making money online

How I Still Make Money with eBay

Kentin Waits — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 10:24:06 +0000

In the glory days of eBay, the marketplace was ripe for amazing profits. Grandma’s hand-knitted doilies sold for $10 each, vintage puzzles with two pieces missing sold for $25. Buyers were drunk on a heady concoction of new technology mixed with dot-com incomes and childhood nostalgia.

Those days are gone. Today, eBay is a larger, but more somber virtual place. Independent sellers who aren’t managing their own drop-ship businesses struggle to survive. Making the hunt, listing, packaging, shipping, and customer service worth our time is an ongoing challenge.

I’ve been antique picking and reselling on eBay since those halcyon days — 1997, to be exact. After all the bubbles and bursts, I’ve settled into a modest groove with eBay. Some days are certainly better than others, but to stay consistently profitable in the new eBay era, I’ve embraced some old concepts. (See also: Secrets of Top eBay Sellers)

Generalize

I used to focus on antiques from the early-to-mid 1900s (think Fiesta Ware, Bakelite jewelry, and the like). Today, I’ll sell anything from cowboy boots and eel skin wallets to replacement gas caps. Times have changed, and in order to consistently source goods, I have to know a little bit about a lot of stuff. Appealing to a broad range of buyers from different categories and interests also helps avoid market slumps in a single area.

Be Ruthless About Overhead

I get most of my shipping supplies from the recycling bin (thanks to a large apartment building nearby) or from generous retailers who don’t mind me rummaging through their aisles on stock day. $4 per roll for packing tape is insult enough — I cringe if I have to pay retail for bubble wrap. I stock up on boxes and supplies of all sizes and quantities regardless of what my immediate needs are. Preparation is the key in avoiding last-minute packing expenditures when I need to a get a shipment out the door.

Research

Research is vital to ensure profitability in nearly every business. eBay is no exception. Prices fluctuate, tastes change, and new trends evolve nearly every day. Understanding what my customers are after and/or what they're having a difficult time getting is the groundwork that informs every purchase I make. Thankfully, eBay has created tools that make this research much easier. Sellers can view completed sales to investigate final prices and save keyword search terms for ongoing sales research.

Stay Ahead of the Trends

Once I know what’s selling and for how much, I can’t get too complacent. The marketplace is fickle and trends are constantly changing. Staying ahead of trends helps me be “first on the scene” for potential buyers and helps avoid paying more for these items when the word has gotten out.

Understand Your Area

Once I know what’s selling online, I can see opportunities for profit around my physical location. For instance, in the Midwest most people ignore mid-century furniture or accessories. But online, there’s no category that’s hotter right now. Though the locals may chuckle, I know that finding a 1950s starburst clock or 1960s “BoHo” purse is money in the bank.

Price to Move

Other sellers may argue with me on this one, but I price my items to move them quickly. For me, sitting on an item for two months while I wait to get my ideal price is frustrating, time-consuming, and typically futile. If an item doesn’t sell at my first listing price, I lower it until it I can (still profitably) move it. Only as a last resort do I sell to break even — and that’s just to recoup my investment and move on something more profitable.

eBay will continue to evolve and selling on eBay (or sites like it) will continue to be a challenge as even more people get in the game and the sources of good used items erode. But for the moment, there’s still a bit of meat on the bone, as my grandfather would say. You just have to look harder for it.

This article is from Kentin Waits of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

5 Ways to Make Money With Amazon Mechanical Turk

Xin Lu — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:00:08 +0000

The Amazon Mechanical Turk or MTurk is a service that was created so that those who need work done can hire thousands of human workers for much less than minimum wage. Each task is called a HIT and it can be as simple as clicking a link and as complex as writing an entire computer program. If you are a worker in the system you will not be compensated very well, but there are quite a few ways the work requesters are profiting from this service.

1. Transcription Company

There are several transcription companies that are quite active on MTurk. They pay the MTurk workers or "Turkers" less than 50 cents for each minute of transcription and sell the end results to various clients. They do control for quality, but the profit margin on these transcriptions is at least 50% to 70% by my calculations. If you have the connections to start a transcription company or just need some transcription done then MTurk would be a great place to source your workers.

2. Content Sourcing

Many requesters seem to be building content sites and they are getting their content for dirt cheap on MTurk. Quality is an issue, but then the same requesters just have more MTurk workers do quality checks on the results they receive. It's quite funny, but I have to admit that it is effective. If you want to get a slew of cheap content fairly quickly then MTurk may be the place to go. The different types of content I have seen vary from polls, quizzes, questions and answers, and articles. Theoretically you could also build a trivia game.

3. Research

There are many research projects conducted on MTurk. Some of the companies that do research on MTurk in turn sell their research results for a profit, and some are actually university researchers who are doing a project. Either way, MTurk is a good source of willing participants for research. When I was in college I often see labs pay research subjects $10 an hour or more just to answer some questions, but now on MTurk researchers can get subjects for as little as 5 cents each.

4. Data Collection and Mining

There are many tasks that ask people to find information. For example, there are batches of jobs that ask for the email address or contact information of certain politicians. Other jobs ask for the email addresses of college financial aid offices. With thousands of people collecting data the jobs are done much faster.

5. Art

The Sheep Market is a quirky project done by Aaron Koblin. Basically, he commissioned 10,000 sheeps facing left on MTurk for 2 cents a piece. The end result was quite fascinating and some of the Turkers actually drew very complex sheep. Now the sheep are selling for $20 a piece and the art piece has been exhibited internationally. If he sells all the sheep he would have made a profit of 100000%.

If you are not in the mood to systematically profit from MTurk, then you could always do a few HITs for a few cents. You do have to be careful not to do the tasks posted by scammers, and these are detailed in a post at the Turker Nation forums. In my research for this article I did a variety of paying tasks and I have to admit that I actually learned quite a few things even though my effective hourly wage was below $2. Many of the tasks are great for people who are bored and want to earn a tiny bit of money. I am thinking of designing some tasks and hiring some Turkers to build something profitable. I'm not quite sure what I would do yet, but the possibilities are endless. What is your idea for using this service?

This article is from Xin Lu of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

10 Ways to Make Money for the MySpace Generation

Bob Lotich — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:00:02 +0000

I still remember my dial-up internet connection, paying for AOL by the hour, and waiting 45 minutes for a 1MB file to finish downloading. I can recall thinking that it was all fun to play with, but I didn't see the big picture of how the internet would so drastically change the world that we live in. Now, the Myspace generation is growing up, and they have known nothing else! Luckily for them (and us) all these changes present tremendous opportunities for business and new ways of making money!

1. Sell stuff on eBay for Mom and Dad

If I were a teen trying to make a few bucks, I would sit mom and dad down at the kitchen table and offer to sell their junk for them. I would have them identify all the junk around the house they don't want, and I would offer to split the profits with them. Hopefully, they would just let me keep all the profits. Either way, this is a win-win deal.

2. Write product reviews

I still remember a few years ago when I realized the power of user-generated reviews. I had this revelation that I no longer had to guess if a product would hold up to what it claimed; I now could find out beforehand from others. There are websites like Epinions.com and ReviewStream.com that offer cash or rewards in exchange for product reviews. If you are a fast typer and have an opinion, this could be a way to earn a few extra bucks.

3. Take online surveys

When I first discovered online surveys, I thought it was like a dream-come-true. I could sit at my computer and make a living taking surveys all day. Then after doing it for an hour and wanting to pull my ears off with boredom, I realized this wasn't for me. An additional hazard is that many of the survey sites are borderline spammy, and if you don't protect your phone number and address, you could end up with some "deals" that you might not have been interested in.

4. Sell digital photos

The internet has helped the advancement of the digital photo. There are now lots of sites looking to buy digital photos: Dreamstime.com, Shutterstock.com, CreStock.com, Fotolia.com. While it definitely wouldn't hurt to be a pro photographer, there is plenty of opportunity for amateurs with a good/decent camera to make money selling their work.

5. Tutor or give lessons

Many parents are willing to shell out a lot of cash to pay for a tutor for their child. They realize that if Johnny can get his GPA up to 3.7 he will have a better chance at getting a college scholarship. If you are great at Geometry, Physics, or Underwater Basket-weaving, there probably is a demand for your help as a tutor. Try advertising your services on Craigslist. And to make it even more 21st century, try tutoring via Skype.

6. Create Myspace backgrounds

When you hear about a pre-teen making more money than his parents creating Myspace backgrounds, you know that times have changed. If you know how to use Photoshop or Gimp and have a little creativity you can create a product that people will want. Throw up a website with a Paypal "Buy it Now" link and you will be off and running. Bonus: creating Twitter backgrounds is in fashion, as well.

7. Design web logos

Taking the whole graphic design thing one step further, you could create logos for blogs and other websites. There are a gazillion blogs out there that would pay $25-$100 for a logo.

8. Create websites

Even though we are well into the "Internet Age" there is still a tremendous demand for affordable web developers. There are still tons of mom-and-pop shops that either don't have a website and want one, or haven't updated it since 2002 and want to. It seems like I hear the same story every few weeks: The small business owner wants a website, but can't afford to pay thousands of dollars for it. Many of these business owners would be thrilled to pay $500 for a Wordpress site with a pretty theme. Sounds like a great business opportunity to me! (Over the last year blogging has become my primary source of income — which is nice after getting laid off last year! It is anything but a get-rich-quick scheme, and I like to call it a work-for-free-for-a-long-time-and-then-reap-your-reward program, but there is money to be made. I wrote extensively about how to make money from a blog a few months ago on my blog.)

9. Sell widgets on Etsy

If you are crafty and need a bigger market than your freshman lunchroom, you can sell your goodies on Etsy. They are a website designed specifically to buy and sell handmade items.

10. Become a freelance writer and sell articles

Check out Upwork and find thousands of people willing to pay for your writing skills. There is pretty good money to be made for good writers. But even if you are mediocre, as long as you can write a coherent sentence you should be able to find plenty of work. If you prefer to sell your articles individually, you can visit sites like Constant-Content, ArticleSale, Helium.

Guest Post Blurb:

This guest post is by Bob of ChristianPF.com, a website that approaches financial topics using timeless Biblical principles.

Links to more articles from ChristianPF.com:

This article is from Bob Lotich of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

The Key To Making Money Online? Diversification, Baby!

Kate Luther — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 05:41:02 +0000

Most of us are familiar with the term "diversification". Its what the well-respected analysts tell us to do with our investment portfolios to insure against the ups and downs of the market.

But why stop there?

Just as diversification can help balance your investments, it can also help balance your income. And for those of you hoping to make a living online, balance is definitely key.

What it is

When you diversify your portfolio, you put a little into stocks, a little into mutual funds and maybe a little into bonds. You might also break that down even further, by splitting your stock investments between small cap, large cap and a few international picks.

The idea behind spreading out your investments is that if those tech stocks you bought begin to tank, your other investments will hopefully keep your entire portfolio from bottoming out.

The same is true with your cash flow.

If your primary income is generated by a traditional nine-to-five job, that's like investing everything you have in that "sure thing" stock. Companies downsize, people get fired... it just happens. And if it happens to you, you'll be in a bind to find another nine-to-five gig quickly before your savings runs out.

And if you're making your money online, this is even more true.

How it works

When I first started freelancing online, I set up my website and bought a membership with Upwork. In all honesty, these two simple things have generated a pretty decent income.

But... there are times when business seems too slow. Maybe people don't need any new copywriting done, maybe their cash flow is tight that particular month or maybe, just maybe my competition beat me out on a particular gig. It happens.

*Sigh* what to do... what to do?

Well, I could sit and wait for the money to start rolling in again but I don't think my mortgage company and credit card people would be happy with that solution. I could take on a part-time job to fill in the gaps but then what happens when the gigs start rolling in again?

The solution is diversification and here's how it works:

In addition to my freelance writing biz, I also have a couple of different blogs that I own, each utilizing a number of different advertising strategies from Adsense to affiliate programs to selling space directly to advertisers.

I've also written a couple of e-books (with more on the way) that I sell through e-junkie for a mere $5 bucks per month. The Working Girls Guide to Financial Freedom sells for $14.95 and the Casting Some Link Bait e-book is just $8 bucks. Not a huge profit by any means but multiply those amounts by even 100 buyers and you can quickly see the point of my efforts.

Can I stop there?

Not hardly. I've also recently set up a Cafe Press shop . Granted I've only got four products featuring two designs but hey... its a start and as I continue to add inventory and promote the shop, who knows?

I also write for About.com which is a regular paying gig, based on page views. So, even if my freelance clients aren't buying up new services, my About money is still coming in.

Other ideas for diversification?

Do you like to build birdhouses or make soaps or something similarly craftsy? You could set up an eBay store and sell your wares.

Don't have your own creations to sell? How about dropshipping items for other companies? New Age Reseller has a great guide that includes hundreds of new age companies looking for people to dropship their products. And if you're not into candles, incense and yoga videos, just do a search for dropshipping in your favorite search engine. There's plenty out there to choose from.

Take affiliate programs for some of the bigger companies one step further and create a mini-site devoted strictly to promoting their product. Clickinsure has a good one as does Net Zero , The Company Corporation, DentalPlans.com and US Search.

Like to write? In addition to the ideas mentioned above, you can also get paid to write reviews. Sites like ReviewMe , PayPerPost and Blogitive will pay you a set price to review products and services on your blog. That means extra content for your site plus a little extra cash for your efforts.

And let's not forget about donations. Yes, donations. Create really good content and people don't mind paying you for your time. PayPal has a really easy donation button that you can implement on your blog, making receiving those donations a snap.

Enjoy giving your opinion? Then turn that into some green by taking surveys. Paul Michael has a great article on what to look for when searching for reputable survey companies.

The point is that there is more than one way to generate an online income so why limit yourself to just one? And if you are still relying on a nine-to-five to pay your bills? Well, there's no reason you can't implement some of these ideas too. Who knows? You might just create a new source of income that allows you to create your own reality.

This article is from Kate Luther of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread: