Make & Sell Handcrafts & Natural Products
Make and Sell
Making, Finding or Creating Items to Sell on the Internet
Make & Sell has been the goal of every stay at home mom, ambitious teenager, & crafter in this country and the world. Some have been successful, but many are never able to earn decent money for their work.
Nowdays it has never been easier to find places to sell your products, but since that is true for everyone, the competation has never been as fierce either.
Ebay is the obvious new market for craft items and I have written extensively about selling on Ebay at www.About-Auctions.com. If you are thinking of selling on Ebay I am sure you would learn from visit there.
Make and Sell is a domain I acquired with the thought of writing more about the process of making and preparing to sell hand crafted items. However, I think that is more restrictive than it should be. From looking at the search terms used to find this site it has become obvious that more people than I realized are looking for ways to make money online.
Now, I am not an internet marketer and I don't have an ebook or to sell you. However, I have researched a lot of ideas for things to sell online and some of them my be interesting and work for you.
My ideas include:
- Ways for children and teens to earn spending money by adding value to free or inexpensive items. For example, Pine Needle Baskets are a folk art form that is still popular. However, unless you live in the Southeastern part of the USA you can't find the 12" long pine needles you need. I have have seen a pound of clean, dried long pine needles sell for $16 on Ebay. I recently did a search for "Used toys" as part of my research for Toy Harvest and discovered there is an active market for used tennis balls. There were several auctions for lots of about 100 tennis balls with active bidding in the $20 range. If you look around, you may be able to find free materials that grow where you live that have value to someone in a different part of the country.
- Profiting from organizational and marketing skills. Do you sometimes get frustrated that your Lego, Star Wars, or other toys have lost one or two pieces? You can buy boxes of toy pieces on Ebay for very little money. If your kids have been playing with toys like this they can probably go through a random assortment and quickly identify which sets the parts belong to. I think these individual toy pieces would sell for good money to a person in need of replacement toy pieces.
- Technology based opportunities created by the falling cost for high tech equipment such as a color laser printer and the demand for less expensive products which can be made with it. The text below discusses some of these ideas.
- Profiting from a hobby. Do you have a woodworking hobby with products you should sell so you can recover your cost of materials? Homes for the Birds is a website currently showing all the bird houses for sale on Ebay. I think someone who builds these for a hobby could set up a small site with their own bird houses for sale and use occasional sales on Ebay to drive traffic to the site. The Ebay sales probably won't produce much profit because the competition is so intense, but it's a great place to show off your work and help people find you. Then you have a chance to sell them more profitable items directly from your website. Unique carvings would be a possible nich for someone who knows or wants to learn woodcarving.
- Sleepers is the term for valuable items sold by a clueless seller. Lots of people who are knowledgeable about a subject are able to buy sleepers cheap and sell high when they write educated and informed auction descriptions. Navajo jewelry looks to be such a category on Ebay. The listings are filled with items from sellers who obviously have no idea of what they have. Of course, many think they have the treasure of the ages, but I think opportunity lurks in all those listings. Japanese wood block prints are another area.
- Websites: There are thousands of potential customers just waking up to the fact their business needs a website. I already see people selling turnkey sites where they register a domain and install a cheap or free script and sell it. The problem with these sites is there are hundreds of others running the same script so it is hard to get traffic and make any money. My approach is to buy domians I think will work well, put up my own content, add a few links, and get the site indexed by the search engines and perhaps even making enough money to pay for itself. I list these site, many of which are for sale, at my Idea Store. The needs of many customers are very simple and they would be happy with a site built by a beginner. I suggest starting by looking at the business cards handed out by building contractors. Many have yet to understand how much value there is in a site that shows before and after pictures of their completed projects.
- Minisites Websites don't have to be large or complex to generate a side income. Anyone with some interesting life experince can probably publish a mini site that will earn a small income. In fact, the tools for doing this have gotten much better. They are easier to learn, more powerful, and build nice looking sites. Domainers, people who speculate in domain names, are activily building minisites to help pay the renewal fees.
- Crafts are a very competative area, but many people make a nice side income from them. I think you have to work hard to develop the skill to make somthing well which can not be purchased everywhere. Candles are a possible craft that can be made, marketed, and sold from home. Sterling silver spoon rings , especially those made from antique spoons, sell well on Ebay. I think a budding silversmith could polish their skills buying old spoons, turning them into rings, and selling.
- Wood based craft items. Wall crosses can be made from any local (free) wood with some grain that will take a stain.
About a year ago I had a little extra money and saw an HP color laser printer on sale for about $400.00. It is hard to make and sell something using a technology with which you are not intimately familier, so I decided to buy the printer and see if I could use it to make products I could sell. Not surprisingly, I learned it is harder than it looks, and is probably not for me. I think it might work really well for someone with more artistic interests who really takes pride in printing beautiful things that are perfectly done.
The competation on Ebay is cutthroat so to make money you need to offer something which can't be easily found elsewhere. To me that suggested I needed to be able to print on unusual "paper". I checked out the local office supply places, and while they had lots of different papers, most things I printed looked pretty much the same. Then i found an online company called Ripped Sheets that sell a LOT of different substrates which will work in a laser printer. They also do diecut work so you can get sheets with your custom labels already precut. They were very willing to send samples and I recommend them.
By looking through Ripped Sheets inventory I couild see what they sell and research the terms/products they offer. I discovered that label printing is a much bigger business than I realized. I am familiar with address lables, but I had not thought about oil change labels, plants labels, etc. When I did my keyword research I found that some of the label terms get a lot of searches.
Since I am interested in building online business I always look for and register domain names related to the business idea early in the process. I end up letting many of them expire when the idea doesn't work out, but it seems like cheap insurance to make sure that if it does look like a business I should get into I have the domains I need. I have built an online marketing website which I use to keep track of my sites, their stage of development and my plans for each domain.
Questions or Comments about these ideas are welcome.. You can contact me about them at paul at y6b dot com
Listed below are current auctions for "Make and Sell" items. Clicking one of the links will take you directly to that auction. Be careful though; it's not as easy as many make it sound.
