How to Sell Collectable Stamps and Postmarks on eBay

Learn More About Selling Collectable Stamps and Postmarks on eBay, by Avril Harper, HERE

Ideas

#1.  Buy albums containing stamps from all over the world.  Split into country lots and sell to people collecting just one country stamps. 

Another idea: buy themed stamp collections, such as all dogs, all trains, all space travel.  Some themed stamp albums contain thousands of stamps.  All you do is split contents into same breed of dog, same country trains, all roses, all famous people, and so on.  Then you sell in lots of ten to twenty stamps on eBay.

#2.  Break pre-1900 atlases into separate maps to sell individually.  Use maps with plain backs; buyers don’t like double-sided pages.  Remove problem areas round corners and margins and mount whatever is left of a damaged map.  Old maps can also be used in jewellery and altered art products.

#3. Look for collections of multi-country view postcards.  Split into countries and sell cards separately to one country buyers.  Or buy one country collections to split and sell as individual states and counties.  Any that don’t sell can be bundled into one country/county/state lots and auctioned with a low starting price.

More to Come

Who Fancies a Sex Change on eBay?

LEARN MORE ABOUT SELLING STAMPS AND POSTMARKS ON EBAY HERE

A group of Israeli researchers tested buyer attitudes on eBay and discovered that women sellers tend to receive lower prices and fewer sales than men selling the same and similar products. The team tested their result over various different products and age groups and reached roughly the same conclusion.  

There were some minor variations, however, one being that buyers tend to trust women more than men to accurately describe quality and condition of used goods.  But for new goods, male sellers came out tops in most situations where seller gender is known.

The obvious exception is where prospective buyers don’t know and can’t easily determine whether a seller is male or female. 

Like most high level research, the Israelis’ report extended to numerous pages of statistical jargon most of us don’t need to know about anyway. 

But we can all benefit from knowing how to use the research to our advantage.  One way is for female sellers to avoid using predominantly female names in eBay ID and eBay shop names.  So instead of ‘Avril’s Collectibles’, I should fare better calling my eBay shop ‘Collectors’ Emporium’ or ‘Harper’s Shop’ (very rough and hopefully fictitious).  And we girls would probably be better off not mentioning gender or first names in our listings and messages.

You boys have no such problem, although you might like to consider a name change if you’re selling mainly used items.

You may think I’m over-reacting but I personally agree one hundred per cent with the Israeli team, based among other things on something a local flea market stallholder said last weekend when I complained about having encountered two really difficult buyers in just as many days.  He said, and he meant it: “It’s because you’re a woman and they think they can run rings around you.” 

Next day I used my husband’s name to reply to both problem customers, saying Avril was away on business and he was in charge.  Did I just imagine both people becoming more polite and less hostile?   

I don’t think so and that’s why I’ll be letting an imaginary male colleague tackle badly behaved buyers in future.

In Praise of Auction Selling on eBay

I’ve always liked auction selling, more so than listing products fixed price and there are several reasons why. 

For one thing, auction is a great way to determine the value of an item you haven’t sold before and which no one else has offered recently on eBay.  That being the case you can’t do an advanced search for recent listings for similar items to see how much they fetched.  So you run an auction and let bidders say how much your product is worth. 

Another good use of auctions is to generate a bidding frenzy between two or more people placing bids much higher than they originally intended, not merely to win the product but to stop someone else having it.  Yes, it does happen, and no, I don’t know why.

Then there’s a reason that has more to do with fast turnover of goods and never having to pre-test or guess selling prices or dispose of stock at a loss.  This technique works contrary to the way most sellers source and list products on eBay, typically by buying in bulk at wholesale discounts and using a fixed price multiple product eBay listing.  Some sellers do but most sellers don’t test prices by performing several different priced offers before running long-term promotions.  And that sometimes means sellers lose out on potentially higher prices and bigger profit margins for their products.

The better way is to obtain one unit of product, on the high street if necessary, then you run an auction with a starting price matching the lowest profit you need to make after all acquisition and selling costs.  Run a ten day auction to optimise viewer and bidder numbers. 

One of three main things will happen:

(i)  No one bids and the product goes unsold.  You can check your listings for mistakes and oversights which when corrected might generate bids and sales.  If none exist you will probably drop the product and use it yourself or sell it off at a loss.

(ii)  Only one person bids and you make a tiny profit, suggesting the product is unlikely to be a regular seller. You’ll probably do another few test runs just to be sure.

(iii)  Lots of bids ensue, some much higher than your minimum acceptable profit price.  So you send the first product to your winning bidder and you submit Second Chance Offers to some or all unsuccessful bidders whose bid achieves your minimum acceptable profit.  When Second Chance Offers are accepted you obtain sufficient stock to fulfil orders, plus another couple of units to relist the product on eBay.  Use the same starting price as before and see how many bidders emerge and how far prices go.  As before, fulfil your winning bidder’s order and submit Second Chance Offers.  Rinse and repeat one more time.

After the third auction you’ll have a good idea if your product is a likely long-term regular seller, as well as knowing what the majority of people are prepared to pay for it and what level of inventory to carry without overstocking or running out of product and delaying delivery. 

From thereon you can use multiple product fixed price listings based on the optimum price from your combined auction listings, both cutting your eBay listing fees and allowing your listings to develop a sales history to help them rank higher in eBay search returns.

Learn more about Second Chance Offers at:

http://ocsnext.ebay.co.uk/ocs/sc

Anti-Virus Software and a Major Problem to Guard Against

Today I want to reveal problems I experienced this week that were entirely avoidable and I don’t ever want you to encounter anything similar. 

Let me begin by updating you on that computer I ordered a few weeks ago, the one a very well-known courier company said they had delivered but in fact they hadn’t.  The computer did actually turn up, a week later than expected and via an altogether different carrier and the packaging was in terrible condition.

But worse was still to come and it gave me two sleepless nights and panic attacks for several days.

In a nutshell, what happened was this: as I was installing anti-virus software and Microsoft updates on the new computer, I very stupidly did something I have many times told my readers never to do.  I downloaded what I thought was a genuine programme, in this case Google Chrome, then I began using the computer.

Within minutes and going on for several days there were advertisements popping up all over the screen; I turned a blind eye to them all, believing my anti-virus software would eliminate all possible threats.

Then my husband began using the computer and said ‘What’s that ‘b’ in the middle of Google Chrome’s logo down there?’

And that is when the penny dropped and I realised I had innocently downloaded what is called ‘malware’, a very intrusive programme that can destroy files and steal essential personal data, like financial and personal details, also eBay and PayPal and other website passwords.

I looked into my programmes folder and found more than twelve malware programmes, including one called ‘BoBrowser’, the one using a logo that resembles Google Chrome, with just a few tiny exceptions, including that ‘b’ at its centre.

My husband and I spent hours trying to remove those programmes but the faster we removed them, the more appeared in their place.  Eventually, with more than two hundred suspicious programmes in the system, I turned off the computer and looked for expert help.

Why didn’t my anti-virus software detect the problem and prevent me from downloading the rogue ‘Chrome’ programme?  It’s because malware isn’t always infected, as such, just majorly disruptive and potentially very damaging, and that is why many anti-virus programmes will find and remove viruses but not always malware. 

The long nightmare ended for me using a free malware detection and exclusion programme from https://www.malwarebytes.org. 

The free trial takes just minutes to remove all malware programmes and the paid for version will keep your computer malware free.  It cost me £20 to activate my free download and clean up my wonderful new computer and I can honestly say it’s one of the best investments I have ever made.

Please go do the same.

How to Sell Your eBay Goods Way Above What Any Sane Person is Willing to Pay

I’m going to tell you now about people who will pay way over the odds for something you are selling, just to make sure they get their hands on that item and stop someone else buying it instead

As an eBay seller that sort of thing happens to me every day, and once you’ve finished reading this article, you’ll be no stranger to receiving top whack prices for items you purchase for pennies or low pounds at boot sales and flea markets.

Before I reveal how to make this idea work for you, let me tell you about something that happened to me more than forty years ago and which I have regretted every day since.

It happened at the Ramside Hall Hotel in Durham City, at a flea market where a dealer had a massive selection of vintage topographical postcards from my own collecting area, namely towns and villages close to Peterlee where I lived at the time.

I had twenty or thirty pounds in my purse, enough then to buy a fistful of average price postcards.  I bought what I wanted and was about to leave for home with enough money left to pay the rent for the week ahead.

And that is when I spotted two identical real photographic postcards depicting the interior of a long gone railway station in a nearby village.  I had been looking for this view for years!

I had enough money to buy one of the cards, but if I bought the card I would not be able to pay the rent.  What should I do?

Well, I’m not one for avoiding my debts, and there was a second card available, so I asked the stallholder where he would be the following week.  Then I set off for home, confidently expecting to see at least one of the cards at next week’s flea market.

But, I never saw those cards again, not at the following week’s flea market, not on eBay, not anywhere else!

And that is why, faced with potentially losing an item I really want to own, I will jump at the chance to buy it in future.  And I will hand over my money right away.  On eBay, that means hitting the ‘Buy It Now’ button faster than you can say “Give the rent a miss this week!”

And my experience is mirrored by other collectors desperate to own a particular item and willing to pay ten or more times what the item is really worth. 

For obvious reasons, this idea works with unusual or unique items, like antiques, art and collectibles, but not for mass market products available aplenty on eBay.

You can locate suitable high profit items by researching eBay daily to find recently completed auction listings for art, antiques and collectibles.  Auctions represent the very highest finishing prices and sometimes dozens of bidders. 

All you have to do is jot down the highest prices paid for items with the highest bidder numbers.  Then you go looking for similar items at boot sales and flea markets and priced less than half the amount paid for those items recently on eBay. 

You get the item home, recheck its potential on eBay, then list it in your eBay shop with a price at least twenty-five per cent higher than the recent highest finishing price for a similar item on eBay.  Use a fixed price listing and add ‘Buy It Now’ and ‘Best Offer’ to the mix, then wait.

Within days you’ll begin receiving ‘Best Offers’, some derisory, some pretty close to what you will eventually get.  Be courageous and refuse all early offers less than ten per cent below your own fixed price.  Do so for two or three weeks because there’s always someone willing to pay a silly price for something they can’t live without.  If your item remains unsold after three weeks, accept the first offer exceeding the highest recent finishing price for a similar item.

Tipping the Scales in 2016 and Beyond

January is never a very profitable month for me on eBay, mainly because antiques and collectibles auctions are few and far between from November to early spring, and that’s when I tend to spend less time looking for products to sell and more time looking for ways to improve my earnings on eBay. 

Today’s eLetter gives you the benefit of my findings to help grow your own profits this year on eBay. 

In no particular order:

* At a flea market last week an old selling friend told me ‘You don’t make money when you sell, you make money when you buy.’ 

He means, of course, that simply spending the majority of your time listing stuff on eBay isn’t the most important part of the money-making process, especially if like many people you buy products you think might make money when you really should focus on buying items you know will make a healthy profit. 

My friend explained it like this:

Visiting dealers at flea markets go from stall to stall, picking up anything and everything going cheap on the day and from which they expect to make a few pounds profit on eBay.  ‘People like you.’ he said, pointing to me. 

And he’s right, I do sometimes leave a fair with four or five plastic carrier bags filled with hundreds of different items, mainly postcards and ephemera, few of which have more than a passing chance of making a couple of pounds over what I paid for them. 

My friend on the other hand leaves each fair with a couple of items wrapped up in newspaper and shoved into his jacket pockets. 

My friend is selective in his buying habits and rarely buys anything offering less than fifty pounds pure profit.  He does it by inspecting just a few products at flea markets and other buying locations, like auctions and antique shops, and he selects between ten and twenty items to research for profit potential. 

My friend makes notes or takes photographs of items he wants to research and then goes to a coffee shop where he uses his mobile phone to research prices paid recently for similar items on eBay.  When there’s a clear profit to be had he makes a purchase. 

I tried following his lead at the same flea market in Gateshead Stadium.  In my case I studied and made notes about thirty or so real photographic topographical postcards - among the highest priced collectable items on eBay - and then I studied recent sales for similar items.  Ten items promised profits of ten pounds each or more and the other twenty or so would just about recoup their investment.  I bought those ten items and ignored the rest.

This same idea of buying only when you’ve researched an item’s potential resale value on eBay can be applied to virtually any product.  Go and give it a try.

* Aside from only buying products I know will make money, I’ve decided to focus more on repeat sale items than one-off affairs.  So instead of buying, say, an antique print likely to make ten or twenty pounds profit on eBay, I’m looking for original artwork since passed into the public domain, allowing me to copy those designs and sell them hundreds of times as prints and other decorative pieces. 

I might get to pay fifty pounds for my painting or other original artwork but by choosing carefully I can earn ten or twenty pounds and maybe more from reprints.  As long as the subject of the original piece appeals to a potentially unlimited audience I can sell copies indefinitely.  That potentially unlimited audience covers people interested in iconic artists like Rembrandt and Louis Wain and collectable subjects like dogs and transportation.

Other repeat sale items guaranteed to make money over the indefinite future include greetings cards (just one design can generate a full time living spread across marketplaces other than eBay, such as Amazon and Etsy); wedding favours (there’s a bottle opener reproduced from an antique key design that’s selling several times every day as a gift for male attendants at the wedding); reproduction vintage photographs (especially topographical images, such as street scenes, which I’ve personally sold in abundance), and numerous other products alongside. 

Find repeat sale products at www.goofbid.com.  Choose ‘eBay Tools’ top of the screen, then ‘eBay Most Popular Tool’ bottom right of the dropdown menu.  Next page enter a product type into the search box and GoofBid will return listings for items achieving multiple sales, sometimes thousands of sales over a couple of months.

Use some of those listings to create your own unique products based on other people’s best-selling designs but make yours better and more appealing.

*    I make a lot of my own products, things like jewellery and keyrings featuring various dog breeds, and they always sell and make a decent profit.  But twenty items is my maximum output each day and that doesn’t take into account describing and listing those items on eBay or packing and delivering them to buyers. 

Compare that to visiting art and craft fairs looking for products on display which already match those fetching regular sales and high prices on eBay and you’ll realise how anyone can buy many more items to resell than they might ever make themselves in the average working day. 

For the record, some of my highest profits have come from selling the work of local artists and craftworkers on eBay.  You’ll find fairs advertised in your local evening newspapers, usually at the weekend.

Now please go try those ideas yourself and let me know how you get on.

Time to Plan Your New Year Resolutions

New Year resolutions more or less describe things you plan to do for the first time in the early New Year or which you have already done in the past and want to do better in future.  Such as losing weight, for example, or being a better parent, starting your own business, beginning a correspondence course, and so on.

In business, resolutions might focus on developing new products and introducing innovative selling campaigns, along with performing other tasks you may have thought about in the past and didn’t develop to their maximum potential or they were dropped at the planning stage.   

So you may have enjoyed a great Christmas selling period in 2014 from products you dropped from inventory in January, 2015, and failed to restock for Christmas this year. 

Maybe you found a product other people were selling aplenty on eBay and you had an idea for making your version very different and potentially sell more units than other people are selling.  Then another product idea came along, followed by another, and another, and they all got lost in the muddle. 

Now let me suggest ways to prevent similar problems by revealing the thinking behind my own New Year resolutions and recommend ways for you to create your own plans for bigger profits and reduced workload and stress in 2016.

Here we go:

*  I’ll start by telling you about my close friend who sells on Amazon, using FBA (Fulfilment by Amazon), a process whereby he lists his products on Amazon’s site and sends goods to Amazon to take payment and fulfil orders direct to buyers. 

Having once sold exclusively on eBay, and doing very well, he decided to expand his products to Amazon where, after just a few months he says Amazon sales beat eBay by about seven sales to one every day.  More than this, using FBA he doesn’t have to pack products and submit them for delivery and he doesn’t have to deal with delivery problems or bounced payments.  Amazon does all of that for him, at a cost, but one my friend says is negligible compared to available profits. 

So my resolution is to expand my selling beyond eBay, including on Amazon and Etsy.  I’ve chosen Etsy because listings are easier and take less time to create than on eBay and feedback isn’t quite so in-your-face and damaging to a seller’s reputation than on eBay.  So I can spend less time listing similar products on Etsy than on eBay and less time worrying about negative feedback blighting my business reputation.

They’re just two of many viable and reliable selling platforms and you may find other platforms more suitable to your own requirements.  

One thing I don’t want you to do is stop selling on eBay which remains one of the most heavily visited sites of all and generates a good income for millions of sellers.  Not forgetting that eBay is the world’s biggest auction website where finishing prices can sometimes exceed all reasonable expectations.

* The 20:80 Rule, sometimes called ‘Pareto’s Theory’, suggests that, among other things, close to twenty per cent of an entrepreneur’s time is spent performing tasks that will make eighty per cent of his income and, conversely, eighty per cent of working time typically accounts for twenty per cent of income.  That suggests you could work just one-fifth (20%) of your current working week and still take home four-fifths of your current profits.  So if you normally work forty hours a week and make, say, one thousand pounds profit each week, Pareto’s Theory suggests you could make eight hundred pounds every week working just eight hours.  Or thereabouts! 

So my resolution is to determine my most profitable working hours and where I am achieving limited profits from four-fifths of my working day.  Then I’ll expand my twenty per cent of profitable tasks and reduce or eliminate proportionately lower profit tasks.

Personally, I find that vintage postcards I have cherry picked at flea markets and antiques fairs amount for the majority of my profits on eBay, while items bought at auction typically yield lower profits and demand longer hours spent listing them on eBay and fulfilling orders.  So my resolution is to spend more time and money at flea markets and antiques fairs buying vintage postcards representing subjects currently fetching the highest prices on eBay and cutting back on buying auction lots containing mainly low and medium price items.

*  A report I’ve neglected since finding it online six months or so back reveals numerous reliable statistics telling why some auctions end with higher finishing prices than others, including that bidders tend to trust PowerSellers more than ordinary sellers and that auction finishing prices tend to grow in line with a seller’s positive feedback rating.  So the more positive feedback ratings you have, the more your auctions are likely to make.

So my resolution is to grow my positive feedback rating and work very hard to avoid neutral and negative feedback and having poor feedback revised to good.

This report is an eye-opener covering more than just auction listings and the reason I haven’t read more than a snippet or two is because it’s written in statistical jargon with lots of charts requiring more than a cursory glance.  So I haven’t had time, or rather I haven’t made time to read a report I honestly believe will have a very positive effect on my eBay profits.  That is something I will correct when things slow down for me on eBay between Christmas and the middle of January.   The report is called ‘Online Auctions Efficiency: A Survey of eBay Auctions’ and you can download it at:

http://wwwconference.org/www2008/papers/pdf/p925-huA.pdf

Don’t let the early date on that report deter you because many of the findings remain just as valid today.

*  Lack of focus is the main reason people fail on eBay and other marketplaces and it’s a problem anyone can solve with a diary and pen.  You do it like this:

-  When you find products fetching high prices and regular sales for other people, you make a note of the product in your diary, along with ideas for making the product more profitable for you than for other sellers.  Spend at least half an hour developing the product by jotting down profitable ideas from other people’s listings, comparing other people’s prices to sales ratios, and so on.  Now move forward five to ten days in your diary and place a big red asterisk top of the date allocation along with the product name and the date you researched it.  This allows several days for the product idea to ferment in your mind and present itself as a workable or not so workable idea.  If the idea still sounds good, you make the second date in your diary the day you turn your product idea into reality.

Build Niche Mini-Sites For Fast and Healthy Profits

'Mini-Site' is a commonly used term in the world of making money online and it has a variety of definitions, but always meaning 'small', hence the term 'mini'. So a mini-site might comprise ten pages or just one but rarely will 'mini' be applied to a site containing hundreds of pages or focusing on more than one tight niche market or product.

Very often a mini-site is a one page site comprising a sales letter for one product and its aim is to convert visitors into paying customers. Because it contains just one or a few pages at most, the site can be highly focused and created in a couple of hours and begin making sales and growing a mailing list very soon afterwards.

And because they are so small and usually tightly focused, mini-sites can be grown quickly around a small number of commonly used search keywords and phrases and quickly begin driving traffic from search engines like Google and Bing.  To illustrate, for a high frequency phrase like 'train a dog to heel', it's very easy to write content for one to ten web site pages containing that term but very difficult to create several hundred articles based on that term for an authority site with hundreds or even thousands of pages.

These are the main steps involved in creating a high profit mini-site:

* Find a popular niche, one that is searched for hundreds or better still thousands of times every day. The greater the number of searches made for the subject of your site, the more people will ultimately visit your site and the more money you are likely to make.

* Find a product or service to promote at your site. Choosing a niche is just one step on the way to making a living from mini-sites and arguably the most important early step.  But regardless of how good a niche you pick and how many people are interested in the subject of your mini-site, you'll still not make money unless there are products at the site for people to buy or advertising links for them to click on to generate commissions for you. So we're looking at finding products to promote from the likes of ClickBank and Amazon, and commission generating links from Google AdSense and similar pay-per-click promoters.

* Create content for your mini-site.  Content is information designed to interest potential buyers for whatever products or promotions feature at your site.  It's keywords and phrases used in articles and blog postings that tempt Google and other search engines to lift your sites higher in search engine returns than sites based on similar niches but without useful information to benefit Google customers. So you need quality articles based on words and phrases that are commonly keyed into search engines to locate sites similar to your own.

* Design a landing page for your site. Your landing page is that part of your site where people arrive as a result of your chosen traffic generating techniques. It's called a 'landing' page because that is where people 'land' immediately they decide to visit your site. Your landing page can be a simple sales page or somewhere for people to sign up to join your mailing list for news of current and future product offers.

* Upload your site to the Internet, determine what traffic generating techniques will best attract potential buyers and pay-per-click users to your site, then develop a plan for attracting as much traffic as possible to begin making money for you.

Job done!

Flipping Websites and Domain Names For Quick and Easy Profits

Some of us do it with houses, some of us do it with cars, and some of us do it with websites. We buy those things, improve their appearance, add a few exciting new features, then we sell up for a few thousand pounds easy profit and maybe a great deal more.  It's called 'flipping' and it represents one of the easiest, most profitable ventures of all, as this article shows.

'Flipping' is the term commonly applied to the exciting business of buying and selling domain names and developing new or existing websites.

Really spectacular profits can come from buying a domain name inexpensively in one location and reselling it for a profit elsewhere, such as by purchasing it from an inexperienced buyer on eBay and reselling it where more knowledgeable buyers congregate, in Internet marketing forums, for example, and companies mediating between domain name and website buyers and sellers, such as Godaddy (http://www.godaddy.com), Flippa (http://www.flippa.com) and Sedo (http://www.sedo.com).

Many full-time flippers buy sites inexpensively, with or without a domain name, and focus on growing value in a site, by adding content, for example, and monetising it with AdSense or ClickBank promotions and growing traffic from articles and blog postings, before finally offloading the whole caboodle to the highest bidder on one of those middleman sites just mentioned.

Website - also domain name - flipping is one of few businesses known to survive and even thrive in an economic downturn, mainly because flippers are targeting up-market buyers, people with money to spend and wanting to buy websites that are already receiving traffic and generating income.  They pay those high prices to avoid having to develop websites themselves, or drive traffic, or identify profitable niches.

Those big price buyers also like the risk-free element of buying an already profitable site, as opposed to paying website designers to create sites for them and having to wait months to see if their new site is profitable or a total flop. So they'll spend heavily on a site that's already making money, sometimes spending many hundreds of thousands of dollars/pounds/whatever currency for a site and domain name that probably cost very little to obtain in the first place. 

A lot of money can be made in very short time, even by people without web design experience and having little or no technical ability, and tales are told of new and experienced flippers buying existing sites for a few hundred dollars (most sales take place on American sites) and offloading them days or weeks later for ten or twenty times more.

Handmade Issues and a Rapidly Developing Marketplace for You to Profit From

There’s talk of one of the world’s most highly respected websites - Etsy - suffering significant problems recently, prompted mainly by an influx of new and possibly bigger competitors in the market for handmade and artist created products. 

At a time when few people realised a growing interest in buying handmade goods Etsy - http://www.etsy.com - emerged as the place for talented artists and craftspeople to sell their wares online to an international audience and for several years Etsy remained on top.

Quality of goods was high and many very gifted creators sold exclusively at the site, leading to high profits for makers and for the company behind the site.  Then as happens for most good things, the competition got wind of an easy way to make money, by simply mediating between people good at making things and others good at selling them.  

Today, Etsy’s main rivals are eBay and Amazon, each with its own developing platform for handmade and artisan created goods, and presenting a major threat to Etsy’s survival.

But for people like us the result is a proven product and plenty of places to market goods you and I don’t have to create and won’t even have to pay for in advance of selling them on sites like eBay and Amazon and, hopefully, Etsy too.

All we have to do is find artists and craftworkers, people typically good at making things and lousy at selling them, and we offer to represent them online. 

It’s all so easy, I’ve done it many times myself and, as soon as Amazon and eBay have all their ducks in a row we’ll take a close look at making money ourselves from other people’s hard work and creative genius.

Until then, keep watching this space!

The Public Domain and How It Helps You Make Money From Specific Dates

Look in any magazine, vintage or modern, and you'll find a common theme running throughout, being anniversaries and seasonal articles and snippets.  The need for such contributions by millions of publications all over the world is so intense that many writers earn their entire income writing about things that happened one hundred or so years ago, people (living and dead) who are celebrating an important milestone (birthdays, deaths, marriages, etc.), or relating to regular events like Christmas, Bonfire Night, Easter, and so on.

All you have to do is find relevant information from the public domain which can be converted to modern day terminology which you then use as the basis for paid letters to the editor, alongside articles, captioned photographs, recipes and poems attracting valuable gifts. 

Or you could produce a range of birthday cards or scrolls containing information to interest people born in a particular year or sharing the same star sign.  Add lucky dates and numbers, main events at the time the individual was born, famous and infamous people sharing the same birthday or star sign, and so on.  Then sell your products on eBay, Amazon, Etsy and numerous other sites.

Sell Vintage Pipes on eBay

Collectable pipes are commonly available in offline auction salerooms where they can sell at prices way below their possible resale values on eBay.

Pipes from ancient times to round about the early 1900s were made from many different materials, some from clay and other inferior materials which were easily broken and few examples remain today, others from ivory or rare woods embellished with silver and porcelain. The latter represent the highest profit potential.

Pipes made from finely carved woods, ivory and precious metals fetch the highest prices, especially with famous faces (a bowl with a portrait of Napoleon fetched £400 at a sale in Newcastle a few months back) or commemorating important events (such as military campaigns).  Among the most valuable pipes are long stemmed designs with ornate carved bowls sometimes decorated with silver and precious gemstones.

eBay.com's recent high prices include:

* $3,075.00 was paid for a Lars Ivarsson Pipe

* A large Dunhill pipe fetched $1875.00

* A Dunhill White Spot Briar Pipe and Case fetched $954.81

* An Ivarsson Pipe made from bamboo made $860.00

A few minutes spent studying vintage pipes selling on eBay revealed the following main trends:

* Pipes aged one hundred years or more almost always attract several bidders and good finishing prices and rarely go unsold on eBay.

* Names like Dunhill and Ivarsson are amongst the most valued and collectable on ebay.com and other eBay sites.

* Pipes made from meerschaum are also extremely collectable, meerschaum being a porous mineral found in rock veins.  Being porous, meerschaum pipes absorb nicotine and gradually grow darker which some collectors like and some don’t.  The better types are elaborately carved to represent people or animals.

The more intricate the design on pipes made from meerschaum and other valuable materials, the higher the finishing price is likely to be, such as a meerschaum pipe depicting an elephant's head with long winding trunk and tusks that fetched £1,000 a few years ago at Christie's and a cheroot holder (not exactly a pipe) in the shape of two ladies sitting on a snake that fetched almost fifteen hundred pounds at Sotheby's.

How Clever Sellers Use Free Information Products to Grow their Product Sales

All over the world people are still reluctant to place credit card orders online, despite the high security generally involved.  So Internet companies have to work harder to sell their products than their bricks and mortar high street counterparts. 

One way to gain buyer confidence and increase sales is by letting website visitors download a valuable information product free of charge in exchange for adding their contact details to the online seller’s mailing list.

Once names are added, the marketer sends emails containing useful tips and helpful advice to establish a relationship with list members and ultimately turn them into buyers.   After a couple of weeks the emails can become more promotional in content. 

Then when list members realise the marketer is genuine and approachable, many will begin purchasing from him or her in preference to spending on the high street.

These are examples of free information products designed to attract people to a website and generate confidence in the website owner:

* Say you are a travel agent selling discount airline tickets.  It's a highly competitive business as you will see from hundreds of small ads. placed by competing companies in countless newspapers and glossy magazines.  An online seller might compete by getting people to download a free book of money off vouchers to use at their destination in exchange for joining the online marketer’s mailing list.  Then the seller begins promoting goods and services those people might find useful at their destination.

* Let's say you are selling Barbie dolls at your website. Barbie dolls are immensely popular and literally thousands of companies compete for sales on and off the Internet. But you could easily attract thousands of people to your website by offering a downloadable PDF file of knitting and sewing patterns for clothes to fit Barbie.   Inside your report you place links to dolls and other products available from your website.

Sell Cameras on eBay

‘Camera', in collecting terms, covers everything from early box cameras with bellows and photographic plates, to more recent 'still photograph' cameras, on to cine and video equipment, even modern mobile phones with photographic capabilities.  They can be large or small, quite modern or antique, some don't even look like cameras. 

But be careful: Unlike most collectibles where older usually means more expensive, the same does not always apply to cameras.

Ironically, our throwaway society creates a situation where specific makes and model of modern camera are in limited supply and fetch higher prices than cameras from the 1940s and 1950s, even earlier. 

To illustrate, a 15-year old Hasselblad camera in working condition recently made £700 on ebay.co.uk, while a Mahogony and Brass Plate Camera from around 1900 fetched just £113. 

Let's look at some of the most popular cameras on eBay and determine exactly what you should be looking for.

Recent eBay Realisations

*  A World War II Konishiroku Tokj Aerial Camera fetch $380.99, about £219

*  A Girl Scout 1927 Official Kodak Camera In Leather Case Went for $270.50, about  £155

*  A 1939 New York World's Fair Brownie Kodak Camera fetch $202.50, about £116

*  A 1900 7.5" x 9" Mahogony and Brass Plate Camera fetched £113.00

Those are not rare cameras. They are no more valuable or uncommon than many items you'll find selling at auctions and boot sales where they rarely fetch more than a few pounds each.  This is especially so at poorly advertised events, like the majority of collectors' fairs and some high street auction rooms, so make a particular point of phoning events organisers every week for details of whatever cameras might be available.  Keep contact details of regular sellers at flea markets and boot sales, phone them regularly about new stock.  Give these people your contact details, too, so they can contact you for fast sales, often of multiple items.

Factors Affecting Value

Most pricing is 'approximate', especially on eBay where bidding wars are common.  Even the experts are surprised sometimes at prices achieved for relatively common cameras, so says the editor of the most authoritative work on camera values, James McKeown (Price Guide to Antique and Classic Cameras): "The price of an antique camera is entirely dependent on the moods of buyer and seller at the time of the transaction."

Makers

Even with a limited study of classic cameras one quickly finds THE names to watch out for among camera makers are Ernst Leitz (maker of Leica models) and Zeiss.  Almost without exception even damaged and worn specimens from these makers are still saleable, even without worthwhile restoration.

Age

According to my favourite camera collectors' site, age is largely irrelevant to resale value (www.marriottworld.com/value.htm).  Reference the Kodak 2C Brownie, produced between 1917 and 1934, which the webmasters say is worth just a few pounds, primarily because many thousands were made over an extensive period. 

Curiosity and Novelty Value

Novelty and curiosity cameras were popular from the late 1900s, looking every bit like James Bond creations and often resembling books, pocket watches, packets of cigarettes, and more.  Referred to, unsurprisingly, as 'spy' or 'detective' cameras, they are often incredibly small, but immensely popular, and can fetch very high prices.  Minolta were prolific makers of tiny spy cameras frequently masquerading as pens and cigarette lighters and worth about £40 to £100, more for advertising specialities or with unusual pedigree.

Production Quantities

Cameras of short term production, (even of inferior quality), can be worth far more than their quality mass produced counterparts.  A good example is high quality, rare and limited edition models made just after the war by such as Nikon and Canon which fetch very high prices today.

Condition

With few exceptions condition is vitally important to a camera's value.  Cameras with their original parts in working order, without rust or signs of ageing, fetch a premium.  Original carry cases and product packaging with operating instructions and receipt of purchase have an upward effect on prices. 

Common cameras in shabby, non working condition are almost worthless, unlike rarer specimens which may still find eager buyers.  Rare cameras, in good working and cosmetic condition attract the highest profits. 

It's worth noting that some collectors avoid cameras in non-working or damaged condition, and there's still a good market for low value, poor appearance but fully-functioning cameras, for whatever reason called 'beaters', which you really can pick up for pennies, tidy up a bit, and sell for decent profits.

Collecting Interest

Collecting themes help determine values for most collectibles; for cameras collectability usually depends on the maker (especially Leitz); type of camera (wet plate, dry plate, motorised movement, etc.); materials used (Bakelite is immensely popular); age (sometimes, especially for low production items); past famous owners, model and mechanism.  Enter two or more bidders of widely different collecting themes and amazing profits are possible.

Area of Production

As for many collectibles you'll find people collecting cameras made in specific geographical locations or at particular times.  For example, Japanese cameras, mass produced at the end of World War II, introduced a new high in reliability. This has made them among today's most collectible cameras usually bought to be used and not just for decoration or collecting value. 

Buying and Selling Tips

*  So quickly has the camera collecting interest grown that today even cameras made as recently as ten years ago are fetching high prices on eBay.  This is one product for which  bidding wars will emerge and high prices result for items that are cheap and relatively plentiful in their country of origin and non-existent elsewhere. 

*  Keep whatever throwaway cameras come your way; they could increase in value even in the short term, especially if they're unused, unopened and in original box, with till receipt, operating instructions, advertising materials.

*  Study cameras carefully before buying.  Only the rarest of items will sell in damaged or dirty condition, although much can be done to clean or refurbish quality pieces.   Looks for dents and cracks in the bodywork that might mean the camera has been dropped and could be damaged and potentially unworkable.  At boot sales and flea markets you may have to take pot luck on cheaper acquisitions.  But at auction and for higher priced items ask for time to test the camera before having to pay.  Many auction companies have staff their test cameras before selling and sometimes to provide sample photographs and warranties.

*  As a seller, bear in mind that some collectors favour working only cameras.  It's wise to take some pictures using the camera and add the photographs to your listing.  Otherwise sell  'as is' or admit you have no idea whether your camera is working or not.  It will reduce bids but will save hassle and claims for refund later.  Alternatively, offer a specific period for buyers to test the camera before having to pay.

*  Take close up pictures of camera and accessories from all angles; point out damage in photographs and description.  

*  Learn from the experts, especially those selling cameras on eBay.  I found a great guide on eBay showing what to look for when buying a classic camera, which by implication is important for sellers, too.  Called 'Buying a Classic Camera - What You Should Know' the guide is available from 9248terry (go to advanced search top right of eBay screen, click through, tick 'Items by Seller' at left.  Once accessed, click on 'View My Reviews and Guides'.

*  It's very easy to buy dirty cameras, clean them up, and find a precious gem lying beneath.

Some Easy Cleaning Tips

*  Be careful and always use gentle, sweeping movements, one way only, to removed surface dust.  Too many backward and forward movements, even with delicate cleaning materials, can cause scratching or lead to an uneven over-shiny patina.  A camel brush is best.

*  Never rub directly onto the lens or other glass areas.  Instead blow dust away either manually or with canned air.  Remove really heavy dirt with lens cleaning fluid from specialist photographic suppliers.  Find them listed in Yellow Pages under 'Photographic Suppliers' or 'Camera Shops'.  Drip the fluid onto a smooth fluff-free cloth and use a gentle circular movement over the lens.  Do not drop the liquid onto the lens and then apply the cloth or you risk surplus liquid seeping behind the lens and damaging the inside of the camera.

*  Don't ever clean the inside of what might be a valuable camera.  The workings are extremely delicate, easy to damage and costly to repair.  Avoid buying cameras that are really dirty inside, they've probably been poorly handled by past owners and could be broken beyond repair.

*  Dirt on the casing can be removed with a soft dry cloth or with a little plain water added to remove encrusted dirt and grime.

Recommended Reading

McKeown's Price Guide to Antique and Classic Cameras, published by Centennial Photo Service, ISBN: 0931838134