Treasures By Brenda, A Lensmaster & An eBay Power Seller

Children’s Picture Book Reviews

Somewhat accidentally, I have managed to publish three children’s picture book reviews in the last week or so.  Two of them are from the very popular “If You Give A…” series by Laura Numeroff.

The first one, If You Give A Cat A Cupcake, features cupcakes and boy, do I love cupcakes! The ones on the cover drew me in & the cat in this book took me on a wild and crazy adventure after he made one heck of a mess with the sprinkles!

The second book, If You Give A Pig A Pancake, features pancakes and a pig!  Just imagine what might happen if you gave a pig a pancake and some syrup and you are launched on the way for another great adventure! 

Click here to buy
Mouse Cookies & More: A Treasury
from Amazon.

All three characters (Mouse, Moose and Pig) from the bestselling If You Give . . . series are in this wonderful family treasury, Mouse Cookies & More: A Treasury. Inside, you will find the books, recipes, songs, and activities. It is full of fun things to do.

Links For Visiting My Children’s Book Pages:

If You Give A Pig A Pancake Book Review  (New)
If You Give A Cat A Cupcake Book Review (New)
Eve Bunting’s Not Scary Scary Halloween Book Review (New)
A Bloom Of Friendship: The Story of the Canadian Tulip Festival

Link to Buy The Treasury:

Mouse Cookies & More: A Treasury

Wrebbit 3D Puzzles

A couple of weekends ago my sister dragged me kicking and screaming out to some garage sales.  (Despite the fact that I am not in ‘buying’ mode for my eBay store.)

Once I was there, of course, I stumbled across some things I just had to buy including a few brand-new, factory-sealed Wrebbit 3D jigsaw puzzles.  I have quite a bit of success with my ‘new sealeds’ as I call them so I couldn’t resist and these puzzles wound up in the trunk of my car…

When, a couple of weeks later, I did the research about them I discovered that some of these puzzles are rare (especially new ones) and some of them are fetching fairly nice sale prices.

Dracula’s Castle, for instance, will eventually sell for about $150 U.S. including shipping.

The towers from a fantastic series called Towers of Scale, of which I have two — the Sears and the Burj Al Arab ones — will sell for about $70 U.S. including shipping.

Those prices are pretty amazing for products that are not much more than ten years old and certainly demanded a bit more attention from me. I commenced researching Wrebbit puzzles and I discovered more than one interesting fact including that they originated from another fantastic Canadian company.  To learn more about this company and to see many examples of their fantastic puzzles, visit my new Squidoo page, What is a Wrebbit 3D Puzzle.

Click here to buy
Wrebbit’s Puzzle 3D Eiffel Tower
from Amazon

And I guess I should take this opportunity to thank my sister who forced me down this road of discovery. Thanks, Cheryl!

Links For Visiting Some Of My Jigsaw Puzzle Pages:

 What is a Wrebbit 3D Puzzle?
Are You Puzzled by Jigsaw Puzzles? A Puzzling Lensography
Welcome To Jigsaw Puzzle Country!
Fall For Halloween Jigsaw Puzzles
Looking For Christmas Jigsaw Puzzles
Melissa and Doug Jigsaw Puzzles, A Children’s Jigsaw Puzzle Lensography

With regard to the Mountain Wolf T-Shirt, the internet headlines read:

• ‘The hottest wolf shirt. Ever.’
• ‘Wolf t-shirt sells like crazy after ‘babe magnet‘ review.’
• ‘Google Wolf + T-Shirt and Magic Happens.’
• ‘The Howling Wolf Tee Guy.’
• ‘The Three Wolf Miracle Shirt.’
• ‘Wolf T-Shirt The Hottest Clothing Item on Amazon.’

The Mountain’s The Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt is an unexpected internet sensation…since student B. Govern “Bee-Dot-Govern” wrote a fun review about how the t-shirt helped him attract women at Wal-Mart. I’m sure that The Mountain did not intend their t-shirts as a way to attract the opposite sex…and despite, Govern’s initial review, the subject is controversial.  One purchaser was disappointed when not a single supermodel approached him  after he wore the shirt for a week.  (I do hope he washed it!)

Click here to buy
your own three wolf moon t-shirt
from Amazon!

The company reportedly said, “We appreciate humour as much as the next company, but we don’t approve of some of the remarks.”  However, the firm must really be pleased. (Who wouldn’t be thrilled to be selling more shirts in today’s economic climate?)  “We’ll take ironic fashion any day…. and we’re printing another 400,000 t-shirts…”

In case you haven’t heard of them, you need to know that The Mountain creates marvelous, hand-dyed & environmentally-friendly t-shirts. We can all be thankful that Govern chose a shirt that was made by such a fantastic company.  Read more about The Mountain by clicking right here.

By the way, I owe thanks to Joan4 for totally distracting me this morning by bringing attention to this issue with her page, Best of The Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt on Twitter.

Until next time,

Brenda
Treasures By Brenda

Follow these links to more reading:

The Mountain Wildlife T-Shirts, Hand-Dyed & Environmentally-Friendly
Best of The Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt on Twitter

What’s an eBay Power Seller? Well, nothing more than someone who has dedicated considerable time and effort into achieving a certain volume of sales on eBay.  I’ve spent several years learning the ins and outs of how eBay works and it was awhile before I opened my eBay store, Treasures By Brenda.

An eBay Power Seller On Squidoo, my latest page, discusses some of my successes selling on eBay and Buying or Selling on eBay discusses in greater detail why I started selling on eBay, what I sell and what my store policies are.

My experience as a seller on eBay has been pretty eclectic but a few of the areas I have had success with include:

Children’s books, they are sellers. Read about The World of Anne of Green Gables and L.M. Montgomery and some of the Lucy Maud Montgomery books that are for sale in my store.

Cookbooks are quite popular, too! Check out my Recipe for Finding A Good Cookbook.

Yes, and I know it is hard to believe, but rare VHS tapes Are sought after! Check out Rare VHS Tapes ~~ A Collector’s Guide to Videotapes for the scoop.

Discontinued CDs are another good seller! I haven’t created a page yet about all the different types of CDs that I have listed in my store but I do have Christmas Music All Year Long which includes many of the fantastic Christmas music CDs in stock now.

Brand-name clothing is HOT on eBay! I particularly enjoy selling Roots Canada Ltd. ~~ Trendy Clothing and Leather Bags because of the quality merchandise they make.

Jigsaw puzzles are popular, too! Are You Puzzled by Jigsaw Puzzles is a discussion of jigsaw puzzles and includes many of the puzzles that are available in my store.

If you are looking for some great stories about items that have been sold on eBay, I highly recommend picking up a copy of one of  Lynn Dralle’s excellent eBay books. 

Click here to order Lynn’s brand-new book,
Home Run The 4th 100 Best Things I’ve Sold on eBay,
from Amazon.

When someone asks, “How should I get started on eBay?” I always recommend buying a few things on eBay first to learn how the system works and what it is like to be a buyer and reading, reading and more reading. Read EVERYTHING you can about eBay!

Follow these links to:

* Read more about an eBay power seller On Squidoo.
* Learn more about my eBay policies and procedures.

If you are planning a trip to Hawaii with kids, you might just enjoy Hawaii For Kids By A Kid. On that page you will discover the story of my nine-year old’s version of our Hawaiian vacation plus my additional comments. Some of the ideas might be perfect for your family Hawaiian holiday.

You might also enjoy Hawaii Souvenirs, The Best ~~ Our Top 10. There are so many great items you can pick to remember your Hawaiian vacation, it can’t hurt to think about it in advance and this page includes our top 10 favorites. Some of them can be purchased before you go to Hawaii and some of them can be purchased after you return from your trip; others are available only in Hawaii including my favorite momento. Check out the page to see what our favorite souvenir is!

Whatever you do, don’t plan a fantastic vacation without investing in a terrific, current guide book like Frommer’s Hawaii with Kids. It is an inexpensive way to help make sure that you enjoy your important trip! I am a big fan of Frommer’s travel guides.

Click here to buy
Frommer’s Hawaii with Kids
From Amazon

Click on any of my Hawaiian-themed pages to learn more:

Hawaii For Kids By A Kid
Hawaii Souvenirs, The Best ~~ Our Top 10
Magnum’s Hawaiian Shirt, The Jungle Bird
The Best-Ever Hawaiian Punch Recipe
The Best-Ever Hawaiian Potato-Salad Recipe

Have you read Dan Brown’s new book The Lost Symbol? It’s the sequel to The Da Vinci Code and you no you haven’t missed it because it is not actually being published until September. Despite that fact, it is in the top spot on Amazon’s Bestseller list.  Pretty amazing, isn’t it? I hope it is a great book!

Click here to pre-order the hardcover version
from Amazon.
List Price: $28.95
Amazon Price: $15.63

My latest foray into sales lenses is a duo — A Beginner’s Guide to How to Throw A Frisbee and If It’s Not A Wham-O Frisbee, It’s Not A Frisbee. 

The first is actually an extremely soft sales oriented page.  It does (I think) a fairly good job of showing and telling you how to throw a frisbee and it has a small but relevant assortment of related merchandise.

The second one is definitely a fully fledged, sales-oriented page.  I cannot even guess how many frisbees are on that page to buy — 20? Maybe more? Plus an assortment of interesting and related frisbee-themed t-shirts, books, etc.

I hope that together they can become a popular team.  My initial research showed that there is a demand for information on Google.  I hope it was accurate and that now I can get those people searching looking at my pages.

My reason for creating the sales-oriented page is the other successful sales pages that I have created.

Note I NEVER (almost never) make a page just oriented for sales. I always try to give the reader more for his money. In the case of the sales-oriented Frisbee lens, there is still interesting information on the page about good Frisbees and about the company that created the first Frisbee, Wham-O.

Some of my other sales stories (successful and not successful):

Hatley  Children’s Rainwear — which has nice visitor numbers and has sales to rival the sales on all 10(?) of my blu-ray lenses.  Yes, I did something right on that lens and have been busy selling rain boots, raincoats and umbrellas!

My Simple & Affordable Little Girls’ Easter Dresses For Spring & Summer had strong visitors going right past Easter, hoardes of click outs but almost no sales.

The Mountain Wildlife T-Shirts, Hand-Dyed & Environmentally-Friendly — a fairly new lens with rather low traffic. However, I am surprised that despite low visitor numbers I have sold four t-shirts. (I realize that is not a lot of money but it is a good indicator of the subject of the lens being a good choice.)

Magnum’s Hawaiian Shirt, The Jungle Bird - Is still fairly new but it is a sales lens that doesn’t seem overly sales-oriented because it almost exclusively features Magnum’s shirt. Whether it is the spot to buy it for your husband or a picture of Tom Selleck wearing it for your locker, it is quite tightly focused on the shirt.

Sorry ladies, but Magnum, P.I. does not come with the shirt. I had no idea when I created this page that Magnum was still so popular. If you want a smile, make sure to click through to the page about Magnum’s shirt and read all the great comments from some of the top female lensmasters at Squidoo. Will this lens perform affiliate wise? Only time will tell.

Brenda

Click here to see many of the fantastic Wham-O Frisbees that are available.

When I first created my page about Disney’s Earth ~~ An Animal Nature Documentary, I did not add any merchandise. Disney has not created any especially for this documentary movie and I was unsure of what to choose. Then, when the lens received traffic so quickly, I decided I was missing a big opportunity.

I carefully chose and added three items. I added links to some beautiful plush polar bears on Amazon, some amazing plush elephants (although for some reason elephants just aren’t as cuddly) and a link to a beautiful, environmentally friendly The Mountain t-shirt.

Well, you’d never guess but people who are interested in The Earth are interested in related merchandise and in t-shirts. The facts that The Mountain shirts are beautiful, feature an endless choice of wildlife PLUS that they are environmentally friendly (they have a 100 percent Oekotex certified rating) is a great combination. 

Out of curiosity, I did a bit of research on The Mountain and discovered YIPPEE that people are searching for their shirts and that there is not a lot of competition. So, of course, I dropped everything (that’s hard) and made a companion lens for my three Disney Earth movie lenses. Google picked up The Mountain Wildlife T-Shirts, Hand-Dyed, Environmentally-Friendly Cotton Shirts lens right away — the first visitor was from a Google search — but promptly let go again. Once Google grabs a hold of the lens for good, I’m expecting good things…maybe even an affiliate success story in the same manner that my Hatley Children’s Rainwear lens has been!

It will be great when the Lensrank is fixed so that we can all see how the things we are working on are looking. This many days with the lensrank not updated is going to result in a big change, I think. Two of my Disney earth lenses Disney’s Earth ~~ An Animal Nature Documentary and Disney’s Earth Movie And Planet Earth ~~ Are They The Same Documentaries are almost in the top five for their categories. Both are receiving strong traffic; one has even been blessed. If only the lensrank would update! Right now would be a good time for them to appear on Squidoo’s front page!

Brenda

The Top 3 Lenses Wouldn’t Be Accurate Today So I’m Going To Include My Newest Lens:

The Lost Symbol, The Sequel to Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code - This book is ALREADY Amazon’s Number 1 on the bestseller list! Due out in September, I obviously haven’t added my review, yet. If anyone knows where I can get an advance copy…there are, by the way, rumours of a leak…that would be good PR, wouldn’t it.

Disney has gone back to a subject it did well with the release today, Earth Day 2009, from its new DisneyNature division of Earth the movie. Walt Disney used to do nature films and do them well. Do you remember those days and those films? I do but they must have been reruns! Between 1948 and 1960 Disney’s nature films won eight Academy Awards! If anyone has the resources to do beautiful nature documentaries, I think it must be Disney.

Earth, the movie is a Hot Topic. How do I know it is a hot topic? Well, of course the internet is a great measure and, I figure, when a page I have written is immediately picked up by the search engines and visited by a lot of visitors, that something is up so, after the initial success of my page Disney’s Earth Movie ~~ An Animal Nature Documentary I went looking to see what all the excitement is about.

(By the way, AJ, I created this page about the new Disney movie originally because I thought it would be a good companion to my Imax Blu-ray Movies page, not because I knew Earth was going to be so successfull!)

We all know that Disney the company is both loved and hated and that, perhaps rightly, everything they do is critically examined. This movie is generating discussion on two fronts, both of which I thought warranted Monkeybrains lenses. (Monkeybrains are debate-formated pages and can be pretty thought provoking.)

Back to Disney’s Earth. A rumoured 60 to 70 percent of the footage from this movie comes from the Planet Earth BBC production which has aired on the Discovery Channel. You can bet that fact is not being so warmly received. How would feel if you went to a movie and saw something that you had already seen at home, for free, on your television? You are right, that has some people upset. However, Disney feels that this footage was too beautiful NOT to be seen on the big screen, that they wove it together to follow the lives of three animal families over a one-year period and that the entire film has a different slant than the BBC series. I’m hoping you will visit my latest page, Disney’s Earth Movie And Planet Earth ~~ Are They The Same Documentaries and be the first to participate in the debate.

Then of course, there is the fact that people feel that Disney should be giving back and, to some extent, they are. For every ticket sold in the opening week of this movie, they are planting a tree in a Brazilian rainforest and they do have a nature conservancy division. What do you think, can Disney help save our planet through the use of films like Earth? Visit Earth The Movie ~~ DisneyNature Films CAN Help Save Planet Earth and add your thoughts to that debate.

I have to admit to being quite excited about the new movie. I wanted to see this movie this weekend but I may have to go alone! (My family has the nerve to have other plans.) The trailers, on my first page about Disney’s Earth movie are absolutely amazing. I have not seen the Planet Earth series although it appears on the Top 10 Blu-ray Movies list and is on my must-see list so I do not have to worry about having seen any of the Earth film before.

If YOU see it, be sure to come back to Disney’s Earth Movie and let us all know what you thought of it.

Brenda

My Top 3 Lenses:

A Tasty & Traditional Easter Dinner Menu (With all the traffic Disney’s Earth is receiving, this one must be hanging on by a thread.)
Disney’s Earth Movie ~~ An Animal Nature Documentary (Number 7 in the movies category, can it make number 1?)
The Best-Ever Glazed Baked Ham Recipe

My Rare VHS Tapes ~~ A Collector’s Guide to Videotapes lens continues to amaze me. It runs along pretty much like a good movie does staying in or around the top 10,000 pages on Squidoo with only an occasional update from me to keep it from feeling lonely. Despite the fact that it is showing only eight visitors right now (it usually has around thirty), it sold $5.91 worth of merchandise from eBay so far this month. That is more than all of the income it has ever made from affiliate sales. I like the fact that it is doing what it was made to do…at least in part.

What was it made to do? It was made to share information about how to care for VHS tapes and to help sell rare VHS video tapes from the video section of my eBay store, Treasures By Brenda. I am not sure how it is working in that regard but I am pleased with my videotape sales and have sold $319 worth of rare videos in the last couple of months.

I can hear you thinking aren’t videotapes history and the answer is yes and no. If a movie or film has been released on DVD, then the videotape is worthless but – and here is the interesting part which you will find discussed on my page – just 25 percent of films made before VHS were ever issued on VHS and just 50 percent of those that were on VHS are on DVD. This means that many movies made in the past are simply gone, forever which, in turn, drives the demand for the VHS tapes of those old rare movies.

In case you are interested, and I hope you passed over my post if you are not, here are some recent sales figures for VHS videotapes on eBay.com:

Disney’s Song of the South — $68 U.S.
One of My Wives Is Missing — $89 U.S.
Black Sabbath (one of their concerts) — $85
Tormentor (yes, a horror movie) — $79
A four-tape belly dance workout — $112

If you haven’t heard of these films, you can be excused…they are old and may cease to exist when VHS is gone forever.

Brenda

My Top 3 Lenses:

A Tasty & Traditional Easter Dinner Menu
Simple & Affordable Little Girls’ Easter Dresses For Spring & Summer
The Best-Ever Glazed Baked Ham Recipe