Estate Sales on Craig's List

So I recently went on my first (used) book buying trip to an "Estate Sale". I put estate sale in parenthesis because I am not sure that it wasn't really a glorified yard sale. But it was successful from a book buying perspective, as I bought about 15 books, most for a quarter each and was able to list all but one or two of them on Amazon. The average price I listed them was somewhat over $10.00 which means a pretty good potential for profit. Here is an example of one of the more valuable books.

The reason I had not been to an estate sale before was because I was unable to find them - there never seemed to be any listed in my local paper - plenty of yard sales which rarely have any valuable books. Finally I just punched "Estate Sales Virginia" into Google, and along with half a dozen links to companies that run estate sales, there was a link to Craig's List DC garage and moving sale listings. After clicking on the Northern Virginia tab I was able to find sales near me and sure enough one of them was listed as an estate sale. There are at least two more estate sales this weekend that claim to have old books which I just might have to check out.

Search Engine Rankings, June 2007

Time for the monthly update. As usual The first number is the current ranking, the second in parenthesis is from last month:

For Google:
personalized books - #29 (#21)
personalized children's books - #100 (#79)
personalized childrens books - #53 (#42)
personalized story books - #15 (#15) TOP TWENTY!
personalized book - #13 (#8) TOP TWENTY!

For Yahoo:
personalized books - #8 (#11) TOP TEN!
personalized children's books - #32 (#60)
personalized childrens books - #50 (#38)
personalized story books - #10 (#18) TOP TEN!
personalized book - #10 (#14) TOP TEN!


The Good: Improvement in four of five keywords on Yahoo. Two top twenty rankings on Google, and three top ten rankings on Yahoo, including on personalized books.

The Bad: Decreases in 4 of 5 keywords on Google and one keyword on Yahoo.

The Ugly: While the improvement on Yahoo is great, I am much more concerned with the decreases on Google - the positive trend I had been seeing now has reversed itself.

Odds and Ends Post

Here is a hodgepodge of things going on here at the Home Biz Blues house hold:

• Amazon - Finally got all (or as many as were in decent shape) of the Lot of Books listed on Amazon Marketplace. My current inventory of Used and collectible books now comes to about 750 books. With so many books I had to devise a way to keep track of them, so I labeled my book shelves and made an access database to keep track of where each listed book was located (which book case, shelf, and general location on shelf.) Much easier than looking through hundreds of books randomly placed on shelves. Doing pretty good - selling about 15 to 30 books a month. Now my number one need is to go out and find more books to sell.

• Other Amazon news - my positive rating number has finally gone back up to 90%, which should help sales. My goal is to maintain a 95% and above positive rating, so still a ways to go (Only 10 more good ratings should do it).

• Personalized books - As ever this time a year, the personalized book business is slow. This was not helped when Google decided to make madluckbooks.com disapear from the search results for such keywords as "personalized books" and "personalized story books". This has happened before, but that time it only lasted for a few days. This time it lasted for well over a week and I was starting to panic. Interestingly, yahoo improved my rankings for those same words at about the same time. All of a sudden I was getting hits from Yahoo that I had never gotten before, and nobody was coming from Google. Eventually Google decided to stop being mean and madluckbooks.com began showing up on their searches again (though maybe not ranked as hight as I had been). I'll do the monthly update on search engine rankings soon to see where everything balanced out.

• Schools out for summer after this week so I will have to return to my basement hole to work to keep out of the kids way.