Business Opportunities Weblog

A Low Risk Way to Learn How to Make Money

By on March 8, 2011 in Ideas

Photo by Bill Gracey

37 Signals’ Jason Fried offers some great advice on how to learn how to sell something (online):

So here’s a great way to practice making money: Buy and sell the same thing over and over on Craigslist or eBay. Seriously.
Go buy something on Craigslist or eBay. Find something that’s a bit of a commodity, so you know there’s always plenty of supply and demand. An iPod is a good test. Buy it, and then immediately resell it. Then buy it again. Each time, try selling it for more than you paid for it. See how far you can push it. See how much profit you can make off 10 transactions.

Start tweaking the headline. Then start fiddling with the product description. Vary the photographs. Take some pictures of the thing for sale; use other photos with other items, or people, in them. Shoot really high-quality shots, and also post crappy ones from your cell-phone camera. Try every variation you can think of.

I love doing this, because there’s no real risk involved. If you already have a business, you don’t need to dream up a new product line or rock the boat with crazy experiments. If you don’t have a business, it’s a perfect way to work on your chops.

Photo by Bill Gracey.

ecommerce selling

Business Opportunities Weblog editor and publisher Dane Carlson lives in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, just 15 miles from Yosemite National Park. He accidentally became a professional blogger in 2001. He has added 12,208 posts to the site.

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  • http://www.dog-crate-shop.com Donna White

    Now this is a great idea. If you get the urge to try and sell items online, this would be the perfect practice lesson. Most of us just want to dive in and sell tons of things all at once, hoping to make a decent profit. It really does pay off if you go slow like a turtle and experiment to know what works, than run like a rabbit and hope all works out the way you want, not having a clue why it is or isn’t working.

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