Well friends, I’m happy to report that I pulled off my goal and made a point to fellow work-at-home entrepreneurs.  That point being that it is possible to devise and execute a plan to become an Ebay Powerseller in 90 days and succeed.  As noted earlier, I chose to do it selling domain names.  Although I’m not happy with the average selling price of some of the great domains I once owned, it was both a successful and profitable venture.  It is also likely one I will continue to do for a while. 

Well, it is almost the end of April and I blew through my second consecutive month with more than $1,000 sold on Ebay yesterday.  I continue to specialize in selling domain names and have sold 77 domains thus far with about 18 more that will sell before the month comes to an end.

It was more difficult reaching the $1,000 sales target this month, as the average value of my domain name sales plummeted from a month ago.  I continue to play around with the slate of domain names I’m offering, their keyword subject matters, the number of letters in the domain, etc., in an effort to determine what works best and what doesn’t on Ebay.  Clearly, some subjects move at higher values than others. My best luck has come with selling 5-letter domains that are pronounceable.  They make good domain names for future, yet-to-be-named, companies and products.

To become an Ebay Powerseller you must sell at least 4 items per month, totaling at least $1,000 per month in total sales, for 3 consecutive months.  I’ve often thought this was a daunting task, one that I just didn’t feel I had time for — until now.  I’ve done a lot of research on Ebay lately and that research has inspired me to set a living example for the rest of world of Ebay Powerseller Wannabe’s.  My goal is to prove to demonstrate to anyone desiring to earn a comfortable income from home on Ebay, just how easy it is to become a Powerseller in your first 90 days if you put your mind to it. 

I began my quest at the first of March 2007 and easily accomplished my goal of at least $1,000 in sales for the first 30 days, with total sales for the month of March at $1,276.33.  My Ebay User ID is bizgenie and I’m accomplishing my Zero to Powerseller rating in 90 days by selling domain names.  To watch my progress online and determine if I can accomplish becoming a Powerseller in 90 days, view my auctions by clicking here or go to my Ebay store by clicking here.

Forums that cater to people interested in Google Adwords and Adsense are buzzing.  Many web publishers have been devastated by a huge plummet in search engine traffic and Adsense earnings, while a few are reporting increases in traffic and Adsense revenue.

I’m not sure yet what this particular update has been labled, as previous updates have been coined with a one-word code name.  But whatever its called, its definite that it has made a serious dent in some web publishers earnings and web business careers.  The question now is, “Is the change temporary or permanent?”  Since it was first reported by some publishers on June 27 and has now existed for almost 3 days, I’m beginning to think that the outcome will not be temporary — which will send all the major SEO experts back into their corners scratching their heads and trying to figure out what to do now in order to get sites high search engine ranks in the SERP’s.

The answer to improving SERP rankings really hasn’t changed in the eyes of Google.  They’ve been giving webmasters guidelines for several years on what it takes to achieve success in the SERP’s.  The simple answer is — “Just write good content and dont’ try any tricks or gimmicks to fool the search engines.”  Follow that simple rule, writing good content often and your site will become popular over time regardless of where you stand in the search engine rankings.  The more popular it becomes, the more people visit, the more people link to you, the higher your search engine rankings will rise. 

But most people hate to write and want to see success now rather than later, and it is for these two reasons that they end up shooting themselves in the foot by implementing a method or scheme that is clearly in conflict with what the search engine companies want to see in the management of a website.  Thus, its only a matter of time before an algorithm change takes placed that is clearly designed to remove sites that have offensive material or use pratices not condoned by the search engines. 

The old “Kiss” principle comes to mind (i.e., keep it simple, stupid).  And by simple, I mean just stick to a good game plan of adding fresh content on a regular basis that has interest to your site visitors and over time you will realize great success online.  Obviously, there are more rules than this one, but its a good place to start.  Details about other rules to follow will be published from time to time.

Blog and Ping is a buzz phrase that became popular in early 2005 once it was found that blog sites that most good blog content management systems ping several blog directories each time an article is published, and search engines routinely spider most blog directories (thus providing yet another way for search engines to find your site).

I write this brief article today to make you aware of a new site I created for a friend who loves gardening.  He was very interested in getting up to speed and learning not only what a blog (i.e., web log) is, but how to become a blogger himself.  I recommended that he use Wordpress, an excellent content manager for blogs that is openware (i.e., free).  It’s simple to use and there is a large Wordpress community that routinely creates and contributes free pluggins to make all Wordpress user’s experiences with the program even easier.

Within 3 days of creating the blog he was already getting traffic from Google and Yahoo without promoting his site through other means.  He spoken to a couple of his gardening friends and they contributed a link to his site.  Now, only 5 weeks after he published the first article on his blog, he is ranked in one of the top 3 positions on several gardening search terms and is getting 25 to 35 unique visitors per day without any other marketing methods.  What more, traffic is growing daily and all 23 of his web pages have been fully indexed by Google.

Running your own blog is easy and there’s numerous blog hosting networks available at reasonable rates.  Most all of them ping other directories each time you submit a new blog article.  If you’ve had problems getting traffic to your website I highly suggest you look into using Wordpress as a content managment system (CMS) for your website.  You’ll be glad you did.