An Auctions (internet marketing) Template for Your Ebay Listings
No commentsBy mandeepdhanoa
The advantage to using eBay templates lies in your auction or storefront can look even more professional, attracting more customers and giving your auction a touch of class.
Standing out by using a professional design shows you are putting effort in your auction.
Using a pre-established eBay template makes your job easier as the template has already been pre-built.
This means you will not have to spend as much time designing your own store or paying someone to do it for you.
The less time you spend on designing, the more time you will have for marketing and driving traffic to your stores.
Another big advantage in using eBay templates is it will allow you to post multiple auctions in far less time than it would take if you make each one individually.
However, if you are not keen to build your own template from scratch, you can use a pre-established form to set what you would like.
Next, just sit back and click your options and allow the form engine to create a template for you. You don’t have to know anything about html or css.
In many occasion you can find a free template by searching online. Many web designers will create many different templates and post them on the internet for anyone to make use of so long as they leave the name of the designer at the bottom.
This can be a great method of mutual advertising while giving you the seller the best quality page you can. You may even be able to make a deal with a designer to benefit you both by having him/her continue to make your pages for you.
Free templates are abound on the internet. Many sellers are really non-technie and relies heavily on free templates for their auctions.
If you are really looking to build you own brand identity, it is strongly advisable that you get a designer to create a unique auction templates for you.
Remember to have a logo and good header so that customers know at a glance what your product can do for them.
If you have a website or blog, you can use the same logo and header. This is very important as visitors can relate to you instantly.
Often an ebay templates can also remind you what are the most important features you should list on your page, allowing for maximum information to share with potential buyers.
Although auctions templates are important, users will only be able to view your templates and see how professional you are once they are inside your listings.
Wherever possible, put more effort in traffic generation, keyword searches and competition monitoring.
For more useful tips & hints, please browse for more information at our website:-
www.auction-professional.com
www.auction.reprintarticlesite.com
Marketing Techniques For Your Success In Business
Choosing the Best Storage Units
By Dave Southern
Storage units have become a very popular alternative in storing important items. It is critical to go for the best storage company which will secure your valuables.
A storage unit refers to the rented space provided to tenants by self storage companies. Companies that offer self storage facilities belong to real estate and personal property cargo transits. The storage facilities are divided in self storage spaces which are then leased to tenants mostly on a monthly basis. Self storage services are usually used by individuals or businesses to store inventories, equipments, collection of records and household goods.
Storage units come in assorted sizes for residential and business tenants. The most common size is the 10 feet by 5 feet with 1.5 meters depth. Some units are larger and the largest is measured at 20 feet by 20 feet similar with the dimension of two car garages. Storage units are built with corrugated metal and are without any window. They can only be accessed through the roll up metal door.
These storage units feature secured locks for protection. Only the tenant or lessee has the sole authority in accessing the contents. The facility operator does not have the right over the contents of the storage unit. Also, the operator does not take care, control, or have custody over the contents unless in cases where the lessee fails to pay the rentals imposed. Most of these facilities provide computer controlled access to the storage units, as well. Surveillance cameras are even installed for additional security. Some self storage companies present biometric scanners to ensure that only the tenant can have access on the units.
Tenants are not allowed to store hazardous, toxic, or perishable stuffs in the storage units. Also, they are not permitted to either sleep or reside in the units. In some modern facilities, a climate controlled system is set up in order to prevent mold and build up of moisture. The common temperature of these climate controlled facilities is from 50 to 80 degrees Celsius.
Based on records, there are around 58,000 of self storage facilities around the world. 52,000 of these self storage facilities are from the United States. Roughly, theres 1.6 billion square feet rentable in this country, as well. The United States is generating around $20 billion revenue every year from self storage businesses alone. In Australia, there is 22 million for storage services while in the United Kingdom there is 20 million. For the past years, customers availing of self storage services have increased and continue to grow at an average of 10 to 15 percent. This is due to some social factors such as high rate of divorce, workforce mobility, and home improvements.
Storage facilities grant clients a secure and less expensive way of keeping their other belongings. These also free up their homes with some valuable space. This service is also especially beneficial when you are having home or office renovations or restorations. The most reputable storage companies offer their customers with added assistance such as free packaging, boxes and bubble wraps. Trucks or vans are also supplied as free service when you need to transport your things from your house to the storage facilities.
When selecting a self storage company for your requirement, it is essential to know some details before deciding to avail of their service. You must know of the unit sizes available, rental cost, safety features, distance from your house and other vital details important for your composure. When you have already chosen a particular self storage company, it is now time to pack your things and ready it for transport. Here are some basic tips in packing your things:
Create some labels for each of the boxes so you can easily identify which boxes to open when looking for a particular item.
Never stack boxes too high for it would be very difficult to get an item which is beneath the stack of boxes.
Ensure that you have properly locked your storage unit.
Read and understand the terms and conditions set in your contract.
Understand whether they charge for the access of the storage unit or not so you can schedule your visit.
Get the contact numbers of the storage manager. You will need it in case any problems arise.
Avoid sharing your keys, access cards, or passwords with anyone.
For more information on Storage Units please visit our website.
Q&A with Doug McClure: What Makes Business Service Management Successful?
By David Link
Our initial Q&A with Doug McClure, who took some time to answer some strategic questions on Business Service Management (BSM) Lite. Doug shares his thoughts on BSM and Configuration Management Database(CMDB) strategies for companies and how his stint in the U.S. Navy helped shape his future passion for BSM.
Question: Can you share any of the strategies/advice that you give to companies embarking on their BSM journeys? Doug McClure: “Well, first they’ve got to have a BSM strategy. Nearly all the clients I talk to or hear about wanting to do BSM do not have a BSM strategy. I talk a lot about this on my blog and with clients and it is relevant whether you’re going to think about ‘BSM Lite’ or ‘BSM Heavy’ approaches.
Once we have a strategy, we need to establish a roadmap that guides us in how we’ll implement the strategy in a more tactical manner, focusing on short term iterative quick wins and 30-60-90 day projects.
As I’ve alluded to previously, a client first must define and understand what ‘BSM Lite’ may mean to them. Don’t take what the analysts or the vendors pitch for what you should do to achieve BSM or what value you should get from it.
For any type to be successful, each client must define what it means to them and state what they expect. They must make it personal, make it a part of their company culture and elevate it to be as an important initiative as compliance, risk management, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Information Technology Infrastructure Library(ITIL) or other initiatives may be within the company.
Please don’t get scared off from this strategy thing. Please don’t blow this off as something that the secret enterprise architecture council should be doing. If you’re unable to get an audience in these areas within your company, start within your own sphere of influence.”
Doug goes on to say that “your strategy could be as simple as enabling the local operations center to more efficiently classify, triage and resolve problems based on a simple business service or application contextual understanding. Focus on how this changes the game within your environment. Come up with your own metrics and measures to assess the value this has to this organizational use.
Trust me, you’ll need to justify your investment some time in the future. Another trait of successful Business Service Management implementations is that of the formal monitoring and management tools group has established some sort of database or knowledge repository that enables them to “manage the business of IT management and monitoring” if you will.
In my opinion, the vendor community has let their clients down significantly in this area. The CMDB may be the correct answer, but most companies just don’t value monitoring enough to demand that this be included in their formal CMDB initiatives.
In my last job, we developed an application that I referred to as the “Service Management Database” or “SMDB.” Others may call it something else, but in essence, it was the database that captured what was monitored, how it was monitored, who owned it, what business services and applications it supported, the impact an outage or event from it had on the business services or applications, etc. One key component of this SMDB was establishing the relationships of real and synthetic user and transaction monitoring steps to associated servers and applications. This is a significant gap area in many tools and vendor CMDBs.
Clients who have instituted something formal such as this generally have a very good handle on management and monitoring within their environment. Far too many clients do not have adequate monitoring (read visibility) in place to begin their BSM journey. I’d strongly recommend a good hard look at how well the client’s monitoring and management practices are implemented and managed.
Simply put, if they don’t have adequate visibility into how well those business services and applications are performing, you can’t expect to manage what you can’t “see” that may be impacting the business, clients, revenue, etc. Just ask yourself this - can you explicitly state what monitoring is in place for a given business service or application? Can you quantify the impact of a simple event to a business service or application? Can you explain why something is red, yellow, purple or green and what causes it to change from one color to another? If you can’t, your BSM journey will be challenging.
Those with formal CMDB initiatives have their hands full with high risk, long time to value projects to just get a handle with traditional configuration management models. Taking these low level configuration items (CI’s) and establishing application and service dependencies comes after a lot of work getting through the organizational challenges of getting systems access to populate the CMDB.
I strongly recommend that the formal monitoring and management tools group create an authoritative database that enables them to establish end-to-end visibility into the service and application delivery chain and the impacts it has on the business, customer, etc. This ultimately becomes part of a more realistic federated CMDB within the business.”
Question: Can you provide an example of a successful implementation of BSM? Were there specific factors that especially contributed to its success?
Doug McClure: “I’ve touched on the highlights of the most successful BSM implementations throughout my previous answers. Clients that have rallied around an organizational change or transformation focusing every team member’s efforts and energy towards ensuring that the business goals and objectives are being met through the delivery of highly available business services and applications.
Far too often the change never happens and it’s the talking heads that are preaching to the choir about what should be done. Every person on the front line, in the support teams, at the help desk, etc. must understand how they support or impact the business in business terms. Try putting this simple phrase after job titles ‘Hi, my name is Doug. I’m a Systems Administrator, Supporting the Business.’
That was a mouthful but simply put, these clients have an impressively instrumented business and IT environment with the right amount of visibility into each area, joined together with an organization that thinks, operates and responds based on their understanding of the business goals and objectives and how these business services and applications enable business success.
The operational model for an organization fully adopting BSM identifies ways to establish a service management mentality across the entire business service and application delivery and support chain. The delivery, operations and support organizations must be incented to manage the services and applications being delivered with this end-to-end context.
A leading, outside the box service management organization may include the traditional IT silos but within a matrixed fashion focused on one or more key business services and applications. The service management organization is then incented to work together, as a team, for the end-to-end delivery and support of these services or applications. It’s no longer one’s job to just be the systems administrator, database administrator or network engineer, their job is now to support specific business services and applications.
They provide the subject matter expertise needed to support the services and applications together, as a team, eliminating the finger pointing or “not my problem” attitudes that exist in the majority of IT organizations today.
Overall, the KISS (keep it simple stupid) approach is what will enable BSM of any type (lite o heavy) to be the most successful. If it just feels natural, doesn’t take any additional effort, clicks or tasks to do then it’s going to work. BSM should be transparent and not just another buzz word.
It’s not a form that gets filled out or a special process to follow in the run book. It’s doing the right thing for the business, no matter what the situation, crisis, buzz word or technology initiative of the day is.”
Question: How did you get involved in BSM?
Doug McClure: I think the foundations of my service management background and passion were initially established during my service in the US Navy. Today, I relate that experience to what I call BSM for the Military or Mission Services Management (MSM). We had been taught over and over that extreme attention to the details of the mission at hand (aka “the business”) was the number one priority and that all of our technology, services, and applications existed for those Sailors and Marines on the other end (the “customer”).
I can recall countless instances where mission critical communications services (telephony, orderwires, teletypes, command and control systems, etc.) were impacted in one way or another. It was extremely critical that we understood who was impacted and to what degree so that contingency plans could be activated. We weren’t just talking about lost revenue, poor sales or customer experience; we were talking about human lives and the security of the United States.
It is that military bearing, attention to detail and real world experience that drives me with many of my modern day BSM endeavors. That migration from MSM to BSM was honed by working for over 10 years in the Internet Service Provider (ISP) and datacenter, hosting and colocation business.
In those rapid growth businesses during the Internet boom, service differentiation was what “made you millions” or paved your way to bankruptcy. The companies I worked for had an extreme passion and focus on ensuring that their services, applications and Internet access products were of the highest quality, highly reliable and just plain better than the competition.
Again, the IT infrastructure, service quality and customer experience relationship was ingrained in all of our heads. It was all hands on deck when Web mail, Internet access, DNS, or the network experienced problems. We were measured in terms of how many customers experienced a busy signal or dropped connection or if you couldn’t log in fast enough to read your email.
Companies like Keynote Systems and LionBridge/Veritest/Inverse tested the quality of our networks, services and applications and publicly ranked us against our competition. We thought in terms of customer experience and impact every minute of the day, 24/7.
It was in my last job managing a traditional enterprise management and monitoring development group for a nationwide ISP where I was able to work with emerging technology to help get a handle on the complexities of these rapidly growing IT environments filled with emerging technologies and products. Applying this early technology to complex service problems in our environment proved to me that the technology, coupled with the right emphasis on how the technology was implemented and an emphasis on the people and processes within the organization could bring BSM to life.
Where I felt left out in the cold was with my vendor relationship. While their technology gave me the potential, they didn’t teach me how to work through the organizational and technological problems to successfully implement the BSM strategy. My very first end-to-end BSM pilot was extremely successful and provided visibility into the IT environment and business service impact that have never been available before. And here I am today, working at a software vendor for the first time.
‘Welcome to the dark side,’ as they say. The approach and methodology we followed for BSM has become the basis of the core methodology that I teach IBM’ers and our clients around the world today.
My personal mission and drive here at IBM Tivoli is to ensure that BSM is something that the typical monitoring tools administrator can actually implement and that our BSM story is something that any of our clients can be successful with. The sales and marketing slicks must be backed up by something like this, whomever you are these days. Clients shouldn’t put up for ‘marketecture,’ ‘me too’ and ‘gee whiz’ buzz words.
BSM takes a partnership and commitment to every client’s success, and I want to be involved in those BSM efforts in every industry or market worldwide. We need more thought leaders collaborating together in an open and public forum to change legacy attitudes about BSM and do what we can to enable client’s to be as successful as they can be.”
David Link is president and CEO of ScienceLogic. He and his partners built a thriving company from the ground up by focusing on delivering “products that just work” to the underserved business service management marketplace. He has held senior management and corporate officer positions at large public companies.
Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 5:20 am and is filed under business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
