Earlier this weekend, I launched my latest book, How To Make Money Blogging from Home. The early sales have been excellent, but Karen noticed something really interesting today.  Before the game started, we had a couple of sales from this morning.  When Karen went to check email at half-time, we had 6 more sales. I won’t give out their last names but they were from Connie, Jessica, Judy, Angelina, Carol and another Judy.  Obviously a lot of women weren’t watching football.  By the end of the game, when Karen checked again, we had three more sales from women and one from a man in Australia. Since it was the middle of the night over there, I am pretty sure he wasn’t seeking a refuge from sports.

Before I start getting email accusing me of being a sexist, I know that a lot of women love football and I know my sample is only anecdotal. But it gave me an idea.  I decided to try ending some of the items I have for sale that appeal more to women than men next week during the games. I usually end items on Sunday evening –not Sunday afternoon. So it will be interesting to see how they do.

Oh yes – the Seahawks shut out St. Louis 28-0!  I would gloat but one of my dropshippers is in St. Louis and I don’t want to make those folks mad.

Are you trying to build your Twitter Account but keep getting the same spammers over and over? If you have been following me on Twitter or following my blog or newsletter then you know that Twitter can be a powerful marketing tool. But you have to use it properly. This means that in addition of using Twitter to promote your business or your offers or your eBay listings, you also have to send out some good information that readers will be interested in.

I have built my list on Twitter to over 3000 followers in just three weeks, but it seems that I am removing the same ones over and over who are just sending spam –and some of them are running pure scams.  Here is a list of some of the biggest spammers on Twitter:

AdaCardwell AmazingMoney AmazingProfits AmazinTwitties AmberMoore48 bizpromotion ChristineSnider EmilyBrown13 EricaEsau

ExpertMoney HeidiSomarriba JaneDDavis JaniceAnderson JoannaHill23 GloriaHayes KimberlyCheek KristiHernandez Lakers8513 Lakers8979

Melinda_Martin NetworkPromoter EvaJimmerson onlinmarket PaidPerTweets Priscilla_Ortiz socialclicks SusanMccartney RichOffAdsense

I was getting pretty tired of going in and manually deleting these same guys over and over. But I recently learned about a service called Twollo at www.twollo.com.   Twollo does two things: It can help you build lists of people to follow who share your interests. But most importantly they have an unfollow service. You simply put the username you want to unfollow in the box that says Stop Following.  Twollo will remove that person and block them from being followed again.

Best of all, Twollo is free. If you use the free service it does work, but is a bit slow. If you want to pay $4.00 per month, they make you a priority user.

If you want to learn how to use Twollo and other free services to build your Twitter list fast, check out The Twitter Traffic Machine. This is the system I have used to build my list of over 3000 people who are interested in eBay.

See Also

• Learn How To Start and Run a Profitable eBay Business. Printed training manual writter by an eBay Power Seller who sells on eBay every day
  Includes business startup, tools and tips, writing auctions, how to upload photos and real eBay business tips from a successful seller

I thought I would share it with you:

God our Father, Creator of all, today is the day of Easter joy.

This is the morning on which the Lord appeared to those who had begun to lose hope and opened their eyes to what the scriptures foretold: that first He must die, and then He would rise and ascend into His Father’s glorious presence.

By raising Christ your Son You conquered the power of death and opened for us the way to eternal life. Let our celebration today raise us up and renew our lives by the Spirit that is within us.

May the risen Lord breathe on our minds and open our eyes that we may know Him in the breaking of this bread;
that we may know Him in the fellowship of the Spirit;
that we may know Him in the love of our family and friends;
and that we may know Him as we follow Him each day in His risen life.

We ask that you grant these things through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever.

Amen.

I hope all of my readers enjoy a blessed and happy Easter

Skip McGrath

We all like free money.  Although Karen and I are technically self-employed, we do as a corporation and we are employees of our own business.  We needed to make some changes to our payroll this week and called our payroll service who processes our checks.  After we handled our affairs we asked when we would start receiving the new Stimulus $13 week tax break in our paychecks.   I was totally blown away when the payroll specialist said that I should change my withholding so I don’t take it!

"Why," I asked. "Well," she said: "It’s not really a tax cut. What the government did was just change the withholding schedule so you could bring home $13 more each week. But they didn’t change the tax rate schedule, so there is no tax cut. Next April you will owe that money back. Essentially the IRS is just giving you a $600 loan."

And then it got worse. She went on to say that I should be very careful because my income was already close to pushing me into the next higher tax bracket. She was concerned that if I didn’t lower my income a little bit, that I would hit the higher tax rate and it could end up costing me money.

So if you work and receive a W2, you may want to check with your payroll department where you work and adjust your withholding so you don’t get a big surprise next April.

On another topic related to taxes:

State Sales Tax Warning

It is no secret that the various state governments are hurting. California is in such bad shape that the sales tax has gone up to as much as 10% in some counties. With the states seeing revenue from sales tax fall, they are stepping up their enforcement efforts and online sellers, many of whom ignore sales tax.

Just this week I spoke with an eBay seller in Florida who only sold $800 worth of merchandise in Florida last year. She never bothered to report it because it was such a small amount of money. Well it seems that the Florida tax enforcers look on websites like eBay and Amazon to identify sellers to target them for audits. This seller was audited and ended up paying the tax, interest and a $750 penalty.

Each state has its own rules regarding minimum payments, so it will pay you to check with your state sales tax authorities and make sure you are exempt or if not that you are filing the required reports and depositing your sales tax collections.

See Also

• The Complete eBay Marketing System is a printed training course designed to show anyone how they can start and run a profitable eBay business
  Written by eBay Gold Power Seller, Skip McGrath, who makes his full-time lining on eBay

My daughter-in-law Lissa McGrath is married to our son, a Navy Chief who is off serving in the Desert this Christmas. 

Lissa has just completed writing The Complete Idiots Guide to Life as A Military Spouse –Survive and thrive tips for every military spouse. 

This great little book teaches military spouses how to navigate all of the complicated government benefits, deal with long deployments and tons of insider information about little-known programs and benefits for military families. You can find it at your local bookstore, or here is a link where you can purchase it instantly on Amazon.com.

The book has received excellent reviews and is selling very well. It is a perfect Christmas present for anyone married to a member of the military.

This is Lissa’s Third book. she first wrote 20 Questions to Ask Before Selling on eBay, and then co-wrote The Complete Idiots Guide to eBay with me. At just 26 she is off to a great career as a writer.  Lissa also writes a column for the AuctionBytes blog and has written several articles in national magazines.

See Also

• The Complete eBay Marketing System by Skip McGrath
  Complete printed training manual to start and run a profitable and professional eBay business

Come Monday there either will, or will not, be a bailout bill.

I have heard both Democratic and Republican congressmen on TV reporting that calls from the people in their districts are running as high as 5 to 1 against a Wall Street bailout with taxpayer’s money.

There are two parts to this crisis and two solutions that require very little, if any, taxpayer money:

Problem Number 1: There are several million foreclosed houses on the market that are depressing real estate values and new home construction and sales.

This has had a cascading effect on jobs and the economy and the value of all the mortgages held by institutions –even the vast majority of good ones.

Solution: Congress could pass a simple tax bill that said anyone buying a home out of foreclosure would not have to pay any capital gain on the sale of that house. If you wanted to take it one step further, the Congress could sweeten the deal by offering a one-time $5,000 tax credit towards any money spent in the first year on repairs or improvements to the property.

Remember, money hasn’t dried up; Credit, and the willingness to take risk, has dried up. Offering this tax break would bring billions of dollars worth of investment capital out of the woodwork and attract investment dollars from overseas wealth funds that now hold trillions of US dollars they can’t make any money on.

You would have everyone from small independent house flippers to massive Real Estate Investment Trusts and overseas investors buying up the distressed property. Buying these now empty homes would increase value of both those properties, and the neighboring properties, and take a ton of excess inventory off of the market. This would restart sales of existing homes and new home construction. Home prices would immediately stabilize and once again start to rise.

The cost to the taxpayers in lost revenue from the capital gains taxes would be more than offset by people paying taxes as the economy improves and people go back to work –including the construction industry which has shed over 2 million jobs in the past two years.

Problem Number 2: Banks, S&Ls and other investors are holding Trillions of Dollars worth of mortgages that they can’t sell because they can’t set a value on them.

This has caused business credit to dry up. And when that happens, personal credit will start to dry up shortly thereafter. That will send the economy into a deep recession that will cost millions of jobs.

It would take three pages to explain how this happened, but is was the perfect storm of Wall Street and investor greed, incompetence, fraud and self-serving corrupt politicians from both parties.  There will be plenty of time to investigate and assign blame –and that will happen. But we have to do something now to prevent a financial meltdown.

Solution:  Create a public Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) to buy the mortgage paper.  ETF’s are mutual funds that trade daily on the stock market.  There are several ways to get this fund started. The Treasury or the Fed could offer insurance, much like MGIC (Mortgage Guarantee Insurance Corporation) on the mortgages.  Or the fund could be set up as tax free.  Any and all investors, foreign or domestic, could invest in the fund and pay no (or less) taxes on any profits or dividend distributions.  An insured tax-free fund would attract billions of dollars of investment capital into the funds.  Banks could sell their mortgage paper to the funds, or use the fund’s valuation to put a value on their securities. This would allow banks to improve their reserves and balance sheets and give depositors confidence.

What does all this mean to eBay sellers?

Simply put –we are part of the economy too.  Last year about 50% of my eBay sales were paid with a credit card. As I pointed out above, when business credit dries up consumer credit soon follows.  Credit card rates will increase leaving less money to spend on the goods and services people use credit cards for.  Unemployment will increase.  People will still buy the basics: food, clothing, gas and health care. But the market for discretionary consumer goods will collapse. This has already started.  Last week, the largest boat dealer in the Pacific Northwest went bankrupt.

However, a $700 Billion (or more?) bailout using taxpayer money will have the same effect. This will be hugely inflationary.  The only way the Federal Reserve can come up with $700 Billion is to print it. That causes inflation. When you have inflation, interest rates, including mortgage rates, will rise and the value of the dollar will fall. This will reduce consumer purchasing power, kill jobs and reduce investment money from overseas.  The stock market will initially jump on news of the bailout, but then it will begin to fall as interest rates rise and the economy tanks.  Any gains will be short-lived.

If private capital is used instead of taxpayer funds, money will pour into our financial markets and they will stabilize. Inflation will remain under control and interest rates will remain low. We may still have a slowdown, or even a mild recession, but a long-lasting major recession will be avoided.

But, I suspect, that congress will do the political thing rather than the correct thing. There will be some type of bill.  To the extent it uses taxpayer money it will have a negative effect.

One way or the other, eBay sellers who deal in impulse products, or unnecessary consumer goods, will be hurt the most.  Sellers of used items and basic consumer goods will not only be OK –they may actually do well as demand for these goods increase.

The focus for the future of eBay will be on bargain hunters and folks looking to save money on goods they need rather than goods they want –or would be nice to have. The other area that could do well is any type of hard asset or stable collectible such as stamps and coins and collectibles with a long history of holding their value. When inflation and recession loom, and in times of uncertainty, people with money look for safe places to put it.

So, depending on how things look a week from now, you may want to take a look at your business with an eye towards the future. In the meantime, call or email your congressperson and let them know how you feel about them spending your money to bail out Wall Street and their political cronies.

See Also

• New Issue of The eBay Seller’s News is Now Available online
  The oldest and largest FREE newsletter for professional eBay sellers by Skip McGrath
• How To Create and Sell Information Products on eBay and the Internet
  Just Released, the September 2008 Updated version of my best-selling training course on making money selling legitimate information products

I will be out later today with more news from eBay Live, but I wanted to give my readers a heads up on some phony coupon offers you might receive by eMail -and one that is turning up in blog posts.

eBay is running a promotion via Direct mail that expires June 30. I found this on two blogs and got it in an email from someone selling a Secret Wholesale List on Clickbank.

Although the coupons are real they only work for the person they were originally sent to. Here is the text from one email I received:

Ebay/PayPal Coupons – expire June 30th

This is just a short note with two eBay coupons for you.

CJUNE0810P is 10% off any eBay auction up to $100 discount.

CJUNE10SHIP is $10.00 off on shipping. The shipping discount can be used three times.

Both coupons expire June 30th.

Neither coupon works with Liveauctions.

Here’s how to redeem these offers:

Buy something on eBay. Be sure the seller accepts PayPal.

Pay for your item with PayPal before the expiration date:

June 30, 2008 11:59:59 PM PDT.

Enter the redemption code: CJUNE10SHIP or CJUNE0810P

At the end of the email he asks you to click on a link that has an affiliate product he is flogging.

A couple of blogs claim the coupons work, but I tried them both on my user ID and my wifes’ ID it was a NO GO. After I was comitted to buying and paying for the item, I got a message that the code was no good. that’s OK because it was an item I wanted but I would have loved to save 10% on it.

See you later today and stay tuned for my newsletter on Wednesday.

Both eBay sellers and political activists are taking advantage of the eBay platform to make money, raise money, promote their favorites and slam their opponents.

For a while the Democratic National Committee was selling a Romney Flip Flop kit but for some reason these auctions are no longer showing up on eBay.  AuctionBytes reported earlier this week that Meg Whitman is supporting and raising money for Romney and that the Romney campaign was using AuctionPal as a channel for their supporters to donate items that are auctioned off to benefit the campaign. You can read the full AuctionBytes story here.

Ron Paul is selling .999% pure silver dollars on eBay but this may come to an end as Federal Agents stormed NORFED, his coin maker’s factory, yesterday and seized all of the coins.  In the Federal warrant that leaked an FBI agent stated he is “investigating NORFED for federal violations including "uttering coins of gold, silver, or other metal," "making or possessing likeness of coins," mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy. "The goal of NORFED is to undermine the United States government’s financial systems by the issuance of a non-governmental competing currency for the purpose of repealing the Federal Reserve and Internal Revenue Code," he states. I suspect these coin auctions may be pulled by eBay or then will reduce as sellers run out of supply.

Some eBay sellers are just taking advantage of the popular keywords that a political name brings to sell goods like the fellow who is making his own T-shirts with the name of almost every candidate.  Another seller has designed a line of Political Clocks with irreverent sayings about each candidate.

Others are already selling campaign collectibles like badges, autographed magazine covers, baseballs, and other memorabilia.  And, other sellers who are highly partisan are using eBay as a place to make political statements for and against their favorite candidates.

I decided to do a count of the auctions to gauge popularity.  So far it looks like Hillary Clinton is leading in pure numbers of listings.  Here are the numbers of active listings for each candidate.

Hillary Clinton       619

Ron Paul              328

Barack Obama      294

Rudi Giuliani         160

Fred Thompson       59

John McCain           55

Mike Huckabee        49

Mitt Romney            29

John Edwards          24

Bill Richardson         12

Dennis Kucinich         9

Joe Biden                  6

Duncan Hunter          1 on eBay and 7 in eBay stores

Tom Tancredo           1 on eBay and 9 in eBay stores

Chris Dodd                0 on eBay but 6 items in eBay Stores

Hillary leads easily but this is partly due to the enormous number of her books sold by booksellers on eBay.  When I took the book sellers out, she still leads but Obama is pretty close –of course some of his listing are for his book as well.

Here are some of the interesting candidates auctions listed on eBay today.  I just picked ones I found interesting, so please don’t email me if I left someone out or put more than one candidate over another.  This is a non-partisan blog.

ICED TEA BOOK FRED THOMPSON RECIPES BRAND NEW!!

JOHN EDWARDS 2008 POLITICAL PINBACK CONFEDERATE FLAG

Mitt Romney dog MITT ROMNEY’S DOG.COM republican L@@K!

      Do you want this man as your President? 

NEW! RUDY GIULIANI / MITT ROMNEY DREAM TEAM BUTTON PIN

got mitt romney? VERY FUNNY BRAND NEW BLACK T-SHIRT

Huckabee Fundraising Wedding Ring
 

TheHillary.com Domain Name 4 Hillary Clinton Website!!
This is a one time NR auction!!! Awesome 4 Whatever.

Hillary Clinton Wood Intarsia Portrait Wall Hanging Art

DENNIS KUCINICH POLITICAL PINBACK GIVE PEACE A CHANCE

RUDY GIULIANI NEW YORK YANKEES HAND SIGNED BASEBALL CAP

Enjoi Foster Hillary Clinton Skateboard Deck Cheap!

Hillary Clinton Nutcracker

Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton Autograph in One
    THE TWO PRESIDENTIAL FRONTRUNNERS 

Giuliani "I Suck" Political Clock

Obama "We’re all SCREWED!" Political Clock

Barak Obama Rama Air Freshener Car Air Freshener

JOHN McCAIN "NO SURRENDER" 2 PINS PRESIDENT 2008 GOP

RON PAUL 2008 1 oz Silver Liberty Dollar – GET IT NOW!

1-Ron Paul Sons of Liberty Patch

One note – if you count misspellings the results are slightly different, but the rankings don’t really change.  It is amazing the number of people who don’t bother to look up the correct spelling of the names of candidates before launching an auction.  Some of the common ones I found were: Hilary, Barac, Juliani, Kucinich and McCane.

It will be interesting to watch the political wars on eBay as the campaign heats up.

See Also

• FREE Online Newsletter for eBay Sellers
  The eBay Seller’s News is the oldest and largest publication for professional eBay sellers

In Los Angeles, one of these auctions took a turn when the buyer of a particular storage locker contents discovered the previous owner was Paris Hilton. According to the Washington Post, Hilton’s publicist said there had been a mix up and payments had not been credited to her storage locker account as they should have been. Either way, one lucky guy is now in the possession of personal diaries and tapes of Paris Hilton. It is unknown how much he paid for the locker contents, but most storage locker auctions go for between $75 and $500.

Because of the nature of the items, he cannot sell them on eBay, but he has enlisted the help of David Hans Schmidt (who has brokered many deals to sell celebrity porn) to sell the diaries and videos. And the starting price? $20 million. Not bad for a storage locker auction.