“Make $5,000 a week on eBay in your spare time!”

Oh, give me a break.

There has been so much ridiculous hype and hoopla about selling on eBay in recent years. Ridiculous headlines, pop-up ads, spam e-mails and infomercials about how easy it is to make a fortune on eBay. Don’t fall for those scams. But do take a few minutes to read this article and learn the truth about eBay and whether or not it is the right home business opportunity for you.

eBay isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. In fact, there is no such thing as a too-good-to-be-true-get-rich-quick scheme that consistently generates significant income.

You have to bring your own motivation and willingness to work.

If you are motivated, eBay does present a great opportunity for individuals to make money online, all the ridiculous hype aside. According to a recent publication released by eBay, more than 430,000 rely on eBay for most or all of their income. Selling on eBay isn’t easy to master. Anyone can make some extra money doing it but the percentage of eBay sellers who make their living through eBay auctions is well under 1%.

The following 10 tips explain how to be one of the less than 1% who do it right.

1. You must know how to do all of the basic auction tasks. Customer contact, collecting payment, packaging items, shipping items, navigating eBay, etc. This is all the obvious stuff. This is what most eBay sellers learn but for some reason they stop here, or they also learn how to take great pictures and stop there.

2. You must take great photos of your items. Pictures can boost your sales, big time. But poor pictures can actually hurt your sales. You need to know how to take pictures that sell and how to get those pictures onto your eBay listings.

3. You must be the only person selling what you sell. This very idea sounds crazy when you first hear it considering there are millions of items on eBay. But it’s not difficult if you find your own, profitable and enjoyable niche to specialize in. What are your hobbies? What are you passionate about? What skills do you have? It all starts here. Specializing in a profitable niche will enable you to master the next four “must-have” skills.

4. You must hunt for bargains. Unless you’re creating crafts or informational products, you’re going to have to buy the products to sell. You can’t just rely on wholesale guides or drop-shipping sources to find products for you to sell, because their prices are usually higher than eBay market values. You have to dig deep to find bargains. Most bargains are found offline rather than online, and the more you have to dig to find a source, the more profitable it generally is. Your specialized knowledge in your niche will help you track down bargains for items related to your theme.

5. You must add significant personal value to your products. Adding value makes your products unique and it increases your profit margin. You can add value in several ways; making ordinary items unique, finding unutilized niches for products, packaging multiple items into a more attractive package, offering your unique knowledge in addition to the product, or even creating your own products.

6. You must learn web marketing skills to SELL your products. You don’t need a marketing degree to sell on eBay but you do need to learn critical marketing skills so you can write great sales copy. Most eBay sellers don’t take time to analyze their target audience - who they’re trying to sell to - but if you do, your sales will increase because your readers will feel that your ad copy is written just for them. If you specialize, you will have a much easier time of understanding your customer’s mindset and it will be much easier to write great ads.

7. You must provide world-class customer service. Your reputation and your level of repeat business are two factors that may ultimately determine if you succeed or fail on eBay. If you offer adequate service, your reputation won’t be ruined and you will still get business. But only if you provide tremendous, world-class customer service will your reputation grow, word of mouth start to spread and your repeat customer base explode. This entails answering questions promptly and thoroughly, completing sales promptly, and standing out from the crowd. If you specialize, you can easily offer small extras or incentives that separate you from other eBay sellers. You must be memorable for your sales to really grow.

8. You must not rely only on eBay to advertise your auctions. The biggest benefit of eBay is that it automatically drives traffic to your auctions. But does that mean you should just sit back and let it do its work? If you really want to maximize your profits, you need to aggressively advertise your auctions on and off of eBay (this does NOT mean send spam e-mail or unwanted advertisements to anyone. If you do anything like this, ever, your reputation and YOU - are toast). Advertise your items for sale in your actual auction listings, at your eBay About Me page, at websites, newsgroups and message boards related to your theme, in specialty and trade magazines related to your theme, offline if you find targeted sources, etc., etc. Just because eBay brings in traffic doesn’t mean you can’t do so much more to increase that traffic.

9. You must enjoy what you’re doing. I didn’t include this because “10 Tips” sounds better than “9 Tips”. You’re ten times as likely to stick with something if you really enjoy it. You must sell something you’re passionate about and you must be comfortable spending time on your computer, using the Internet, dealing with customers, packing and shipping items, etc. And the #1, can’t miss, most important strategy of all…

10. You must diversify and develop streams of automated income in addition to the income generated from your eBay auctions. The only way to do this is to create your own profitable website. Don’t let the thought scare you. Nowadays, you don’t need technical skills or computer skills because there are hosts that do all of the “technical stuff” for you so you can focus on building your business.