This is my second post; my first is in the "Introduce Yourself" thread.

This post will be an encouragement to any who are having trouble "getting started".

I've not yet put out my shingle as a copywriter, except for putting up a website.

Recently, a friend decided to try selling his classic car on eBay, not being satisfied with local offers. I offered to help, asking only for a testimonial in return. I made it clear that an experienced marketer would require money up front for this service, but I'm just now getting started. If the car sold, I knew he would give me a great testimonial.

I interviewed him (he had owned the car for two decades and had restored the car), did some research and wrote the ad. Took part of a day.

Upshot is the car sold for more than he expected. He was so thrilled that he gave me ... let's just say it's more moolah than I've ever earned in one day.

That one event did more for my confidence than anything else so far.

Here's what I learned, and what you can learn from my true story:

1. All else being equal, it's better to work with people who *want* to work with you than with people who don't really like you or want to work with you. This may not be possible in the beginning, however.

2. Overdelivering is better than underdelivering, but if you're going to put in more effort than is expected, focus your efforts on that which will bring the greatest impact.

3. If you're short in the confidence department, pick something you can achieve quickly and with a high probability of success. I knew that there would be a high level of demand for this car, and even with crappy copy it would probably sell. I also knew that the copy for most of the competitors was not very good. So, I reasoned that if I made an interesting story for people to read, the car would sell at a level higher than my friend expected. Turns out I was right.

4. Gary Halbert is correct - the most important thing is marketing is a starving crowd! I have sold a ton of stuff on eBay over the years, and the difference between most of the items I have put up for sale and the car auction is like night and day. By the end of the auction, there were over 100 people who added the auction to their "watch" list, and there were over 2600 page views (eBay supposedly only counts the first time a user visits a page). There was no question it would sell - the only question was how high would it go?

Hi and welcome

I enjoyed reading you, realy go, go, go.

thank you for sharing with us the lessons that you learned from that.

hope to read more from you.

Congrats on making the big car sale. I myself found it hard to any good ebay copy after writing sales letters and squeeze pages for a while.

The ebay crowd is a diffrent herd. They really dont tollerate hype or anything that pushes a sale. They seem to just want the good hard facts and a little bit of a story to go with it if possible.

Is the auction page still up? I would like to take a look at it. Maybe I can learn something from you. Shoot me a pm if you can please.

Hi Darrel, and welcome to the forum!

Thanks for sharing your experiences in a well written post and I'm sure this is just the start of more good things for you. Hmmm...with this one ebay automotive success under your belt, I'd be looking for other sellers who need help selling their vehicles and you could probably make a killing in that niche!

Cheers,

Steve

Daryl,

I agree with the idea that if you have another couple of successes under your belt, you could make money giving advice on how to sell cars or high-priced items on ebay. Or taking a cut by handling the sale.

Next spring my husband and I plan to sell our '87 BMW convertible. Maybe this would do well on ebay as it's a model that would appeal to collectors and BMW enthusiasts. I have no idea how to do this because I've never bought or sold anything on ebay, and since I'm unlikely to ever have another car worth auctioning on ebay I would not be interested in investing a lot of my own time learning how to do this.

Marcia Yudkin