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The Ultimate Dropshipping Report by Avril Harper
The Ultimate Guide to Becoming an eBay Trading Assistant by Avril Harper
by Avril Harper
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"Three Hundred Income Streams and Growing!" © Avril Harper, Chartered CMIPD, Dip PM
An email arrived today, saying much the same thing as hundreds of similar missives before it! The story goes …..
“….. it’s okay for you, you know what to sell, you have hundreds of different products listed on eBay, you write eBooks and content for websites, you know dozens of different ways to make money ….. and all I want is one good idea to make my living online ….. and I haven’t a clue how to find it!”
Oh Shame!
But not ‘Oh Shame’ because today’s moaner and many others like her are short of ideas for making money, but shame because she thinks people like me who make their entire living online have a magic amulet that sends money making ideas flooding into our lives every day of every week!
Believe me it doesn’t happen like that, and yes, I do have hundreds of different income streams making money for me week by week, month by month, year by year. More than this, I have a great many more proven and very profitable ideas than I will ever find time to use myself.
But that doesn’t mean those opportunities came to me out of thin air, it does not mean I did not spend hours looking for and testing new ideas to ensure their viability before wasting more time and effort, also money on integrating them into my working day.
The fact is I spend just as long searching for new business ideas - that’s usually new products to sell on eBay - than most people spend in their boring old jobs every day. And I’m certain my willingness to spend several hours researching and testing and sometimes discarding ideas that prove unworkable is what sets me apart from others who wait years for their ship to come in and find it never does.
The reality is, if you want to make money online, on eBay or Amazon, for example, or in hundreds of very different ways, you have to put time and effort into researching and testing various product and business ideas. And you must never give up looking for the next perfect business opportunity.
The reason researching new business opportunities should be a daily task is to alleviate the possibility of all your income streams drying up and leaving you without income. It’s the old ‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket’ philosophy and it’s the reason most successful business men and women adopt a portfolio approach to business. For some people that portfolio covers two or three businesses, for others it’s ten or twenty, for people like me our portfolios are ram jam full of money making options.
This portfolio approach should be wide enough to allow a couple of income streams to disappear without you feeling the pinch, and flexible enough for you to regularly add new income streams and remove any on the decline.
So how do you do it? Well you start by taking four sheets of plain paper, A4 size, then tape them together so you have a sheet roughly 24 inches by 16 inches. On the tape free side you draw lines horizontally and vertically across the four-page sheet until you have fifty to one hundred empty boxes. If you’re ambitious go for one hundred boxes, if you’re sceptical go for less, but never fewer than ten.
Now you go research online, looking for ideas that are making money for other people and which you think might also work well for you. When you find one, add the idea to one of your blank boxes along with your role model’s eBay ID or Amazon name, website address or other distinguishing feature. Now go research the idea further, by studying your role model’s product, for example, and how many units they sell each week, at what likely profit margin.
Then look for similar products for you to buy to resell, preferably better quality than your role model is selling. Study additional people selling similar products (or operating similar business ideas) and make notes of unique features of their approach that could add significantly to your potential profits or reduce competition against you.
As you see you’re looking for ways to turn another person’s seemingly ‘perfect’ business (or product) into something unique to your business portfolio.
It does take time, and it doesn’t always work, but when it works you have the seed of an idea that could make a fortune for you! So you plant the seed and watch it grow, then cull or nurture it according to whether it proves a drain on your resources or a major profit maker for you. And all the while you’re looking for new business ideas to add to the other ninety nine boxes on that taped sheet I told you about earlier.
Here’s what I’ve written in my blank boxes this morning:
* Miniature dolls’ house accessories, made from polymer clay, and frequently selling on eBay at one hundred pounds a square inch. Yes really, there are tiny hand made models fetching one hundred pounds plus and probably taking less than a few hours each to create. So does that mean I’m swapping keyboard for craftwork knife to make these miniature marvels myself? Not on your life, hence the reason, alongside the IDs of eBayers selling tiny models on eBay there’s a note saying ‘get someone to make them by visiting craft fairs in Durham next month’. You get the picture I’m sure.
* Sell autograph and image ensembles of well known historical figures on Amazon, eBay, Etsy and numerous other sites. I’ll start by looking for ‘clipped’ autographs at local auction salerooms. These are usually signatures with just a tiny bit of border around them so they’re not very attractive as such, and not very appealing ‘as is’ to collectors. They’re called ‘clipped’ because they’ve usually been clipped from letters and autograph albums and other vintage documents. Once framed and with a tiny image of the writer these tiny scraps of paper, costing just a pound or two apiece at auction salerooms, boot sales and flea markets, can fetch fifty or sixty pounds each on Amazon and eBay. Where to get the images without falling foul of copyright laws? From the public domain of course! Then when I find those illustrations from a Google search - key the subject’s name into the search box at google.com then hit on ‘Images’ top of the screen - I choose any from original sources and in the public domain. Finally I print the images and add them to an autograph mount, available in bulk on eBay, with image showing through the larger aperture and the signature in the smaller one.
* Look for wholesalers of wall decals - they’re stickers that cling to most walls and surfaces - and they’re fetching double figure sales daily for some lucky sellers on eBay. The most popular designs are butterflies and dogs with art nouveau borders, they sell at twenty pounds plus per transfer, and that’s why I’m searching alibaba.com today for something similar for my own eBay business.
* Write twenty to fifty articles, using private label rights articles to save time having to research the facts in my articles for myself. Then I’ll add my own articles to a Squidoo Lens and aim to sell it for a few hundred pounds - or dollars, or other country currency - or even more. The reason for using plr articles as the foundation of my own unique articles is purely to save time, because researching facts is the most time consuming element of writing. Once the research is done, by someone else, all I do is rewrite the text into my own unique style, and the articles are exclusively mine. So in the time it takes to research and write twenty articles from scratch, about two days for research and another day for writing, I can create three times as many articles using private label rights. And that means I can create and sell a Squidoo lens every few days, compared to a handful each month where I create my articles in their entirety. And yes, you are allowed to sell Squidoo Lenses, they can fetch several hundred pounds each as you’ll discover at:
http://www.squidoo.com/sellmylens
All articles are provided in good faith and are researched and written to the best of our abilities. However, readers should always do their own due diligence before investing in any business opportunity, and they should be aware that many article writers and web masters, including ourselves, frequently receive a commission for selling other people's products. We pride ourselves on always choosing the very best products to recommend to our readers and we only recommend products offering a solid money back guarantee.
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Make Money Tearing Up Old Books and Magazines and Selling Them on eBay by Avril Harper
Bank Big Profits Selling Vintage Topographical Postcards on eBay by Avril Harper
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