Become an eBay seller. eBay is a fantastic resource, it means all you have to do is find stock to sell and put it up for auction, there’s no need to promote any website or business to get sales eBay does all that for you. You could make a habit of looking for flee markets, garage sales, closing down sales in order to get stock to sell for a profit. Or if you really wanted to be a professional trader, you could seek out manufacturers and set up a trade account with them. That means you’d buy their products in bulk (usually you can start as low as 50 or 100 units) at a 50% discount on what they retail for in the shops. The obvious drawback is that you’ll have to have quite a bit of paperwork to set your business up in that industry, manufacturers don’t just sell to the general public. Just make sure you research your market well, make sure the products you’re buying are already being bought on eBay by other people.
Start your own book club. This is a good business if you live in a rural area, as people don’t want to travel a long distance into a city in order to buy a new book alone, they’d rather just put it off until they need several things. These customers will also buy books 2-5 at a time from book clubs to make savings and enjoy quick delivery. You’ll need to purchase at least 100 books to start this business, make them all known best sellers and it’s up to you if you want to focus on a specific genre (“Dave’s Horror Book club”) or have several different ones. You can travel to the city and visit used book stores, be sure only to buy books that look as good as new, use online auctions like eBay, or online bookstores like Amazon, or even buy books from other book clubs you are a member of. Once you’ve got your stock you’ll need to write and print up a book club brochure, use cheap online printing services to do this. Advertise your book club in the local papers, on shop windows, at the small local library, hand out single page leaflets door to door etc. Don’t waste your time and money sending your brochures to just anyone on the street only respond to people who are interested. You could also include adverts from local businesses in your brochures to make some extra cash.
Are you funny and artistic? Then why not design some bumper stickers or t-shirts or hats with jokes or one-liners on them. You can easily sell these things at car boot sales, on eBay, on websites and best of all at any town centre. Just make sure you’ve got a street vendors licence if applicable (in some states in America all you need is to do is quote freedom of speech as long as you’re selling your own words). There’s plenty of examples of major successful products like these out there – that “Hang on in there” poster with the kitten, The “Shit happens” bumper sticker, even the “I’m with stupid à” t shirt. All you need to get started is your own joke or concept (don’t plagiarize!) and then use one of the many cheap online printers to produce t-shirts or hats etc with it on. If you’re a bit scared to try this at first then you can always do it for charity, giving all profits to a specified charity to show you’ve got the nerve to do this work.
Work for charities. This may sound silly, as charities are not for profit organisations! However, they’ve become more like businesses recently in order to raise as much cash as they can for their cause. Sure they can still have people working for nothing with collection boxes and make £100,000 a year to help cure cancer, or they can hire professionals and pay them wages, and put the profit towards the charity. They usually hire telemarketers, leaflet printing and distribution firms, street survey marketers etc. But what most people don’t know is that if you have a product and go to the charity and say “I’d like to put your name to this, in exchange you’ll get 40% of the profits” they’ll take you up on your offer! That’s great for selling Christmas gifts and wreaths door to door, basically seasonal items. And it’s for a good cause.