Selling items is so much easier now

I've just sold an item on ebay that was used by my business. It was a piece of equipment that can be used again, but it was no longer right for my business.
I turned to ebay to auction the item off. Starting at £50 and hoping for around £200, I eventually sold the item for well over £300. I am delighted with that piece of business.

Before the advent of the Internet - and particularly ebay in this instance (say, over ten years ago) - I would have had to try to sell the item by other means, for example an advert in the local paper. I would have had to set the price (probably £200) and hope that people viewing the ad would be interested enough to call and arrange to come and see the item. On ebay, of course, you can post a picture (several, if you wish) so that potential buyers can see it immediately and make some sort of judgement about condition. I would have made less money at greater inconvenience in "the old days".

Although there may be some downsides to ebay (though I've never experienced any), this way of selling is a vast improvement on what we had available to us a decade ago.

Bankonyourself

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The Personal Equity Institute (PEI) can help you learn how to do this. PEI is a company which teaches and helps implement new strategies for gaining wealth. Teaching methods include online resources, classroom teaching, seminars, books and videos.

PEI is continually looking for new ways to acquire wealth, looking at the history and principals of finances, applying common sense and structuring powerful prosperity systems. People who PEI help to invest are usually professionals and small business owners.

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Who's going to win the social network war for businesses?

In the private sector, and particularly in the small business, sole trader or freelance part of the finance sector, many businesses are battling for too little work.

Many of us turn to social media (social networks, business networks) in an attempt to boost our business connections. But there are so many of them, which ones should we turn to?

Many people are on Facebook and, although it has some pretences towards business networking, it is primarily a social network. It has undoubtedly promoted some success for people in their businesses, but it is hard to mix business personal activities with business activities, unless you have more than one Facebook persona (which is hard...).

Twitter is swamped with business people following other people merely in the hope that they will follow them back. The number of Internet marketers on there is a phenomenon in itself - I wonder if they manage to market to each other. It still seems the best place to follow people you're interested in ("celebrities" for want of a better word), and I should imagine the number of business success stories are a tiny percentage of the amount of nonsense that goes on there.

Ecademy and LinkedIn are more business-oriented networks, and both have chargeable elements. LinkedIn seems to give away a little bit more for free, and the pendulum seems to have swung its way, with Ecademy now trailing behind.

Where all these will lead is anybody's guess. More networks are appearing all the time - WAYN  and NABO are two that keep bombarding me with, well spam, for want of a better word.

Where Friends Reunited and Myspace have fallen, will facebook and Twitter follow? WIll all your invested time have been wasted?