eBay Entrepreneurs Go Green - Here’s how!

• Reuse your boxes - As ebay sellers, we get a lot of mail and a lot of packages (usually our inventory that we are selling on ebay or other things that we buy). So when you ship out your next package, look at your boxes and see if you can reuse any of them. Don’t just throw them away, save them up over time and you will have a good supply to choose from. And it is important to remember that you can make a box that works for you out of another box that may be too big, just get your box cutter or scisors out and you are ready to go! Another way to reuse boxes is to visit your local retailers and see if they will give you any of their old boxes. Places like Wal-Mart, Target, Lowes, and Food Lion will be more than happy to provide you with boxes (for whatever purpose) if you ask them and are there at the right time (usually early morning or late at night).
• Combine your trips to the post office - One of the issues with being an eBay seller is that you are constantly at the post office it seems. During the spring while at school and selling on eBay, I think I was at the post office everyday for weeks in a row. However, now that I am home and working full time, my parents are able to take some of my packages on top of things they may have or I can put smaller items in the mailbox. If you have auctions ending at different times throughout the day then save all your packages up until the afternoon and head to the post office then. Or, the better option may be to go in the early morning (because everyone else waits until the afternoon). Better yet, go every other day or only a couple times a week. Put this in your eBay policies and let your customers know that you are attempting to make your business green and I am sure they would be happy to hear that.
• Use the USPS Carrier pick up - If you are printing your shipping labels off the computer and pay for them online, you can usually schedule a carrier pick up, which could be the same time that your regular mail man comes to your house or office anyway. This will save you from having to go the post office at all and also save you on using more gas in your vehicle!
• Use less paper and recycle what you do use - When I ship out an item, I usually include two things: an eBay invoice and a “thank you for shopping with us” business card. The biz card basically lets the person know that we are thankful for their business and also to leave feedback for the item. By including these, I use a good amount of paper and ink. If I just stopped including the invoices, I would save a lot of paper. But the point is if you have some pages that didnt print right, print on the other side of use them for scrap paper or even packaging material. If possible, write out labels for your packages instead of printing them and using labels and more ink.
• Use packaging material from around the house - Do you get the newspaper everyday? So do the rest of us. Now instead of throwing it out or recycling it every week, use it as your packaging material for when you ship out items. This will save you from buying either packaging peanuts or tissue paper or other items. Also, if you have a cross cut shredder, you can use the shreds from your basket for packaging - it basically looks like confetti! A cool way to mix it up is to shred a couple pieces of colored paper with all your other stuff (letters, old bills, credit card offers, etc) to make it a little more colorful.

I currently have the archives area shown because it was a requirement for a couple different paid review websites that I use, however, as month after month passes, it gets so long! I either want to get rid of it or figure out how to shorten it to say maybe the last 5 months only.

The other area I am thinking about knocking off is the categories section. Do you use it? I know for me, if I was looking for something specific I would do a search on the website rather than utilize the categories on the sidebar. Now having the categories is good for when you want to link from a post to another area of your site (say a whole topic of posts such as business ideas or monetizing websites), but this is also a long list that as time goes on, will probably only get longer.

What do you guys think? Keep them, loose them, or keep one or the other?

Anyway, I just wanted to share with you all about OIO Publisher again as I know I have talked about it before. If you are looking to make money online from blogging, you need to have OIO Publisher to do it! So go sign up today and take your blog income earnings to the next level!

A collaborative effort by Adii, Magnus Jepson, Mark Forrester and Elliot Jay Stocks, I can only imagine what kind of success WooThemes is going to be. With some already great looking themes designed and out there, it is hard to think that they will be able to out do themselves and create something even better.

The concept of WooThemes is great also - you sign up and pay for three or six months membership and get access to any and all themes that are already available and then any that launch during your time as a member. Sounds good doesn’t it? The only better part is the reasonable price! A single user subscription will get you access to over 10 themes right away and more on the way, for only $150.00! Each theme was previously selling at $50+, so this is a great deal for you.

I sent a twitter out to @adii to find out what the hardest part of setting up and launching WooThemes was an his simple reply was “woothemes = blood, sweat, and tears” If you are looking for an indepth follow up on the process of launching WooThemes, keep an eye out on Adii’s site.

Congrats goes out to the guys for a successful launch today!

Twitter is just like any other social networking website out there - you sign up, you start posting (or tweeting in this case), follow what other people are saying, and people follow what you are saying. As you follow people, you start to see what they are saying on your Twitter homepage. Not a bad way to keep in touch with others right? I agree. It is a great way to get a quick thought out or bounce an idea off of someone if you are following each other. However, Twitter has a downside..besides its bad downtime and constant “over capacity” warnings, some people seem to find it neccessary to tweet EVERYTHING they are thinking or doing. For example, Robert Scoble on Twitter. When Twitter was getting popular, I started following him…soon I realized that if I followed him I wouldn’t be able to see what anyone else was doing because he was using the service so much that I only saw his updates. In fact, now that I think about it, maybe Twitter is over capacity because of Scoble accessing it from every means possible: online, desktop widgets, IM clients, text messages, emails, blog plugins, and anything else out there. So needless to say, I stopped following him.

Now, as I cruise the blogosphere, I have started to see different “Follow me on Twitter” images such as I have in the right sidebar. No problem here. Taking it one step further, that person has something along the lines of “You Follow, I Follow” posted underneath that. Meaning that if you follow them, they will follow you. Almost sounds like the pregnancy pact of teen girls who agreeed to get pregnant together and have their babies together.

Anyway, if you start following every person who follows you, you soon will not be able to follow any conversation that might be starting on Twitter, you won’t be able to catch all of the replies or “@” sent your way in a timely manner, and you won’t know what is going on. So, I encourage you to check out Twitter, try out the service, follow me on Twitter, and engage in conversations with people. However, if you follow me, there is not gaurentee that I will follow you - I am just putting this out there. I have been receiving more and more notifications of people following me on Twitter and that is great. I love the opportunity to connect with new people and network however I will not be following you all just because you follow me; that defeats the purpose of the service to me. When I receive an email saying someone is following me, I check their page to see who else they are following, how long they have been apart of Twitter, and what they are tweeting about. If I like what I see, I’ll follow; if not, I’ll check back at it later.

See you on Twitter…if the site stays up long enough.

For the month of June, I made money blogging the following ways:

• AdSense - $14.41
• SponoseredReviews - $38.35
• CashCrate - $6.65
• Review Me - $30.00
• Text Link Ads - $25.06
• Blogrolled.com - $7.50

In a nice pretty chart, the total of $121.97 looks like this:

ReviewMe.com worked out to almost be this past month’s largest income provider. I had accepted a bunch of smaller reviews (around $10 each) but only managed to complete 3 of them and 1 got canceled before I could make the post. If I had crunched out the another 2 or 3, this amount would have doubled.

The same idea goes with the amount from SponsoredReviews.com, which was the biggest earner. I accepted a few different reviews and applied for others but only 2 were accepted by the advertiser. But, $38.35 is not too bad for writing 2 posts.

The amount that I was not that happy with for the month was my earnings from CashCrate. I personally only completed a survey or two which did not amount to much and the referrals underneath of me earned me about $5.50. If you are looking for an easy way to earn a decent amount of money for an easy task, I highly recommend checking out CashCrate. I have written about it a bunch before as well.

Finally, Blogrolled.com is a new service I signed up for and tested out. The premise of the business is pretty simple - like Text Link Ads and other services, they sell text links on your website. However, unlike other sites where you need to put a widget or code on your site, when Blogrolled sells a link on your site, all you do is add the link to your own blogroll until you are told to remove it (the advertiser cancels).

A couple other facts:

• 20 blog posts
• 22 comments throughout the month
• Besides Google and direct visitors, Bobbyhash.com and Collegebeing.com were the biggest referrers of visitors for the month.
• Most popular posts:
  • Did you choose the right major during college?
  • May Blog Income Earnings
  • Frugality for college students

I am sure you guys know all about promotional items that you get from companies when they are trying to sell something to you or when you attend a conference, well Bic Promo Pens is no different offering promotional pens and similar items. I am a fan of promotional items, because many of them I use. I used to get a package once a month from a promotional products company that did printing for me a couple times on different items. Each month they would send me some different sample products, and always included pens. Besides the markers, sticky notes, coffee mugs, and cups that they sent I usually enjoyed the promo pens the best; simply because I could use them daily and it saved me from needing a stock of pens incase I left one on campus somewhere or lost one.

If you’ve got a blog, make a comment on John’s blog and write a post about the contes for a chance to win!

After a great interview with Mike and the folks at SmartyPig, they were kind enough to send me a $50 gift card for SmartyPig. As a user of SmartyPig, that would be a great little bonus into my own account and to be put towards my savings goal. However, I thought it would be more fun to give it away to someone who sets up an account at SmartyPig. Now, before you get too excited about winning a free $50, this gift card can only be used at SmartyPig.com to be added into your account and go towards one of your goals.

So, here is how things will work. First, you are going to need an account with SmartyPig. So, head over to www.smartypig.com and sign up for an account and set up a savings goal. Then leave a comment with your email address that you used with your SmartyPig account. This will let me check to see that you set up an account and see what people are saving for. By signing up for an account and leaving a comment here on this post, you will be entered into the contest.

Here are a couple other ways to get more chances to win:

• Subscribed to the Email Feed for Dorm Room Biz
• Write about the contest on your blog providing a trackback to this post or leave a comment with a link to your post.

It is as easy as that! The winner be chosen randomly and will be annouced on July 15, 2008. After the contest ends, I’ll contact the winner to get their address and send the gift card off to them!

I look forward to some participation in this contest, and more contests will be coming soon!

So, who wants $50 to save towards their goal?

Anyway, the point I am gettng to is that another flaw within the system was people taking advantage of the way Entrecard works and exploiting ways to quickly gain credits through “power dropping”. Power dropping is basically clicking on as many widgets as you can as quickly as possible. This started out with focusing on websites that loaded quickly and had their widget located above the fold. You would quickly visit a website, click their widget, and then move on. Many people would sometimes open up tens or hundreds of sites and quickly tab through them all leaving their card and not visiting the site for more than 5 seconds - this obviously defeats the purpose of the site and exposing yourself to new websites and blogs. As the idea became more popular, many blogs set up landing pages for their sites where you would first come to a blank page with just their widget and after dropping your card, you could continue on to their site. Or some sites just had the widget and some ad’s displayed on them. Either way, it was taking advantage of the system. As a result of power dropping, someone could easily accumulate thousands of credits and be able to either advertise on all the most popular blogs in the system, sell the credits on eBay, or trade them for other things.

Well, Graham and the Entrecard gang have finally decided to put a stop of the abuse of the system and drop the real bomb on the power droppers. As of today, July 1st, they are supposed to be putting their foot down on all the quick drop and power dropping pages out there. Their accounts will be closed, credits lost, and will have to sart over if anything.