James Clifton

A man and his blog.

You get what you pay for.

I once made my living selling full time on ebay. And while it sounds simple it really is as hard, if not harder, than a normal job. If you work for yourself you don’t get paid on a regular basis; I forgot how many times I lay in my bed at night wishing I got a regular pay check, even if that pay check was less than what I was currently getting! Each morning I woke up and filled out the mornings orders, then answered any emails that needed responding too. Then it was time to do research – this took up nearly 50% of the working day. Why do so much research? Because I needed to stay ahead of my competitors, if not then they would catch up to me and take away my market share. The one thing I noticed when researching is that I got what I pay for, and that rule still applies today. We’ll start with free advice You really do get what you pay for here. Ask an open ended question on a forum board (e.g “What is the best way to do this?”) then you will get 101 different answers; of which 10 will be accurate. Another method of asking questions on ebay is to ask ebay directly – this would be the worst thing you could do as they ‘cut and paste’ the answers, and I’m convinced that a computer reads the email and tries to answer it. The answers I have received to my own questions have been so wrong as to make my head spin. What I find offensive about this is that each month I receive a large bill from ebay (which I pay straight away), so you would think that they would have better customer service for paying customers – but I digress. Cheap advice I have bought a lot of ebooks off ebay for around the $1 – $10 mark. And most of these have snippets of advice that is worth the price of the ebook, but they also include a lot of waffle (It’s not BS information, the writer is simply trying to fill out a 20-30 page ebook so it looks like you are getting your moneys worth). Rarely have I bought an ebook at this price and been disappointed, but nothing has ever really stood out from the crowd. Medium(?) advice Medium is the wrong word to use, but if I think of a better term then I will come back and edit this blog ?? Ebooks around the $10 – $50 mark are the ones I refer to here. Because of the price I can’t afford to purchase each ebook I see at this price; but the one’s I have bought are usually worth it – the writer has several points to make and knows their stuff. I notice with these ebooks that the writer has gone out of their way to show their credentials throughout the sale; this may include screenshots of payments, screenshots of search engine rankings. My biggest mistake was not buying a particular ebook valued at $30 that showed how this person got a number 1 ranking on google. The writer gave out the term he was number 1 for and if you searched in google (which I did) his website was number 1 AND number 2! I think I saved it in my ‘watched list’ but didn’t do anything for a long time and it disappeared! I search for the ebook regularly but so far I have come up empty handed ?? Expensive advice This is for ebooks or courses over $50. The best purchase I ever made was from a marketing course, it cost me $600 (at the time I only had $800 in my credit card, but I took a chance). The sales letter was very impressive so I thought I would give it a go. And it was the best purchase I ever made! I’m currently reading the whole thing for a third time (I read it once a year) and each time I congratulate myself on buying it.