Category Archives: Make Money

How to Start a Side Business Today: Simplify and Go!

Make Money, Self-Employed

Too much planning is the enemy of action.You know how you get an idea and start planning away, and pretty soon you have a to-do list that’s a mile long? One that seems to mysteriously sprout additional items every time you glance at it?

Well, I think sometimes we make things needlessly complicated. Take starting a side business, for example.

Ask someone how to start a small business, and they’ll probably tell you to start by writing a business plan. So you look up how to do that on Google, and get directed to a 38-slide presentation with many steps and business-y sounding phases like “Company Vision” and “Market Analysis Summary”.

It seems overwhelming, and if you actually do it (which I’ve done before) you’ll find that it’s a whole lot of work. You can spend weeks (or even months!) writing a good business plan. Or a few very long days, if you’re particularly industrious and don’t much need sleep. » Read more

Selling on Amazon FBA: My Personal Experience

Make Money

This post is from reader Jon of Money Smart Guides, a personal finance blog that helps readers get out of debt and start investing for their future. He provides actionable advice to get you to where you want to be financially.

My experience

I enjoyed reading through Jackie’s Amazon selling experiment (parts one, two, three and four) and thought it would be helpful to share my own tips, tricks, successes and failures with selling on Amazon.

What makes me qualified to talk about selling on Amazon? I’ve been doing it for almost 2 years now to make extra cash. On average, I earn about 20% return on my money. While this is great, it did take me some time to get a handle on selling on Amazon. You can see a snapshot of my sales in the picture below:

Snapshot of my Amazon FBA sales from selling on Amazon
» Read more

Find Your Money-Making “Something”

Make Money

When it comes to being successful and making more money, sometimes it’s hard to know exactly where to start.

Questions to ask when stumped for money-making ideasWhat if you don’t know what you’re good at, or are stumped for ideas? You know you want to do “something”, but aren’t sure what would be a good fit for you.

Here are five questions that can help you figure out your money-making something.

1. What do you like to do in your free time during the week?

Is that something you’d enjoy getting paid for? For example, maybe you’re a huge fan of a certain TV show, and you watch it all the time. There are people who make money from blogs and podcasts relating to TV shows. Heck, there’s Felicia Day, who makes money due to her love of gaming. » Read more

The FBA Experiment (Part 4)

Make Money

The Fulfillment-by-Amazon Experiment, Part 4I wrote about my experience trying out Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) as a seller in parts one, two, and three of the FBA Experiment.

In this post, I’ll tell you about my results and what I thought of the experience. First let’s go into my reasons for giving it a try, since they definitely color my opinion.

Why Amazon FBA?

I wanted to experiment with retail arbitrage for a couple of reasons. First, I’d bought and resold items at a profit before on a very small scale. (First using — gasp — the newspaper, and later using Craigslist and eBay.) I’d resold airline tickets (back before the days of 9/11), books, random antiques and collectibles, and musical instruments. I enjoy coming across a screaming deal and reselling at a profit. It’s fun.

My husband and I had also been looking for something that we might be able to do together to make extra money. He’s happy to input things into the computer, and probably wouldn’t mind packing stuff up. I enjoy shopping, so thought maybe the combination of things would work out well. » Read more

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