Hey!!  Guess what?  John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing just interviewed me for his world-famous blog & podcast (I am right above Seth Godin – how cool is that?)  Check it out:

 

Duct Tape Marketing Blog

 

Duct Tape Marketing Podcast 

Tags: Success Announcements by Janelle
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Just hired a fabulous gardener…without calling any references or seeing if he could do the job…I hired him for his marketing ability. (although my flower beds rock tonight!)  Not ‘out of the box’ Seth Godin marketing…but I was still impressed. 

 

He blanketed the neighborhood with flyers on bright red paper that included his phone number and a ‘free estimate’ offer.  He called me back almost immediately after leaving a message.  He didn’t make me do any of the work – looked my address up online without me having to provide directions (this sounds small, but it impressed me and saved me some extra time on the phone). 

 

He arrived within an hour, promptly shook my hand and called me by name (how often do you remember someone’s name after hearing it once?).  Walked around for a few minutes, gave me an estimate immediately and offered additional services.  NOT for an additional price…they were included in the estimate.  Perhaps he IS doing a bit of Seth Godin marketing…setting yourself apart from your competition…being remarkable! 

 

He showed up on time today, shook my hand again upon arriving and immediately got to work…never took lunch, never took a break until he finished what he said he was going to do.  I chatted with him when I brought him some ice tea…he had been working for someone before, but wanted to be successful being on his own – LOVE THAT!  Before he left, he handed me some business cards ‘in case your friends need someone’.  And, you know exactly what I will do…tell everyone about this ‘find’ of a gardener I stumbled upon.  He is truly brilliant.  In my yard and as a marketer.  Do you have phenomenal marketing tales to share…

include your marketing stories under the Comments section.

PS – If you are in the Seattle area…his name is Walter of WGR Gardening and he can be reached at 206–816–5098!

Tags: Success Announcements by Janelle
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Everyone on the call wished it could have lasted all day!

Rieva is always entertaining and brilliant…and today she was full of useful advice for start-up business thinkers and owners.  From how to come up with a business idea, to niche sourcing, to getting funding, to outside the box marketing AND SO MUCH MORE!! 

Listen to the interview to learn more about:

• Business Plans
• Taking the plunge
• Choosing your business and the products
• How to stand out from your competition

During the interview, Rieva went through almost each chapter explaining in detail the ‘must knows’ for starting and running a business.  This woman knows her stuff!!  She was an entrepreneur before the word was in the dictionary!!

Pick up this MUST HAVE book, “Start Your Own Business – the only startup business book you’ll ever need”

Rieva will be at eBay Live this year.  You can meet her in person at:

Trend Spotting: How Keeping Up on Trends Can Boost Your Business’s Bottom Line – Thursday, June 14^th, at Noon in Room 107B

Trend Spotting: How Keeping Up on Trends Can Boost Your Business’s Bottom Line – Friday, June 15^th at 9am in Room 107B

Book Signing for“Start Your Own Business” – Friday, June 15th, at 10:30am – BCEC Level 1 – Book Store

Rieva shared the following sites during her interview:

NEW Women Entrepreneur site

Her NEW blog

Checking out MLM’s

Checking out Franchises

Save $10 Off Any Entrepreneur Magazine’s Start-Up Guide!

Special Discount Offer: Save $10 on books to help you start your own business

25 Businesses You Can Start and Run From Home.

Entrepreneur Magazine: Only $1.33 a month (Expires in 20 days!)

to listen to this podcast click here

Tags: ASK, Podcasts by Janelle
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What a delightful & very informative interview we had today with Louise of Mirra.N.Me, her partner & daughter Lia and of course Mirra!

They both shared their secrets & tips about going from the corporate world (and in Lia’s case, college) to being successful entrepreneurs!!  Learn how:

• they work together in harmony
• their sourcing secrets – love this one!
• and the tools they use to continue to grow as PowerSellers

Website Mirra.N.Me talked about:

Endicia – Online Postage and wealth of knowledge about the new postal changes

ProStores – your website outside of the eBay world

eBay Stores

Their eBay Store – Mirra.N.Me

to listen to this podcast click here

Tags: ASK, Podcasts by Janelle
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Howdy,

WOW…so many email entries were sent in for the eBay Live Success Week Contest (in case you missed it, you can read the information on my blog here: www.myspace.com/janelleelms

 

I asked the following contest question:

Besides our incredible PowerSeller Raymund Chua of Buy Direct Specialists (www.janelleelms.com/buydirect), who are my top 4 guest speakers I have for you during eBay Live Success Week (June 4th – 8^th)?

 

My favorite guess was Pierre Omidyer – wow, that would be super impressive if I could get him.  But he is a tad elusive.  However, you all gave me some great ideas of who to start working on next!!  My dear friends Chris Malta, Rob Cowie and Mike Enos will be delighted that you honored them with guesses for rock star status.  Some of you came SO close with 3 of the upcoming guru speakers…but we have a winner…well actually…

 

Congrats go out to TWO winners….I know, I said one winner, but I am a softie.  These two between them probably sent in 300 entries – LOL…they wore me down.  Their winning entries came in within moments of each other AND, they had both been super close from their very first guess.  The last of the 4 was the hardest because he wasn’t listed on the eBay Live speakers list.  HUGE congrats and $1000 in Success Coaching go out to:

Wendy Siegel of http://stores.ebay.com/WebWendy  AND

Edith Russo of http://russosrealm.com/

 

Nice job representing for the women!!

 

As I mentioned, these were some tough interviews to get…all of them were going to be speaking at eBay Live, but eBay has the money to get those kind of names.  Plus, not everyone is going to Live this year AND I will be speaking at the same time as many of these rock-stars.  So I wanted everyone (including me – lol) to get a chance to hear the people who have the information to profitably change your business and your world.

 

Here were the clues given, as well as the correct answers:

Guest #1 – ‘The Carving Studio’ (where he was working prior to eBay), 50 something cross-dressing, milk farmer, eBay Legend (what he called himself on the first forum group) – Uncle Griff or Jim Griffith 

 

 

Guest #2 – ‘Remarkable’ (the term Seth uses to define what is needed in your business), blogger, dip (his latest book), recently chosen as one of 21 Speakers for the Next Century by Successful Meetings, best-selling author multiple times over – Seth Godin

 

Guest #3 – ‘Talkers’ (what Andy says you need for your business), has advised TiVo, Ralph Lauren, Sprint, and Kimberly-Clark on their marketing strategies, hosts a roving dinner for interesting people, GasPedal, taught at the Wharton School of Business – Andy Sernovitz of Word of Mouth Marketing

 

Guest #4 – ‘Sticky’ (how John explains how your marketing should be), his powerful & informative blog has earned him awards from Forbes, Harvard Business School and Marketing Sherpa, his profitable marketing tools have received accolades in Forbes and Entrepreneur Magazine. – John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing

 

I hope you’ll be as delighted and thrilled as I am at the incredible line-up we have for eBay Live Success Week.  You’ll want to get registered for these amazing interviews ASAP…press releases are going out on Tuesday to the ‘rest of the world’.

 

PLUS, since I noticed when I was doing the clues that all of the powerhouses for the podcasts that week were men, I rounded up some amazing women entrepreneurs for this week!!  Plan to have your Success World rocked over the next 10 days!!

 

Here is our fabulous line-up for the coming weeks:

 

Wednesday, May 30^th, 2007 at 3pm pst/6pm est

 

 

 

Thursday, May 31st, 2007 at Noon pst/3pm est

 

 

 

Friday, June 1st, 2007 at Noon pst/3pm est

 

 

 

Saturday, June 2^nd, 2007 at 10am pst/1pm est

 

 

eBay Live Success Week

 

Tuesday, June 5^th, 2007 at 11am pst/2pm est

 

 

 

Thursday, June 7th, 2007 at Noon pst/3pm est

 

 

 

Thursday, June 7th, 2007 at 1:30pm pst/4:30pm est

 

 

Friday, June 8^th, 2007 at 1:30pm pst/4:30pm est

 

 

Fabulous Blessings,

Janelle

 

 

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• Auction Style Listings
• Insertion fee of only 20 cents
• This is going to be fabulous for your higher ticket items
• Remember, you can use Uship to deal with your heavy, bulky and large items

20 cent listing day

Tags: Podcasts by Janelle
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Google has been testing a new tool in their labs section called Trends.  A nifty tool in following what people are searching for.  This could be very useful in staying on top of trends for sourcing, keywords, and marketing.  It has two main parts:

Comparing trends and the Top 100 trends

The Top 100 trends is not a list of the most searched words, but is instead an interesting insight into searches that are suddenly becoming popular.  Words that are quickly being searched more than usual. 

No surprise that recent ‘Dancing With the Stars’ winner Apolo Ohno is showing up on here.  However, if there is a term on the list that baffles you, you can click on the hot trend words and up will come related searches, news items, and the chart showing it’s sudden popularity.  You can usually tell from the news articles if it is a ‘flash in the pan’ or something you might want to add to your sourcing or keywords list.

The comparing trends feature allows you to drill down into information.  You can pick one word, a group of words, or even compare two words.  I love the analytics below showing the popularity by regions, cities and languages.

Have fun playing,

Janelle

Tags: Success Announcements by Janelle
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Learn how this amazing husband and wife team share the spotlight and success of being eBay PowerSellers!

Join Marshall and Joli of 2dizzylizards as they share:

 

• how they work so fabulously together to create this incredible success story
• What marketing tools they have put in place to increase their profits
• What tools they utilize in their business to create success
• And why Marshall is SO adamant about research!

Websites they shared during the interview:

Hammertap

Inkfrog

Their Store – 2dizzylizards

to listen to this podcast click here

Tags: PowerSeller, ASK, Podcasts by Janelle
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I tried to warn you guys….

 

You know I had a very strange dream last night…I woke up in my dream – looked out my window – and saw utter & mass destruction…burning buildings, destroyed houses, crashing airplanes – everyone was running around acting insane.  When I really woke up this morning I remembered about the upcoming shipping changes from the USPS and figured I had better send out a guide to help you survive the mass destruction that is about to happen….

 

From the USPS’s website:

“On May 14, 2007, the U.S. Postal Service is introducing new pricing that reflects changes in our operations and the marketplace, offers you more choices, and creates a more efficient mail system that keeps overall costs as low as possible.”

 

Ok, you guys know I am usually a very ‘glass is overflowing’ type of chick…but c’mon.  This intricate price increase is going to frustrate the eBay sellers more than almost anything the post office could have possibly done.  If they had just raised their fees, it would have been (gasp) much better than what is about to occur in a couple of days.  But the new fees partly have to do with what SIZE your boxes are…Egads!  As much as I am an optimistic, this will be a disaster.  Many people don’t know this huge change is coming, other know but haven’t adjusted their businesses yet for it, and probably the worst part is going to be the poor buyers stuck in the middle as the frustrated sellers come to grips and adjust their selling experience on eBay.  I am just finishing up ‘measuring’ my standard shipping boxes for my items…yet in complete honesty – even after writing this – I am still not completely sure I understand all of these changes.

 

I hope all of you make a beeline to the USPS booth #613 at eBay Live and tell them exactly how these changes effect eBay sellers…make sure your voices are heard.  We are a HUGE part of their revenue and hopefully that will carry some weight.  AND, whoever the Post Office has doing their copywriting for this new fee change deserves a raise – lol.  It actually sounds like the USPS is doing us a fabulous service of confusing the heck out of the mailing system!

 

Ok, so we can’t fuss anymore…we just need to ‘pull up our big girl panties’ (thanks Danna) and beat out our competition with our amazing customer service so that OUR customers don’t suffer.

 

  

Some things to think about:

• You are probably going to want to move your products into pre-determined box sizes – meaning…ordering standard Priority boxes from USPS or getting plain ones from another business that are specific sizes (instead of using any size box you can get your hands on).  This way you will always know the size of the box, and won’t have to whip out the tape measure for every single shipment.  Here are some companies to order these from:

                  USPS - http://shop.usps.com/

                  EZ Shipping Supplies

                  Manhattan Mailroom01

                  MegaBox Warehouse

                  AAA Box Company

 

• You might want to think about moving your shipping into using the Flat-rate envelopes and boxes from the USPS as much as possible.  They ship for a flat fee no matter how much the boxes weigh…whatever you can stuff in them goes for that price.

                        $8.95 for either 11″ x 8.5″ x 5.5″ or 13.625″ x 11.875″ x 3.375″ flat-                          weight boxes OR

                        $4.60 for a 12 1/2″ X 9 1/2″ envelope

 

• You might consider staying away from large items that don’t weigh much – they will be charged based on their size, not the weight now. 

 

• Endicia, my favoritest postage printing site, took the time to put together a great newsletter about the changes, what is happening, how to deal with it, as well as tips on making sure you goes smoothly for you and your customer.  You can read their latest newsletter here: http://www.endicia.com/newsletter/EndiciaNews2007-04.htm

 

 

• Read eBay’s information about the changes here: http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200704.shtml#2007-04-19094009 – this includes information on what eBay is trying to do to help with this transition

• eBay’s FAQ page about this: http://pages.ebay.com/shippingfaq/

·        Read the two great workshops that eBay put on about this transition:

            http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa?threadID=2000341780&ssPageName=CMDV:AB

            http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa?threadID=2000341784&ssPageName=CMDV:AB

 

• For International Sellers – here is a breakdown chart for you: http://www.usps.com/ratecase/_pdf/immtables43.pdf

• Go back and listen to the great podcast PowerSeller Carol did about this very topic: http://onlinesuccessinstitute.com/?p=9 – she has also included an easy guide for reference about the upcoming changes