Have you ever looked around your house and wondered if there was a way to get rid of some of the items you’ve accumulated over the years?  If you have children, finding extra, unused stuff is not that hard.  Turn those unused toys and clothes into a little extra cash by learning to sell them online with eBay.  If you’re a Stay-At-Home Mom, this is a perfect low stress work-at-home opportunity. 

As a parent, you know how quickly your child grows out of their clothes and changes their favorite toy on a daily basis.  If you’re like me, you even have some children’s clothes that haven’t been worn!  Why not turn your excess into a little extra cash?  It’s simple and it doesn’t require too much of your time to accomplish.  Selling on eBay is also a great way to learn some habits and techniques that can quickly be turned into a full-time home based business.  Clothes are just a start, there are plenty of other profitable items that can be sold online through eBay.

Thousands of people sell on eBay everyday and make a good living from it.  Since this is probably your first experience selling, start off small and focus on one idea.  Some of the best items Moms have for selling on eBay are clothes.  Take the time to go through your child’s out-grown clothes and make “packages” of related items that you can group together and sell.  Perhaps you have several articles of clothing left over from last Easter that would make a great little Easter outfit package for some child.  Be creative in designing your assortments.  Your originality is what will catch buyer’s eyes and make them view and hopefully purchase your products.

Understand that eBay does have policies on the types and condition of clothing that can be sold at auction.  Read through the policies so that you have a good understanding of what needs to be done before offering your goods for sale.  Much of the information is common sense, but you’d be surprised at what some people try to sell.

For tips and information on selling online, visit World Wide Brands for useful eBay selling strategies and marketing ideas.  Once you are comfortable with selling online, check out World Wide Brands wholesale directory called OneSource that gives you access to hundreds of legitimate distributors willing to dropship their products directly to your customers.

Remember, start off slow and learn the basics.  Trying to accomplish too much too fast will leave you feeling stressed and discourage you from completing your goals.

In Part 1of my Blogging 101 guide, I gave a brief overview of how I would like to tackle the creation of my first blog.  Now it’s time to get my hands dirty and begin to give the blog a good look and feel.  Since this is an experiment in creating my first blog, I want to start off with minimal expenses.  Therefor, I’m going to try to use a free Wordpress theme to start.  Once I feel that the blog has matured a little, I may decide to look for a custom blog design.  You’ll see why shortly.

Wordpress Themes

I did a Google search for “free wordpress themes” and found about 8,370,000 hits!  Thankfully, most of the sites contain duplicate content of the same themes.  I must say, you could spend hours-and-hours looking through various themes and drive yourself mad quite quickly.  I tried to help narrow the themes I was looking at to those that worked with widgets and two columns on the right.  I’ve seen this setup on lots of newer blogs and I think the layout works well, especially once ads are added to the blog.

I also spent some time visiting other blogs to see how theirs looked and how functional they were.  Again, the blogs that spent the time and money to customize themselves looked the best and gave the viewer the best overall web experience.  But for now, I’m going to stick with the free themes.

From the selection I had, I narrowed it down to two: illacrimo and bloggingpro.

Both are widget ready and have the dual columns on the right.  While neither is great, it’s a start and I didn’t want to spend weeks searching for just the right theme.  In the end, I chose the illacrimo theme created by Design Disease.

What about Widgets?

I know these widget-ready blog themes must irritate the hell out of the web-purists out there, but I’m a blog newbie and don’t have the time right now to try and tweak the code to insert the new modules.  That being said, I’ve looked at a few blogs, and I think I’m going to start out with the following basic widgets and add-ons:

Widgets:  Recent Post, Categories, Recent Comments, Calendar and Archives

Add-ons:  Akismet for blog spam, Wordpress Stats for viewing statistics, and Google XML Sitemaps for auto-generating sitemaps.

There are many more widgets and add-on customization that can be done, but I’m going with this as a start and I’ll tweak as needed.

By adding the above mentioned widgets and add-ons, I’m ready to add some basic content and begin work on generating web traffic.

Wordpress is an extremely friendly and easy-to-use blogging system.  Depending on your needs and computer skills, there are a couple of methods you can use to setup your blog, and  some factors you should consider before you launch your Wordpress blog.

Method #1 - Free Wordpress Blog

Think about these questions:

1. Would you like to use your own custom domain name (ex. simplywebtastic.com), or a third-level domain name like myblog.wordpress.com?
2. Will you need to store lots of photos, music, or video files for your blog?
3. Do you like fiddling with the blog code to tweak your site just right?
4. Do you need to do lots of private blogs?

If you answered YES to any of them, you’re going to need to spend a little extra money if you host with wordpress.com because the features mentioned above are paid upgrades.

You should visit their site to get an idea of the extra costs involved.  Take some notes on the costs and compare them to the costs for a full hosting site. 

Method #2 - Paid Web Hosts

Your probably already thinking, “Why would anyone pay for a blog when they can get one for free?” The answer is simple; space, flexibility and lots of customization!  With most paid hosts, you’ll be able to do what you want, when you want, for a small monthly fee.  Depending on the goal of your website, these monthly hosting fees may afford you more flexibility and less headaches in the future.

I’ve dealt with many web hosting providers over the years.  Please DO NOT base your choice of web hosts solely on cost alone.  This can be very misleading.  You need to compare the services they offer, their reputation, and then their fees.

I personally like and have had success using the web hosts listed below:

1. Host Gator (read review)
2. 1&1 Internet, Inc.

There are literally thousands of web host providers out there.  Do your homework and read others comments about their compliments and complaints about various web hosts.  Not all web hosts are created equal.  You may never need help from your web host provider, but if you do, you’ll want to make sure there’s someone available, who’s competent enough to handle your problem, to assist you.

Glad you could visit my site!  Yeah, I know it’s not much right now, this is the building phase.  I’ve been wanting to start blogging for some time now, but with two small children, finding a little extra (personal) time can be difficult.

 I got to thinking…instead of getting the whole website fully functioning right from the outset, let me document my progress from the ground up.  It will allow me to utilize my time more efficiently (ie. work when the kids go to bed!!!) and readers will get to see how to build a site from scratch to hopefully, a fully functioning, and interesting blog site.

I don’t have any formal work-plan, but I’m going to try to use the following as a guideline:

1. Sign-up with a hosting provider and create my blog site SimplyWebtastic.com.
2. Choose a blog theme.
3. Decide which widgets to include.
4. Determine any custom coding that may be necessary.
5. Find ways to monetize the blog (honestly, let’s face it, money is a motivator!)
6. Research ways to generate blog traffic.  (commenting, guest articles, social websites, etc.)
7. Set an initial monthly blog visitor goal and try to increase it every month.
8. Keep rethinking and reworking the blog based on readers comments and functionality.

Since this is my first blog, I know they’ll be changes to my guidelines, but as with anything, this is a start.  Also, as I write articles about the different topics, I’ll try to come back to this document and create links to those entries.  This way, readers will eventually be able to use this initial post to follow the process of building a blog.

If there are readers out there willing to give some advice on different aspects of blogging and the creation of this website, I’d surely appreciate the comments (both good and bad).  It’s the only way to truely make a friendly blog site.