Information Overload and too Many Choices

My very first post on this blog was the journey I started last January looking to start building an small online business.  I had a plan or so I thought, start out slow build a reputation while I still had a toddler at home so I would have the start of an online business when she went to school.  Well by May I realized that eBay was not working for me with all the non-stop changes way too much for a little hobby seller so I started looking for other sites.  Now a little over 1yr later I am revisiting my plans to see what is working and what is not.  I can say that promoting for a small site ended up being much more of a full time job than I expected.  Good thing I had an understanding husband.  I have discovered that networking and finding mentors is one of the most important things you can have as you work your way through internet 1.0, and I have to thank Rainbowseeker and the folks at www.Pheebay.com for helping me along so much to this point.

Now enter web 2.0 the social media web.  I found forums and started my own blogs and squidoo lenses, then around the middle of last month I discovered Twitter.  This is where the title of this blog post comes in.  Through Twitter I have discovered more blogs and podcasts then I ever would have even thought to look for and they have all taught me a great amount of information.  But this all now leaves me in a great quandary what is right for my business plan.  Do I work with online auction platforms and work promoting the site and myself??  Do I go with my own small website?  Do I sell at fixed price sites or try and stay with auction sites?  Do I go back over to eBay because the traffic is still there?  Do I spread myself thin trying out different sites?  Just in the last few weeks I have started spreading my items out onto different platforms to see what sells better where, but then I have to remember to remove it from the other site.  Plus when I started out I gave no thought to the fact that my user name would become my brand so I ended up with 3 different ones.  Thank goodness I love my avatar as I use it everywhere.

Now I read about all these new platforms that are opening up and some of them sound really cool.  Here I am still a relative novice at all this and feel like I have been left alone in the candy store.  I am a fairly intelligent person and try and do my research but there are so many options out there how do you even know where to start anymore.  In the old days (pre-2008) you wanted to start an online business getting rid of your stuff you went to eBay, then there was the sprouting of all the online auction sites (and new ones still crop up daily), now there are more choices/pricing plans then ever before.  The web has changed drastically over the last year as I started this journey and as of this moment I feel like I am wandering around in a foreign country where I am just learning the language.

I really need to thank a lot of the people I follow on Twitter for opening up this whole new world for me and hopefully as I process all of this information I can start on the next step in this journey of building an online ecommerce business.  I still give myself a few years to get it all worked out, and hopefully as I continue to blog this journey it will help other trying to find their way through the maze of the online ecommerce world.

Here is a list of some of the great people I have found through forums and Twitter.

Rainbowseeker-from www.pheebay.com/www.milbid.com
Octavia, Sunray and Passionvinehouse – from Pheebay

Then from Twitter and this is in no way a complete list;

@attheboutique1
@HillaryDePiano
@colderice
@redINKdiary
@ebayandbeyond
@thesavvyseller
@auctionwally

Any comments and suggestions are more than welcome and greatly appreciated.

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