163 – Lead Generation: Tom talks eBay

Episode 163 - eBay
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody, it's Tom here with episode 163 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about eBay as a lead generator and cash flow machine. And I almost quit eBay and then two thousand dollars rolled in from somebody that never heard of me before, but heard of me on eBay. That was my two by four to the head of Why I Shouldn't Quit eBay. All right. We'll get to that later. Hope you didn't miss episode 162. That was Christine Kloser. Her clients just simply love her. And if you want to write a book, she's got a great program to make it happen. So please tell some friends about the podcast. We really appreciate it. Also, go over and leave us a rating and review that helps the show out. And again, we appreciate that. Our podcast app. Make sure you get a copy. That's very handy to have on your cell phone or tablet so you can take us with you on the road. It's got all kinds of fancy features to really help your listening experience. And you can find that and all the instructions that screwthecommute.com/app and I've got a freebie for you. Of course, I love to give freebies away it's my twenty seven dollar e-book, How to Automate Your Business. And just what are the tips in this e-book has saved me over seven and a half million keystrokes and and I got another little surprise there for you that has something to do with podcasts. Now, I hope you've heard about if you've been a regular listener, the great Internet marketing retreat and joint venture program, I'm sitting here right now in this enormous facility where students come in from all over the world to study Internet marketing in the lap of luxury. And I want you to be here to one of these days. It's a it's part of a year long program, but you don't have to spend a whole year before you can start making money with online marketing. And another little sidebar that you rarely hear about is that I've taught more professional speakers than anybody living. I dare you to find somebody that can beat that record. So that's part of the deal, too. If you have any thoughts of becoming a professional speaker, anything I can do to help you make money. Fits into the nature of this program. So check it out at greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and I will tell you a little bit more about that later.

[00:03:00] All right, let's get to the main event. eBay as a lead generator and cash flow machine. I'm going to take this in two sections. So. So let's talk about lead generation first. First, you should know that eBay currently has over a hundred and eighty million active users. I mean, it'd be a like a it's the third largest country or so. If it was a country. I'm not sure how they define active users, but probably has something to do with how many people interacted with the site in the past, so many days, maybe 30 days. I don't know.

[00:03:37] But no matter how they define it, that's a lot of people. And I can assure you that not all these people are broke. Super bargain hunters. Now, they may be bargain hunters, but they're all not broke. I shop eBay regularly and I can buy whatever I want. I just grew up very frugal with frugal parents that taught me not to waste money. I mean, I love yard sales and flea markets where. Listen to this. I get lots of opportunities to to move someone else's junk from their garage to my garage.

[00:04:16] But anyway, on eBay, I've buy parts for my pressure washer and dishwasher. Bought CDs and DVDs. Books. Drone parts. Martial arts and self-defense gadgets and tons of other stuff over many years. When I find a supplier I like, I just go back to them directly. Now for dishwasher parts. You know, guess what? I don't buy them very often. So other than that sale, the vendor doesn't get much further business from me. But when you're in the information business. People on eBay can find you there the first time and then buy other stuff from you directly. And that's what I call lead generation. See it almost always cost you in one way or the other to develop leads for your business. In this case, people are paying me to get into my database. Right. And yeah. They're getting in at a discounted price. But to me, that's way better than me paying Facebook or Google to get a person that hasn't and may never spend any money with me. Now let me tell you, when I was ready to quit eBay, I got an eBay order for my wake him up business presentations book. It's a twenty four ninety five beautiful soft cover book. That's it's somewhat of a classic. I'd have to say. Now, the guy paid me two dollars for this brand new book and he wanted me to autograph and I was thinking to myself, this is worthless I should quit eBay and it is not worth my time.

[00:05:58] And so I'm kind of bellyaching about this in my mind. And then a week later, the guy that bought that book for two bucks, but two of my thousand dollar wake him up video professional speaking system. Nobody buys two of them. I can count on one hand the number of people that bought. All right. He bought one for his son and one for himself. Now, that was my two by four to the head that eBay is lead generation. It's quite likely that person would never have heard of me in any other way and would have spent his two grand with somebody else. So basically, you're putting your products on eBay to get your share of those 180 million people so that they hear of you and then you get them in your database to market to them forever. And remember, they paid you to get in your database. Now, here's one thing you got to keep in mind to get leads off eBay. You must sell a physical product now. For a while we were able to sell digital products on eBay, but that didn't last very long. People were claiming they didn't receive their downloads and asking for refunds by the droves. And I'm not sure if these people were rip offs or just not savvy enough to get their downloads, but from eBay and PayPal's point of view and by the way, eBay owns PayPal, it was too much hassle with no proof of delivery like you would have on a physical product.

[00:07:34] So they quit allowing downloads now from a real life aspect. What I just said is not entirely true. All right. I have tons of older C.D. and DVD for sale on eBay for several years or for the past several years. When someone buys a C.D. and then they ask me if I have a digital download of it so they can get it immediately. Well, of course I do. I needed the digital file to make the C.D. or DVD in the first place. All right. So. So I just send it to them and I just might accidentally on purpose forget to mail the C.D. or DVD. But you didn't hear that here. Okay. Pretend you didn't hear that. Now, they didn't really want the CD. They wanted the information and most people were honest and very happy. They got the information quickly in an easier to use format. Now, I'm not saying using eBay as the lead generator only works for information products. I'm just saying you do have to list a physical product to get your listing accepted on eBay. So if you want people to pay you to become a customer, then eBay is a good alternative. Let's talk about cash flow. You can make some good cash flow, too, and have eBay as a significant part of your business. I mean, at the peak, when I had one of my geeks running it for me, we were pulling in about seven thousand dollars a month and I got my power seller certificate.

[00:09:15] So cash flow can be your goal. In addition to the generation, if you're willing to work it now, you can sell your own products. You can sell other people's products or products you've acquired. Now, I'm going to tell you about several different people that have been in my life. One was a single mom who desperately needed the cash flow to take care of herself and her kids. She would take between 80 and 100 bucks every Saturday morning and go to every yard sale and flea market. She could find. She would see items and then immediately check on her cell phone what the item was selling for on eBay. And if it was significantly higher than what she could buy it for at the yard sale, she'd buy it if it was not that great of a deal. She'd pass. And she'd take all her acquisitions home. Look up the past sales of the item on eBay and I'll tell you how to do that in a minute. And and she'd I don't want to say plagiarized the listing that someone else had written. All right. But let's just say she got good ideas from other sellers on how to write her listing for that product. She took a photograph of the item and put up the listing on eBay.

[00:10:37] Bottom line, she told me she profited between 700 and a thousand dollars per week consistently over many years doing this. I think she wrote a book about it. Now, before I tell you about a couple more people, let me tell you how she found all the text to use in her listings. And hardly anybody knows about this on eBay. There's a function called advanced search by using this function. You can put in the name of your product and then click a box that says this says something like completed listings only. This brings up all the listings for that product from the past 90 days. Now, if the price shows up as green, that means the product actually sold and that was the price it sold for. If the price shows up as red, then that listing didn't sell the product. So you look at the listings of the ones that actually sold. And again, I'm not saying to plagiarize. But used similar ad copy from other people's listings. Now, I can't advocate for it, but I'll suggest to you that many sellers just copy from other sellers, and if it's a one off item, like like if it's not something being sold over and over again, like one of my C.D.s, then the old seller probably would never know and never care. If you copy their listing for a product, they are never going to sell again.

[00:12:17] Now, the biggest hassle from selling one off items, in other words, if you have a Tonka toy truck to sell, you probably won't be able to use that ad copy or picture in a future listing. So it's a little more labor intensive than selling the same listing over and over again like I do on my C.D.s.

[00:12:37] So the advanced search function is a good thing to know about, and I even used it as a buyer to see what a particular item is actually selling for, so I don't overpay when I'm trying to buy something. Now, this next example, I would not have believed had I not seen it with my own eyes. OK. I was I was buying a drill locally off a guy that was not off eBay, it was off one of those buying apps like Facebook Marketplace. So I go to his home and he had like a quarter of a million dollar gorgeous motor home out front. The home itself was beautiful. The guy was nice and met me at the door and invited me to come down to the basement, to his workshop to see the drill. And once we got to the basement on the way to his shop. I saw something you just don't see everyday. If you were gonna see it, it's very unlikely you would see it in a home basement machine shop. There were there were hundreds of bras hanging up in rows in this guy's basement. Now I'm getting creeped out. I'm in this basement. Nobody else is around but me and this guy, he's he's pretty much proudly showing me his shop, which was immaculate, I might add, and totally ignoring the fact that hundreds of bras were hanging up, some of which almost hit me in the head as I walked towards the shop.

[00:14:21] So after talking to this guy, and since I love tools, he was telling me how he got several of them and I was asking him what some of them were that I had never seen before. And we're basically BSing about tools and how our dads got us started working on things. So. So I paid him for the drill. And on the way out, I felt comfortable enough asking him, hey, hey, what's up with the bras? Okay. And his face lit up and I'm kind of hoping he it wasn't like souvenirs from all the women he had serial killed. I don't know. But anyway, his face lit up. And guess what he said? Oh that's my daughter's eBay business. And she said, wait, listen to this. She pulls in about one hundred and forty thousand dollars a year selling used bras, used bras. Who buys used bras? I don't know. And I'm not sure I want to know. He said she goes to all the thrift shops and buys up all the odd sizes and especially cute ones.

[00:15:33] And I don't know what else her criteria were, but she brings them back and lists them on eBay. One hundred forty thousand dollars the year, folks. That's crazy. All right. Now, the guy that taught me was doing 20 grand a month. Well, listen, what he was selling used cell phones again. Who buys you cell phones? I don't know. I always just upgrade and, you know. But I don't break mine all the time either. Any way. I was gonna pay him to teach me more of the finer points of selling on eBay. eBay has a program where experienced sellers will list themselves, where they help you learn and you pay them to help you. So I wanted to check this guy out before I hired him, so I. So he brought over his sales, all printed out for the last three months. It was a binder three inches thick. Where he paid an average of about 10 bucks per cell phone and sold them for an average of one hundred dollars per cell phone. I ask him how he got all those used cell phones. And he said, well, he went to pawnshops and asked them what was the thing they had the most trouble selling. They all said cell phones because they could never keep track of the different services and chargers and all that stuff. He said he'd give him ten dollars each and once a month he'd come around and collect all that they had. He showed me this giant box in his car. He had just picked up that day that was full to the top with cell phones. He'd take him home. Figure out what they were. Which he got very good at. Quickly. And list them on eBay. And at least for the three months that he showed me, it was clearing about twenty thousand dollars a month is just amazing. And another thing he told me that he sells is doll heads, doll heads.

[00:17:35] I don't know if people were decapitating their dolls for fun or voodoo doll. No, no, no. He's that people make dolls and he had these molds where he would pour in. He said about 10 cents worth of rubber. Let him sit overnight and he would get four doll heads for 10 cents worth of material. And the doll heads were selling for ten dollars apiece. So he'd get a 40 dollar return on a ten cent investment.

[00:18:06] So people are doing all kinds of stuff on eBay, folks. You can make a full time live in their. All right. And even one of my contractors getting into it. I mean, yesterday in a meeting, he said he found a Gucci ashtray for 50 cents at a yard sale and sold it for a hundred bucks. All right.

[00:18:26] So, again, these are typical things, but it is typical that you could clearly do this and make a very significant cash flow. If you just did what I told you in here. Check out what things are selling for. Buy them if it's cheap. Resell then on eBay. And there you go.

[00:18:47] And the one thing you can do to learn is just sell some of your own unwanted stuff and you can clean out your basement and garages at the same time. But bottom line is eBay can be both a great lead generator and a cash flow machine. If you're willing to work. Now, one other thing is eBay has all kinds of help to teach you how to use it. And there are internal to eBay and third party apps that help you automate your listings. And hey, maybe I'll buy some of your junk and move it into my garage.

[00:19:25] So, folks, this is just one of the revenue streams and one of the ways I've made money over many, many years. And, you know, I kind of turned the Internet marketing world on its head with my very unique method of helping people where you don't pay the enormous fees that they a lot of people at my level charge. You pay an entry fee to my program and then I get a percentage of profits that's capped. So you're not stuck with me forever. So for me to get money, you've got to make way bigger money. And then after a while, when you become an expert, you don't need me anymore and you're not stuck with me. It's just the it's the most unique program has been running for nearly 20 years. Seventeen hundred students. I want you to be one of them. If you have aspirations of becoming an online marketer, but you're fighting and everything, all the stuff people are trying to sell you, that's garbage and you don't know any better and you're wasting money and time. I cut out all of that for you when you come to me. I don't allow you to spend a nickel unless you clear it with me first because so many people were selling stuff that's just, you know, all shiny objects that have no substance behind them. And you're just wasting your money and they're telling you how to get rich and they can't hardly make their car payments. So that's a whole different thing here. So check it out at greatinternetmarketingtraining.com as part of your program. You get an immersion weekend. We just had people here yesterday that just left. And you also get a scholarship to my Internet marketing school. It's the only one of its kind in the country that you can either use yourself or gift to somebody else. We had one guy joined a mentor program, gift the school to his daughter, his 22 year old daughter, who was working a regular job within one month. She was making eleven hundred dollars on us on the side from what she had learned in the school. And after two months, she she's quitting her job because she totally replace their income, just working with what she learned in only two months in the school.

[00:21:35] So this is all very powerful real stuff. This is not hocus pocus, not get rich. Quick stuff. It's real. That's all I'll teach. I'm not going to risk my reputation giving you a bunch of B.S. because I get money. You know, if I just keep doing busy work and just take your entry fee, I don't get anything in the in the back end where you make money and then brag about me to all your friends. All right. So you can be sure I'm going to stick with you. So I'm kind of a fanatic. I take your calls. It's one on one instruction and tutoring for me and my entire staff. You can't beat this anywhere else. If you want details check it out at greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and then send me any questions. I'll talk to you about it. See if it's right for you. And if if so, you get going immediately. You don't have to wait for the next class to start because it's one on one.

[00:22:30] It's me and you mano a mano. I think they call it.

[00:22:34] So anyway, that's our story for today. eBay can be a great lead generator and cash flow machine for you. And hey, I'm going to catch all the next episode. See ya later.

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