August 4th, 2012
Volume VIII, Issue 6

Don’t know where to start! I guess I will start with some good news. Houston turned 16 and we had a very fun birthday party for him here at the clubhouse on July 8th.
Here he is with some of his favorite guests. Those would be the girls Yes, it was a girls and boys co-ed pool party.

The rest of the month was a blur starting with webinars…beginning with the Queen’s court webinar and wrapping up with of our 4 part basic webinar series. It was a FANTASTIC series and we all learned a lot. Check out this email from Nancy K. about the webinar basic series:

Hi Lynn,

Yesterday’s Webinar (June 13th about Research) was great.
You, Mo, and Indy were terrific. I wanted to go over some of
the things again and I am glad it was recorded.

Nancy K.

For those of you who don’t know what a webinar is, it is an audio and video that you watch on your computer that shows my computer screen as I explain what I am doing. It is still available for purchase here at the low introductory rate.

Here is an item I sold that I listed during one of the webinars. How cool is that? I can list on eBay, show you my computer screen and teach you with both my voice and my actual computer screen---and the items I list actually sell!

I paid $5.99 for six of these. This listing will show you 3 that sold.

By the way, I sold the other three and as Indy and I were packing them all up to ship to the same person last week, I said to her, “Indy, this is the way you do it. Turn $5.99 into over $60.00 in one week.”

Here is Indy at headquarters doing some shipping this summer. She has been a life saver. Love you girl! She was my techie for all the webinars and has been coming over to headquarters almost every day. What a doll!

After all that craziness, it was the Pinterest teleseminar phone call with Lisa Suttora. It was WONDERFUL! During the call with Lisa, Indy was pinning items for me. If you want to check out my pinterest bulletin board it is here. Our board still needs some work but you can see the power of Pinterest at work with only these few things we have pinned.

An item that Indy pinned for me during the call sold for a best offer of over $3,000 last week. I am still freaking out even though it was not as much as I wanted! When I got the offer, I said to Indy, “I have this offer, should I take it?”

And Indy was like, “Wow, Lisa Suttora is so RIGHT ON about Pinterest.” I had totally forgotten that Lisa had just taught Indy HOW and WHY to use Pinterest! AND that this was one of the items she had pinned. REMEMBER do not pin everything in your eBay store. This is a HUGE mistake.

Here is the item that sold for A LOT after the Pinterest Pin.

If you are a QC member it was your gift for July, if not you can still purchase the Pinterest Power teleseminar here.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a Pinterest picture can be worth thousands of dollars to your eBay business! (It was worth it to mine! )

Pinterest is now the number three most-popular social network. In fact, it's on pace to become THE most significant driver of social traffic to e-commerce sites by the end of the year--bypassing more mature
networks like Facebook or Twitter.

Pinterest now drives more traffic to ecommerce stores than LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube COMBINED – even referring more traffic to external sites than Twitter.

So much so… that eBay recently added the Pin It button to every listing page on eBay.com!!

On this call you'll learn how to use the power of Pinterest to increase your eBay sales...

On this exciting call Lisa and I covered:

What is Pinterest and why is it so powerful? (HINT: It's not what you think!)
Why Pinterest and eBay go hand-in-hand!
The eBay Pin It button
Pinning for profits!
Pinsider Tips for getting started!

The call was recorded and is ready for download now. Click here to purchase now if you missed it.

BTW, keep in mind that with all of this going on Mo has been on vacation at home with her mom in Minnesota. We miss her!

Then began one of the longest weeks of my life. It started on Monday, July 23rd, when Houston took his driver’s test. For those of you parents out there who may relate, I barely slept all night. Then I was pacing at the DMV. Luckily, Houston’s 1st grade teacher happened to walk through the door to get a drivers license renewal and it helped to ease the stress. For those of you who don’t remember here is a story from one of my 100 best books with that 1st grade teacher Mr. Carroll in the side photo. Small town, small fun!

Houston finally had his name called and he drove my SUV around into the Queue. The instructor walked up and said “you can leave the vehicle now”. NOOOOOOOOOO. About 15 minutes later Houston walked through the side door and I was like what? He gave me a thumbs up! Thank goodness he passed. Here is Houston at the DMV.

The fact that he can drive has made my life so much easier! The first day (still Monday…keep in mind this was the longest week of my life), I called and said, “I forgot my lunch, can you please drop it off at the office and pick up the mail?” He walked into headquarters, plopped down in an oversized arm chair and said, “I feel like Papa."

BTW, when my dad is in town he does all my errands and Houston was letting me know that he felt like errand boy number #2. Poor baby!

After shipping like fools all day on Monday, at 5 pm we all went to the airport to pick up my dad. He flew in for a San Diego baseball tournament.

Tuesday am was power ship day again, pack the car and leave for San Diego at 2 pm for the Extreme World Baseball Series Championship. It is a very competitive tournament and my dad was excited to be going with us.

Check out this partial set of flatware that I sold when my dad was here that Tuesday morning helping us ship. I only sold 12 pieces that you see on the table (for $104.94…my dad couldn’t believe it) and I still have all the pieces that you see in the wire container still up for sale.

Here is some of the flatware listed for sale so that you can learn more.

I love flatware! An update for those of you still waiting for volume 4. I finished the writing and it is with Lee. We will be sending it out as soon as it is formatted.

So back to the craziest/longest week of my life….so far. We arrived in San Diego at the hotel (that I found for me and my friend Christy) by 4:30 and I realized that a $68 a night in a central SD location may be one of those “you get what you pay for” L. The hotel room was fine. A sitting room, bedroom with two beds and a kitchen but on a super dangerous street.

Indy and I ran out to run an errand and came back to see three cop cars, three cops with their guns drawn and a suspect with a drug dog blocking the entrance to our hotel. I told Indy to take a picture. Here is what she got from the car.

I just knew my friend Christy was going to arrive with all of this going on and as Indy and I pulled a u-turn to head back around the hotel, there was Christy and her son pulling into the hotel (somehow making it around the cops with their guns drawn). Yikes!

After that hoopla died down, we spoke with two of the cops who assured us that it was a very nice, safe neighborhood with lots of workers at night. I said to Christy, “you know what they mean by workers right?” She didn’t. I filled her in, prostitutes and drug dealers. Wonderful start to my one “pretend” vacation this year.

We started to hunt for hotels. Summer in San Diego is not a good time to be looking last minute and we aren’t even talking last minute, we are talking desperation. Christy’s husband found her a hotel in hotel circle but not until the next night.

I started calling every hotel on Coronado Island (because we had the majority of our baseball games there) and finally found a reasonable one with an opening the next night Wednesday, nothing for Thursday and one with rooms Friday and Saturday. I said, “I’ll take it." Somehow we made it through that one night in our SEEDY hotel. That is putting it nicely.

The next morning, we all got out of dodge! Christy and her son went their way and we headed over to Coronado. What a treat! The hotel we stayed in was small but quaint. Almost the same style room but pick it up and put it in a wonderful neighborhood. Houston said, “Mom, I have learned the difference between a dump and a dive on this trip.”

I said, “OK, why don’t you explain it to me?” He said, “A dump is OK quality in a terrible location, but a dive is the same OK quality but in a great location.” Interesting.

I got to spend some time with Joel Elad while on Coronado. For those of you who don’t already know Joel, he has written many books on eBay, Amazon and other social media sites. He is an awesome friend and it was great to see him. BTW, Joel has lost 125 pounds. Congratulations to Joel! Here we are in front of our “quaint” hotel. I just can’t call it a dive Houston. It was darling.

You all know me, while baseball is going on, I am a going shopping! Found the nicest Goodwill that I have ever been in on the lower part of Coronado and spent quite a bit. Went to many garage sales with Indy and bought two flatware sets and a huge dinner set. OK, my SUV was already packed to the gills, but I was going to edit and make it work. I’ll show you a photo of the fully loaded SUV later on as it heads back to Palm Desert.

But, here is one of the coffee mugs I got and listed from our “quaint” hotel/motel.

Big shout out to the Queen’s Court Members as the QC turned 5 Years Old Last Month!!!!! WOW! Thank you to all of you! Especially our charter members who have been with me since 2007! What a great journey.

Here is a link to learn more.

Thanks to QC member Nancy Nelson and new QC member Chris Taylor of www.pagemage.com , I was one of the first people to ever get to speak to a meet-up group at eBay headquarters in San Jose! What a treat. For those of you in the bay area, here is more information about that awesome group and it comes from Chris Taylor himself:

The eBay Sellers of the Bay Area Meetup Group is for sellers to meet,learn, share ideas and help each other. Whether you're a casual seller wanting to make a few extra dollars or a Top Rated Seller earning a living, we are for you.

The group is free and meetups are free. We meet once a month in the SF Bay Area. We have an excellent breadth of members - from eBay trained Education Specialists to Trading Assistants to store designers to eBay employees and more. We are fortunate to have sessions with prominent eBay experts (like Lynn Dralle!), eBay executives, and companies providing solutions to sellers.

Learn more here

But back to San Diego and the longest week of my life. The saga continues. Remember, we were not there to stay in “dump” motels or to shop for items to sell on eBay…..we were actually there for a world series baseball tournament.

The boys really struggled their first four games and went 1-2-1. That is one win, two losses and one tie. Not a great showing. My dad was pissed off. Did I say that out loud? I guess I did. He had flown in just for this week long tournament to see his grandson play.

After that poor showing, we (funny how I call it “we” it really is the boys but the families put so much time, effort, money and emotion into it …it almost becomes your team) were seeded after that.

There were 16 teams playing in this 16 under major tournament. 8 would make it to the top major division and 8 would be placed in the lower AAA division. We were the 12th seed so got placed in the AAA division. That was OK because we come from a smaller town and many of these teams were from major areas where they could pull more kids.

What this meant was that from now on, Saturday on, we would have to win each and every game to continue. It was elimination time. There was one game on Saturday to decide if we would even make it to the Sunday games. Houston was called up to pitch this clutch game.

My brother had decided to come down to San Diego from LA to see some baseball and my dad. He got on the 405 freeway at 1 pm. The game was slotted for 2 pm. Lee figured he could make it to San Diego from his beach community in about 2 hours so would at least see half the game. Not even close. It took him 3 ½ hours and he eventually joined us on Coronado, but back to the key game.

Since I always show photos of Houston pitching, I thought it would be fun to show one of him getting an actual hit. Indy took such a great action shot. You can see the bat flying in the air, the ball headed towards a gap between the 2nd baseman and shortstop and Houston taking off to run.

So did “we” win to see another day? Yes, Houston went 7 innings, only hit 5 kids with his wild fast ball, and we won 6 to 2. What a thrill! Finally some good news.

Saturday was fun as we all walked around Coronado, got ice cream and ate some delicious sush at Saiko Sushu. Sunday, again, was win or go home. Who cared? At least we had made it to Sunday. The first game was the quarter finals and we did win! Yay! It was onto the AAA championship finals. One of the most stressful games ever but the boys pulled it out and won 11 to 8 against a HUGE team from Northern California.

Here are my dad, Houston, Indy, me and my brother on the winning field.

BTW, the team we beat were terrible losers. It was the bottom of the 7th with 2 outs and a kid that had just struck out says to the Umpire “You suck." The Umpire threw him out of the game and the parents all started yelling. It got really ugly on their part. But let’s be honest, they were down by 3 runs, no runners on base and 2 down. It wasn’t going to happen.

Here is a picture of Houston with the winning plaque. All the boys will be getting championship rings in the mail soon. Pretty great end to a stressful week. On the drive home, I kept telling myself that it was less than a week ago that Houston had gotten his drivers license. LONGEST week of my life.

I have been trying out a new Scanner app on my iphone. I think it is called barcode and cost 99 cents. But it is awesome! I have been using it because it shows you not just eBay (like the eBay red laser one on their app does) but also prices on Amazon, Target, Buy.com etc. etc. It is super helpful when I am deciding whether to purchase new items. I have even used it on a used teddy bear and it worked!

Here is what the app looks like when we used it on an old Care Bear.

Here are the results. Sorry so fuzzy.

Here is that same care bear listed on eBay with a video that Indy added to the listing.

Here is an item that I scanned while on Coronado and decided that I should buy as the cheapest one available anywhere was over $30. It was priced at $5.99 and I wouldn’t have bought it without my handy barcode iphone app.

Here is the WowWee listed on eBay.

I encourage you to check out this app and have a great summer shopping for and stocking up on lots of great merchandise. I bought so much in San Diego that it was a major “parlor” trick getting the SUV packed, but I did it. BTW, we also bought a boogie board at a garage sale and that is in there somewhere also, along with four people’s luggage and four passengers.

As I was finishing up packing the SUV, a couple drove by and said “that is the most amazing pack job we have ever seen” I said, “Thank you, my grandmother owned an antiques store for 52 years and I was her expert antique show packer. I could pack and unpack a van full of merchandise faster than anyone else.” Then the girl said, “Seriously, this is a huge compliment because my dad was in the military and I “thought” he was amazing!"

Happy eBaying,

Lynn

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