Hi Yard Salers!

Once again, we were out of town this weekend (which turned out to be not a big loss, since it was raining all weekend). Needless to say we dont have a lot of sales to report on, but we do have some udpates about the website. We just added a list view feature underneath the map so now you can see the sales all at once and print them out. A few notes:

• The list will only be displayed when your zoom level is close enough (within a 20 mile radius or closer)
• The list will only display sales within the viewable map area

If you keep tabs on the yard sale statistics thread in the forum, you’ll see the number of sales each week is skyrocketing. We added about 20 regional newspapers to the search engine and this now accounts for about 10% of all sales. We are getting a healthy amount of sellers posting direct to the site as well! And we’re just getting started

For those of you using IE 7.0, you must have thought that I am a horrible web designer to make the blog so hard to read. In fact it was a browser stylesheet problem. I tracked down the bug using an awesome screenshot website at www.browsershots.org

Basically, you can point this site at a URL, tell it what browsers and systems to use, press go and 5 minutes later you have all the screenshots back. Which told me exactly what browser was the culprit (on a sidenote, it seems like IE7 is starting to gain significantly more numbers which is good to know.)

So, for all you latest and greatest IE 7 users out there, enjoy the fix!

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We had 8 sales in town from the map page here that we wanted to check out. The first one started at 6am but we didn’t manage to get there until 7:30. That one turned out to be mostly large items (couches, desks, chairs, etc) - definately not good ebay stuff. We weren’t having much luck after that until we came apon a sale that was mostly tools and had a few boxes of books and one full of board games that was going largely un-noticed in the corner. Not knowing much about tools, I decided to dig around in the board games box, not really expecting to find anything. Underneath a few well used ones was a game called “Cashflow for Kids” that looked to be in pretty good shape and complete. The guy was asking $2 but I snagged it for $1. My wife Brooke tried to talk me out of buying it, but I thought maybe I might be able to get $5 or $10 bucks for it at best. Neither of us had heard of it before. It turned out to be the buy of the weekend, as they are going for $60 and up on ebay and this game is from Robert Kiyosaki, the Rich Dad Poor Dad series author. After we had looked it up on ebay when we got back, I got the high five from Brooke. Its now on eBay.

Other than that, we got a few real nice frames for $15, Brooke picked up some earrings and a necklace, and I bought a paperback book “Little Children” (they just made this into a motion picture) which looks like its never been read for $1.

So what we thought might be a nothing weekend actually turned out to be great one for both profit and also learning! More again soon…

Well its been 14 hours since we relaunched the site. Only one person has done a search so far. It looks like have a lot of marketing work ahead of us!

We just turned the key on some Google Adwords. Also tracking down some good link partners. Stay tuned!