from an eBay seller, you are giving them your money and hoping that you will get something in return. However many guarantees of safety eBay might make to you, nothing is certain: if you just give your money to scammers all the time without doing any checks then the chances are you won't get all of that money back.

    That's why you should always check the seller's reputation, or 'feedback rating'. This is a quick and easy-to-read summary of their history as an eBay seller, which gives you some idea of whether or not you should trust them with your money. Buying anything is a calculated risk: you want to minimise that risk.

    How to Check Feedback Ratings.

    On each item's description page, there is a box in the top-right hand corner about the seller, with the title 'Seller information'. This contains the seller's name, their feedback score, and their positive feedback percentage, as well as any stars they have earned.

    Different coloured stars are given to eBay sellers depending on their rating, in this sequence: yellow, blue, turquoise, purple, red, green, shooting yellow, shooting turquoise, shooting purple, shooting red. Anyone with a 'shooting' star is an experienced eBay member who you should be able to trust.

    If you click on the seller's name, you can get to a more detailed view of their reputation – their 'member profile' page. This page shows the total number of people who gave them a positive or negative rating, as well as a breakdown by time. You can also see a complete history of all the comments that have ever been left about them, with the most recent first.

    What to Look For.

    You might assume that anyone with a very high number can be trusted, but that isn't always true. It is more important to look at their positive feedback percentage – and you should really consider anything below 99% to be a red flag and investigate further.

    Take a look through the first visible page with the most recent transactions: are there any negative comments? What do they say? Take others' experiences into account, as they could happen to you if you deal with this person. Be careful not to punish sellers unfairly, however, if they did bad things in their past on eBay but have improved since. You should look at the breakdown by time and ignore any negative feedback that was left a long time ago. Equally, though, you should sit up and pay attention if a seller seems to have been left an out-of-character amount of bad feedback in the last month or so.

    Now that you know who to trust, it is worth learning a little more about how the different kinds of auctions work, so that you don't accidentally slip up and make yourself and your feedback page look bad. Our next email will be about the different kinds of auctions you can expect to encounter during your time on eBay.

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  • Tips and Tricks for Using eBay Search.

    Tips and Tricks for Using eBay Search.

    If you know what you're doing, you can quickly find what you're looking for on eBay. Here are a few golden rules.

    Be specific: If you're searching for the first edition of the original Harry Potter book, you'll get further searching for 'harry potter rowling philosopher's stone first edition' than you will searching for 'harry potter'. You'll get fewer results, but the ones you do get will be far more relevant.

    Spell wrongly: It's a sad fact that many of the sellers on eBay just can't spell. Whatever you're looking for, try thinking of a few common misspellings – the chances are that fewer people will find these items, and so they will be cheaper.

    Get a thesaurus: You should try to search for all the different words that someone might use to describe your item, for example searching for both 'TV' and 'television', or for 'phone', 'mobile' and 'cellphone'. Where you can, though, leave off the type of item altogether and search by things like brand and model.

    Use the categories: Whenever you search, you'll notice a list of categories at the side of your search results. If you just searched for the name of a CD because you want to buy that CD, you should click the 'CDs' category to just look at results in that category. Why bother looking through a load of results that you don't care about?

    Don't be afraid to browse: Once you've found the category that items you like seem to be in, why not click 'Browse' and take a look through the whole category? You might be surprised by what you find.

    Few people realise just how powerful eBay's search engine is – a few symbols here and there and it'll work wonders for you.

    Wildcard searches: You can put an asterisk (*) into a search phrase when you want to say 'anything can go here'. For example, if you wanted to search for a 1950s car, you could search for 'car 195*'. 195* will show results from any year in the 1950s.

    In this order: If you put words in quotes ("") then the only results shown will be ones that have all of the words between the quote marks. For example, searching for "Lord of the Rings" won't give you any results that say, for example "Lord Robert Rings".

    Exclude words: Put a minus, and then put any words in brackets that you don't want to appear in your search results. For example: "Pulp Fiction" -(poster,photo) will find items related to Pulp Fiction but not posters or photos.

    Either/or: If you want to search for lots of words at once, just put them in brackets: the TV example from earlier could become '(TV,television)', which would find items with either word.

    So once you've found your bargain item, bid for it and won it, what if it all goes wrong? Don't worry – eBay has a thorough dispute resolution procedure, and we'll cover it in some depth in the next article, so you'll be prepared if the worst happens.

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  • Criticism of Google

    Criticism of Google

    Criticism of Google includes alleged misuse and manipulation of search results, its use of others' intellectual property, concerns that its compilation of data may violate people's privacy, censorship of search results and content, and the energy consumption of its servers as well as concerns over traditional business issues such as antitrust, monopoly, and restraint of trade.

    Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program.

    Google's stated mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"; this mission, and the means used to accomplish it, have raised concerns among the company's critics. Much of the criticism pertains to issues that have not yet been addressed by cyber law.

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  • Things To Know When Using Autoresponders

    To help increase the flow of traffic to your website, nothing beats an autoresponder.  These programs can save you a lot of time by answering most of your emails automatically.  They can handle customer support questions, product related questions, or provide information about your company and services.  If you own an online business – an autoresponder is something you should definitely invest in.

    Autoresponders can also be used to track your promotions and how effective they are.  These days, autoresponders are one of the best tools that you can get for your online business.  They are used by some of the biggest and most popular online companies, and for good reason.  They simplify your life with your business – and give you more time to dedicate to other things.

    If you are planning to submit your website to search engines like Google or Yahoo, you should know that most search engines use autoresponders themselves.  Therefore, if you attempt to contact search engines using your autoresponder, theirs will contact yours and you’ll have a never ending reply of emails that will eventually flood both of your email boxes.

    Under no circumstances, should you ever use your autoresponder to subscribe to forums or other discussion type subscriptions.  A majority of the time, these discussion groups and such will email you updates regarding new information.  If you joined with an autoresponder address, your autoresponder will send a response each and every time.  This can get very annoying very fast, and a majority of the time you will end up being unsubscribed.  In this event, it can be very hard for the administrator or webmaster to determine who is using the autoresponder.  Therefore, to make things easier, you should never use your autoresponder with any subscription.

    There are some companies out there that completely take advantage of autoresponders.  They will use their autoresponder to respond to automated messages, which will automatically subscribe the “from” address in their mailing list.  This is totally the wrong way to use and autoresponder, and those who use it in this manner are displaying a very negative image.  Using your auto responder this way will send a negative image rather than positive.  Instead of spreading good word about you and your company, people will become upset and spread the word that you should be avoided.

    Whenever you use your autoresponder, you should always use courtesy towards your customers and your visitors.  Autoresponders are meant to help your company grow, and help you spread information about your services, products, and your company.  There are many creative and innovative ways that you can use this tool, providing you do it the right way.  Most customers know when they are receiving an autoresponder message, and if you don’t use it the right way they will know it.  Although you can always change or add to the preset messages; most contain a unique signature and address that will always be associated with autoresponders.

    The Internet is one of the best ways to conduct business and promote your products.  Autoresponders can help you save a lot of time, although when you use them in the wrong ways, they will eventually get you a negative image.  If you know you are using it the wrong way and continue to do so, you will eventually lose a lot of business and your company will suffer a great deal.  On the other hand, if you always think in terms of courtesy towards your customers, your autoresponder can help you obtain a lot of business and establish relationships with customers who will always spread the word about your company.

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  • Google Products and Services Discontinued in 2010 and 2011

    Google Products and Services Discontinued in 2010

        Marratech e-Meeting – Web conferencing software, used internally by Google's employees. Google acquired the software from creator Marratech on April 19, 2007. Discontinued on February 19, 2010.
        GOOG-411 –Google's directory assistance service, which can be used free of charge from any telephone in the US and Canada. Discontinued on November 12, 2010.
        Google Labs – allowed users to test and demonstrate new Google products.

    Google Products and Services Discontinued in 2011

        Google Buzz – social networking service integrated with Gmail service allowing users to share updates, photos, videos, and more at once. It let users make conversations about things they found interesting. It was released on February 9, 2010. Discontinued by end of 2011.
        Google Dictionary – it was first introduced as part of Google Translate, it then became a standalone service that allowed searching of words and phrases from over 22 languages. Discontinued on August 5, 2011.
        Google PowerMeter – free energy monitoring tool that allows you to view your home's energy consumption from anywhere online. Discontinued on September 16, 2011.
        Real Estate – Real estate listings in Google Maps, launched in July 2009 and discontinued February 10, 2011.
        Google Directory – Collection of links arranged into hierarchical subcategories. The links and their categorization were from the Open Directory Project, but were sorted using PageRank. It was closed on July 20, 2011.
        Squared – creates tables of information about a subject from unstructured data. Discontinued September 2011.
        Google Sets – Generates a list of items when users enter a few examples. For example, entering "Green, Purple, Red" emits the list "Green, Purple, Red, Blue, Black, White, Yellow, Orange, Brown." Described in its 2003 patent filing by creators Simon Tong and Jeff Dean as “an inside peek at how Google groups keywords by concept,” it was discontinued in mid-2011.
        Google Pack – Collection of applications – some Google-created (including Google Earth, Google Desktop, Picasa, Google Talk, and Google Chrome), some not. (Supported Windows XP, Vista, 7). Discontinued on September 2, 2011.
        Google Fast Flip – Online news aggregator that mimicked the experience of flicking through a newspaper or magazine, allowing visual search of stories in manner similar to microfiche. Discontinued September 6, 2011.
        Desktop (Mac OS X, Windows 2000 SP3+, XP, Vista, 7, Linux): Desktop search application that indexes emails, documents, music, photos, chats, Web history and other files. It allowed the installation of Google Gadgets. Discontinued on September 14, 2011.
        Google Image Labeler – game that induced participants to submit valid descriptions (labels) of images in the web, in order to later improve Image Search. Discontinued on September 16, 2011.
        Aardvark – Social search utility which allowed people to ask and answer questions within their social networks. It used people's claimed expertise to match askers with good answerers. Discontinued on September 30, 2011.
        Directory – navigation directory, specifically for Chinese users.
        Gears (Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari): A browser plug-in that enables development of off-line browser applications.

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  • How Autoresponders Work

    At some point in our Internet lives, a majority of us have received a message from an autoresponder.  It could have been a short response letting you know that the individual is away, or an email thanking you for something that you have done.  Perhaps it was even an email letting you know about upcoming products, or even an email letting you know that a message you tried to send couldn’t be delivered.

    Each one of these messages is all but a different version of a useful program known as an autoresponder.  Autoresponders are very useful tools, as they will automatically send out an answer to any email that they receive.  The answer that they send out however, will all depend on the messages that you have the program set up with.  Autoresponders are very flexible, and most will hold a variety of pre set messages.

    The very first autoresponders were used with email providers or email transfer agents.  Whenever an email you sent out couldn’t be delivered to the recipient, it would send you an automatic response letting you know that your mail couldn’t be delivered.  Although these programs were somewhat helpful, they weren’t all that sophisticated.

    Over the years, autoresponders have changed quite a bit, proving to be very useful with big companies and even Internet marketing.  These days, autoresponders are used by businesses and companies to give immediate response and feedback to interested clients and subscribers.  This could include a response about programs, information about pricing, specific details regarding a product, and even a time that someone from the company can get in touch with the client.

    In the world of Internet marketing, staying in touch with clients is easier than ever with an autoresponder.  They will save you a quite a bit of time, especially when you think about how long it would take you to personally send email responses to each and every email you get.  If you run a business, you probably get hundreds of emails a day.  An autoresponder can simplify your life, by sending out a preset message response to each and every email you receive.

    You can set up an autoresponder using either one or two methods – an outsourced ASP model and server side model.  When using an outsourced ASP model, the company wishing to use the autoresponder will their business model will contract through an outside provider.  This outside provider will then give the company user access to a web based system, or control panel.  From the control panel, the company or individual can set up the autoresponder, preset messages, and decide how the autoresponder will handle the many different types of emails. One of the best services we have found is www.Automatic-Responder.com their service is top notch. To use these types of services, the individual or company will have to pay the autoresponder provider a flat monthly fee.

    Server side autoresponders are a bit different.  Basically, they are programs that a company or individual installs themselves and runs it on their own computer or server.  You can save money with these programs, as you don’t have to pay a provider to operate the autoresponder.  Although server side autoresponders weren’t user friendly in the beginning, they have become easier and easier to operate over the years – and are now the most popular type of autoresponder.

    In all actuality, autoresponders are great to have.  They are very reliable, and can easily save you a lot of time. The way the different types work can be a bit perplexing, although most are easy to use and easy to implement into your website.  If you own or operate an online business – an autoresponder is something you should never find yourself without.

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  • What is Google Adsense for Search

    Google Adsense: What is Google Adsense for Search

    Google Adsense for Search is different than Adsense for Content but it is just as important to your earning power with the Google Adsense program.

    Just like Adsense for Content places targeted ads on your content pages, Adsense for Search places targeted ads on the results page of the search set in motion on your page.

    You can use the standard Google search box on your site and the user can then search the web or even your site. When you feel more comfortable, you can change the look of the Google search box, essentially customizing it by changing the colors and using your logo.

    The best thing about Google Adsense for Search is that you can track what your visitors are searching for.  That is, if the search has two or more hits.  Unique queries will not be tracked.  But you can see the top 25 searches performed from your website by clicking on the Advance Report from the Reports tab and specifying a date range.

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