What do I mean by big ticket? By analogy: If the drivethrough window at your favorite fast food joint gets your order wrong and you’re a few miles away when you find out, you probably won’t go back. If someone botches the special anniversary dinner you’ve been scrimping for, though, it’s a different matter.

Let’ s get the simplest solutions out of the way first. Don’t be afraid to use PayPal. As far as eBay purchases, if you’re a novice you may not realize that using PayPal is probably less of a risk than using a credit card at your local grocery store, and it provides some excellent buyer protection. One probem is that some sellers have a legitimate reason to avoid PayPal: they don’t like the PayPal bite, which on an expensive item can be hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

You may also not know that eBay recommends escrow.com, which lets you inspect an item before accepting delivery. It also works for intangible items in some cases, like domain names. Expensive, but well worth it.

It’s all about the Benjamin

If you read Benjamin Franklin’s hilarious, insightful, and truly inspiring autobiography, you will often find that people then relied on letters of recommendation when they moved to a new town. In the 21st century, it turns out, we must do very much the same thing. Since Franklin and his contemporaries lacked instant forms of communication like texting, email, or even that old-fashioned telephone thing some people are using, they relied on the reputation of the letter writer. In other words, it was all about relationships.

It still is. I have found that the most reliable way to buy expensive things is to build up a relationship with the seller both before and after you have won the auction. No matter how excited you are about the item, imagine that you are an antique dealer buying a supposed George Washington ceremonial sword-over the phone. You will want satisfactory answers to many questions, such as provenance (a reliable history of the item), the seller’s background and qualifications, and any previous blemishes to the seller’s history you can find online.

You are completely remiss if you do not obtain the seller’s phone number and have a talk. The best way to get this going is to have a reasonable question that is not answered by the auction description. This is inevitable for high-ticket items. If the seller doesn’t wish to give you the phone number, fine, move on. It may not be worth the seller’s time to deal with you. Your idea of high ticket may be different from the seller’s. Or the seller could be a scammer.

Disregard anything the seller says about this being the last item of its kind, get it now before someone does a BIN, yada yada. That stuff may possibly be true, but the scarcity threat also happens to be one of the most powerful weapons of manipulation a seller can use, one that punctures your conscious thought processes and goes right to your reptilian brain. Scarcity is an ages-old bugaboo and good sellers exploit it mercilessly.

Make sure you have questions designed to let the seller discuss any imperfections the object have. Does the back of the guitar have buckle rash? Why wasn’t there a picture of the back, anyway? When you say it has “the normal wear and tear” why don’t you show a closeup of that wear and tear? If this really is a 55 Buick Special in mint condition, why do all the pictures look like they were taken on an old cell phone? And so on.

If the seller doesn’t admit to perfections in a forthright way, if the seller doesn’t treat you the way you would treat your best friend in the same position, run. The seller should understand that you are making a decision that may be life-altering. If the seller doesn’t, you need to move on to a different item.

Next up: More on how to develop a good relationship in 10 days or less.

Think very carefully before you ignore the benefits of a blog-based site. Without question, you can make a site that simply does not look or act like a blog. But blogging gives your site business and search engine advantages that no other website format offers.

1. Because blogs are updated frequently, search engines love them.

Fresh, original content that’s organized clearly for human consumption is irresistible to search engines. There’s nothing a search engine likes more.

2. Keyword searches happen more naturally

That means people are more likely to find your site when searching by keyword. If your competitors aren’t doing this and you are, you’ll pull quickly ahead of them. And if they’ve beaten you to the punch, you’ll have no choice but to meet or exceed their efforts. The search engine juice is too important these days. Even if you think you’re not a news-based site, you’re probably wrong.

3. Event announcements get spidered faster

If you schedule events for the public, if you want people to learn about new features, if you want the community as a whole to know what you’re doing, or if you want to attract new customers, short news items make it easy for people to keep up.

4. People can subscribe to your site

Using RSS feeds people can subscribe to your blog and get notified automatically when new content is added. If your site is for a restaurant or store, this is a fantastic way to advertise specials and keep people coming back to your site. If your site is for a church or service organization, there’s no easier way to keep people informed of important goings-on. Try asking your webmaster to add a feature like that to a site built from HTML instead of WordPress.

5. Comments mean community

Blogs allow comments to be posted on them (although you can disable this feature, or control what comments get posted). Why is this important? First, it increases interest in your site and gets people to come more often. Second, it increases search engine results because those comments add original content to your site, with little to no effort on your part! How bad can it be to get free help developing your web presence? And finally, it is a brilliant way to network and to learn about new developments in your field that you may never have known otherwise.

Blow your competition away. Build great sites in minutes. Make the changes yourself, and do it without learning HTML, FTP, FBI, CIA or anything else. Just get the job done with your browser, no specialized tools, and be On The Web in an Hour. ]]> http://easyonme.com/blog/on-the-web-in-an-hour/wordpress-blogs-make-great-business-sites/feed/ 0