The votes are in and the decision is final! Thanks to you guys,  for my New Year Resolution I will be……. (drum roll please!)

Training to enter a mini marathon!

I may get some runners for this one!  A big thank you to all 466 of you that entered to help me choose.

The winner of our €200 Sam McCauley’s Hamper goes to:

Martin Phelan, Co. Kilkenny.

Our 5 runner up New Year Packs are going to:

Nevil Veighey,  Co Laois

Orla Leahy, Co Tipperary

Roisin Byrne, Co Carlow

Mark Wogan, Co Kilkenny

Theresa O’Kane,  Co Longford

All prizes will be in the post tomorrow.  Any training suggestions you might have would be greatly appreciated so leave them in a comment below.  Think I’m going to need all the help I can get!

We are DELIGHTED to announce that the great crew over in eircom have joined forces with us and become DoneDealers! Or maybe we’ve become eircomers?

I’m not exactly sure but the cool part is that DoneDeal now power eircom’s classifieds section!

eircom.net are always looking for ways to make life easier for their customers and since that’s exactly what we at DoneDeal always strive to do, we have begun working with them to make your DoneDealing even easier!

You can now see our huge range of funky stuff for sale before going in to check out some tunes in the music hub or catching up on the latest news! We would love your feedback on this new venture, let us know what you think!

If you have items to sell on DoneDeal, the simple tips below will help you to reach your target audience and maximise your ad’s results

Close your eyes and take a deep breath. Imagine yourself enjoying the perfect shopping experience or purchasing transaction on DoneDeal. What do you see? Obviously, the first thing you will notice is the familiar layout and branding of the DoneDeal website. Secondly, you’ll see the item you want at a price that suits your pocket.

What else is there? If you’re looking to sell items through DoneDeal, quickly and without time wasters, it’s important to put yourself in the shoes of a potential buyer. It’s also important to realise that our site includes a number of features designed to help you sell.

Most potential buyers will find your ad by using a search for a specific word or browsing through the site’s various category sections.

They’ll see a brief description and two lines of the full description with a photo beside it. From this list, they’ll choose which ads to look at.

The first thing to ensure is that your brief description actually describes the item you have for sale. There’s room for approximately 40 characters (letters) including spaces, so it might be a good idea to type the headline first in a text document on your computer and do a word count. This way, you can make sure the most accurate description fits the space available.

The next part of placing an ad is choosing the section in which to put it. Our system will make some suggestions based on the information you’ve inserted in the brief description. You can also pick from our list of categories.

The next page in the sign-up process is the description. You have 1,000 characters to describe the goods you have for sale, so type it out first or write it out by hand.

Feedback from DoneDeal buyers has told us that they like to have all the information in front of them before phoning or emailing a seller. Think about it, there’s no point being brief on information and then having to give lengthy answers to loads of questions from buyers. Be up front, to the point but give enough detail.

Another good tip is to get someone else to read it over for you – you don’t want a simple spelling mistake to turn into a major selling mistake.

Divide the information into orderly sentences, paragraphs and bullet points to make it more attractive to the buyer. Put the most important information in your first sentence – this is the first thing someone will read and may well influence whether they look at the rest of your ad.

Next stop is adding photos or video. It is said that a picture paints a thousand words and our site users agree. So make sure you upload some photos (from your phone or camera) that show clearly the item you’re selling, e.g. close-ups and views from different angles. Or how about a video to show the item in use? The video can even star yourself. We don’t mind!

You guys have done it again! Thanks to all you DoneDealers, we have managed to raise €16,666.40 for this great charity.

Some of the hardworking guys from the St Vincent de Paul dropped by the office on Wednesday so we could present them with a cheque for the money you guys helped DoneDeal to raise.

During their time here they told us about many great projects that they have been managing throughout 2010.  In particular they noticed an increased demand with the cold snap during December. Some areas had requests to their offices increase by up to 57%. It seems that December 2010 may have been their busiest ever, so you can imagine the timing of the money you guys raised is perfect and will certainly go a long way.

Yet again, it amazes me what DoneDealers can do, thanks guys!

Please let us know if you have any suggestions or comments on our charity month by leaving a comment below.