Ebay: I sold books on ebay for nearly 4 years. Most of what I sold were rare and antique books, right out of my own collection. (What can I say I was between jobs, and needed some cash flow)
How did ebay treat me? Well first year gross income from ebay was about $40,000
Here is exactly what I did.
I took books from my collection, listed them with a photo, and brief description of their condition this process took only about 5 minutes per book!
Also while shopping for antique books, at Yard Sales, Goodwill, Salvation Army and other Thrift Stores, for my own collection, would pick up little gems and put them on Ebay.. sometimes the results were incredible!
You do have to know a little bit about Books, book condition and describing its condition, but in general if you knew a list of popular authors, you could not go wrong and learning how to list was easy due to eBay's FAQs and by doing a little research by reading other successful listings of similar products.
(here is where reality kicks in)
Supply and demand… you have to have a good supply of books, or like me you will run out of desirable inventory. Once inventory is low, so will your potential earnings be (To sound a bit like Yoda) .
Then the ebay craze has taken place in the last few years. This has brought a lot more sellers to ebay, with more sellers comes more competition, and more of a chance that you will be listing one of several copies available, and this drives prices down. By the time I quit ebaying, I was loosing money at a good pace, once expenses were taken into consideration.
Now this is not to say that you cannot make money on ebay, heck I think everyone should have an account and sell stuff there. It is like having a garage sale whenever you need one, without the hassle of posting all of those ridiculous signs in your neighborhood.
I have one friend that goes to yard sales, asks the people if there is anything free he can have, and then sells whatever it is on ebay.. he’s making $200 a week using this technique and his wife can now drag him to yard sales.. he’s happy , she’s happy.
My challenge to you, is to take something that you KNOW is of no value.. write a great description of it and put it on ebay! You might be very surprised with how much people will buy JUNK for, and even if it does not sell you get to have some fun for about 35 cents! Now that’s cheap entertainment!
So I say give ebay a try! Click this to go take a look..
more later..
okay it's later...
I also have webmastered a number of websites, some were actually very popular.
Websites in some semblance of the order I created them..
A personal webpage, I set up a type of page about me, as my first test.
I used angelfire for the free web space.
See http://www.angelfire.com/
I then went on to do a website about a friend’s band. This one was fun, I had a lot of pictures and even made some sound clips of them in concert. My Friend has a warped sense of humor, and says some really off the wall things when he is on stage.
At the time I had lost track of him and this was as much an attempt to get his attention as anything else.. it worked. Through the web we got back in contact with each other, and still email on occasion.
Ways I tried to make money on these, was through affiliate programs.
I joined http://www.cj.com/ as they, at the time, had the widest array of programs. You literally can find nearly anything (legal) there to sell, and apply to programs to place ads on your sites. Funny enough my best program was one with ebay! But I also had some luck with other programs.. but even with that, and even when had something like a dozen sites running I was only making $200 to $300 a year! Not a lot of money by any stretch of the imagination, if you took what I spent on computers, internet connections, office space at home, I lost a significant amount of money every year.
Look here for cj .com info if you want to give them a try.
I have also tried Paid-to-surf programs, of which I do not think that there are any , any more. These would put a banner on your screen that would change about every 5 seconds, the thought being that as you surfed you were shown banners, that the program got paid for (per exposure) and you made a few cents per hour.
They uses a Multi Level Marketing approach to getting new recruits.. top earnings for me as about $20 per month.. less than my AOL account cost at the time. (I am glad to see them go)
My next great attempt and potential the best was to join Google’s AdSense program, and place google banners on my sites.
This is a long story that I will save for another day, but let me tell you this! “DO NOT VIOLATE ANY OF THE TREMS!” I accidentally violated and was terminated. I may now not EVER get another account. I say "yes" give them a try, but do not violate any of the terms nor allow your friends to click your banners , thinking that they are helping you. Google does not care if you knew about invalid click activity or not, they can’t. go to http://www.google.com/ and click on the advertisers link to get info. (by the way, I was making $12.00 a day with them, I am not sure how much of that came from invalid clicks, so good luck)
After being dropped from AdSense I joined another similar program, AdBrite.. so far I have not made a cent.. but I keep hoping. With AdBrite, you have to sell the ad space on your site. Granted they do run a “network” ad bar, but these ads generally will not have anything to do with the content of the page you display them on, so your click through percentage will be low! One tip I can give, is that if you have a site or an affiliate site link, you can buy clicks there and place them on web sites that are of the same theme, for about 5 cents a click. Not a bad deal.
This brings me to my next… I have an affiliate program, that I load a URL as a link. If a reader clicks that link, it takes them to the parent companies page, they are tracked as coming from me with a small piece of code on the tail of the ULR that I post as a link. My Average sale there is $25.00. I find that about 1% of all the people who click this link, will buy. So I am buying clicks at adbrite that point to this page, using my identifying URL. If teach click costs me 5 cents a hundred clicks will cost $5.00 if 1% buy I make $25 for every $5 I spend.. here to I have not made a cent yet, but I have only been doing this for a couple of days now.. too early to tell. I figure I will buy $100 worth of clicks, and see what the results are.
If you got the ballz to try it look here.. Use AdBrite to buy & sell ads!
Alright it don;t take ballz.. just imagination or desperation..
And that’s about it. I have tried a lot of things to make a little extra money, some were semi-successful some were crap.. I hope that if you have a program that is making you money on line, you will add it as a comment here. If you are looking for affiliate programs or other ways to make a little money on line, I hope that this post helps you..
Next posting will be about who know.. but thanks for stopping.
Peace , pass it on.
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