announced on their website on 5th September 2007,
AuctionAds are offering US$ 25.00 free account fill-up to all new registrants.

Additionally, if you had an account previously and had never earned a payout, they will bump your current balance to $25 too. Their minimum payout is also being raised to $50, but everyone who hasn’t earned a payout to date will be halfway there already!

They are also offering (more…)

 eBay UK have adopted eBay to go features several months after they were available in the USA.  

The landing page for this does state it is still in “beta”, which means it’s not fully bug-free yet. But there’s good news there too - on the eBay US hosted eBay-to-go discussion forum it’s been announced that the programmers are looking for ideas to add more customisation features (including an affiliate ID parameter) into the widget set up. Back on the widget creation page, there’s quite a lot of help panels for using the widget with different popular sites and site-builder softwares

The new eBay-to-go UK site offers tools to embed widgets into blogs and social networking sites like MySpace etc.  When displaying a showcase of items, you have to choose a seller ID, it can be your own or someone else’s, and you can choose to display that ID’s shop items or core auction listings. 

Other options are for - single listing, multiple listings (both by listing ID numbers), items from a single seller or single seller’s store/shop (by seller ID & keyword), or by a search criteria set by keyword.  But the most interesting part is that you can choose to display items by keyword within a seller’s portfolio of listings - your own listings, or someone elses.

Here’s an example - it’s based on the idea that BuildaSkill is all about home-based businesses, and the selected item type of “handmade bags” is popular with home-based “cottage” industries.  The search criteria we input to the widget creator on eBay, was the  keywords “handmade bags”, this being a common type of home-business product.   As you can see, the common thought that hand-made can mean poor quality or design, does not apply to these products.

How can you make money from this, if you’re not the seller featured by the widget? (more…)

Thanks to a link in the most unlikely of places, I’ve just discovered www.iStockPhoto.com

I’ve not had a lot of time to investigate it in depth, but the quick synopsis is that photographers can join the site, lodge photographs with them, and earn money when content publishers want to use those photographs.

The deal seems to be that content publishers pay a one-off fee for rights to use the photo - whether this is a one-off use on a web-site, or relates to offline use etc, I haven’t yet investigated, but will be doing so in the coming weeks and returning to let you know more.

In the meanwhile, if you can find time to trawl your hard drive and those attic boxes of old printed photos, identifying what might be sellable, you’ll be fully ready for a fast start when I get back to you.  They already have over 2 million images online, and that’s a good sign that the service works.

Ed

BuildaSkill.com is pleased to announce the launch of our new blog and articles sub-site.

We’ll be using this section of the website to keep you updated with all the latest in-detail news that we believe is relevant to the small and home-based business person, wherever you’re situated.

Please add us to your favourites / bookmarks in your browser, and remember that we welcome your feedback and comments.  We also encourage you to join in with our community discussion forums at www.buildaskill.com/board/ which will have lots of topic categories specifically for budding and existing entrepreneurs.

Ed