If you want to be successful with your online business, you must be able to adapt. If you are not able to adapt, your business will die. I can understand the fear that many people go through when things change because I have been there.

As you know, I have been selling on eBay since 2004. Over the years they have made many changes forcing sellers to change their business model, websites, listing template, about me pages, and many other things. Every time a change was announced I went to the Powersellers forum to see if I could find information to lead me in the right direction. All I ever found in that forum was a bunch of people complaining about the change and how it was going to kill their business. Reading information like this is like a cancer for someone just starting out online and even for someone with a lot of experience. Many times reading all of these negative posts would make me anxious and I wouldn’t do anything but the bare minimum to run my business for days or even weeks. I’m sure you can imagine how this affected me.

Even if you don’t sell physical products, you can experience this anxiety. Recently, there was the recent Squidoo announcement and now this week there was an announcement at EPN. If you use direct eBay RSS feeds on your lenses linking directly to eBay, you will no longer be able to use this method of monetization on your lenses. This is a huge blow for me because the lenses where I link directly to eBay have been my main source of affiliate income recently.

As far as I can tell, you will still be able to use the eBay module on Squidoo to link to eBay because EPN has considered them a social networking model and not a revenue sharing module. You will still lose about half of your earnings because you will have to share them with Squidoo, but it’s better than losing a whole revenue source.

I am currently working on another option for those looking to build their own site, but still have eBay RSS feeds available on their Squidoo lenses. It will take a little front end setup, but you will be on your way to building your own website where you will own your own content.  I will be posting more on this method later this week once I am sure any bugs are worked out.

Meanwhile, I’d like to advise you not to freak out and keep working on your campaigns or making changes to keep you in compliance with all of the changes we’ve had to keep up with on Squidoo and other sites recently. Stay away from forum posts where there is a lot of negative energy because you will catch this bad energy. If you feel yourself getting anxious, just go do something else for the time being to get your mind off of things then come back to the computer once your mind has cleared.

I’d like to wish all of you a successful week.

Originally posted 2009-07-19 11:59:40. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Don’t give up on your dream of making money online if you are not creative. The creativity I am talking about is not the ability to draw or write the next best fantasy novel, but it is the ability to understand how things work and change something up just one little bit in order to differentiate yourself.

You just bought the next latest and greatest ebook that has been released on the market; what you need to understand is that 1,000’s of others have also bought this ebook so you are going to be competing with a lot of other people using the same techniques. This happened when PotPieGirl started selling One Week Marketing; everyone started putting up lenses promoting clickbank products and they all looked the same. I’m sure this is a big reason behind why Squidoo changed their policies regarding certain niches and products.

Take a step back and think about what OWM is really teaching you; she is teaching you how to get a page to the top of the SERPS and even dominate the SERPS for a certain keyword. If done correctly, you could in theory own the first page of Google if you play your cards right.

Here’s where you need to think outside of the box; what else have I learned along the way can I add to my toolbox of knowledge to really stand out and not look like everyone else? You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, just tweak something. Don’t worry if someone said you should do it or not, just feel free to experiment and mix things up a little. If it works, great, you have a little secret trick to get your page ranked or get that extra sale, if it doesn’t work make a note to delete this idea from your head because it’s not right for what you are trying to do at this point in time.

Getting creative and adding more knowledge for yourself is how you will get ahead in IM and avoid IMADD. Today take some time to really think of what you have learned and try to find one thing you can do differently from everyone else. Then implement it and see what happens.

Originally posted 2009-07-10 07:19:18. Republished by Blog Post Promoter