This income generating idea has been sitting in the back of my mind since November, when Barak Obama won the presidential election. At that time,  I noticed a lot of auctions for magazines stories featuring his win listed for sale on Ebay.

I’m not a great magazine reader, but I don’t mind reading them while I wait at the dentist, and am always amazed at the antics of celebrities. It hadn’t crossed my mind to cut up and sell these magazines stories for cash.

I had to explore further…

According to Wikipedia, the name for transitory written and printed matter is Ephemera. I think it’s quite a nice sounding word.

I can totally relate to people wanting to collect magazines stories about their favourite celebrities – I recall being head over heels in love with Jon and Ponch from CHiPs – now I’m really showing my age. I had a scrapbook where I glued photos and cuttings and for a while, it was my most precious possession.

So, off to eBay I went, to search for ephemera and magazines stories for sale, just to see how profitable it could be.

Going back to the theme of the moment, I did a search on completed Ebay listings for “Barak Obama”. Sure enough, there are plenty of newspapers featuring today’s inauguration which sold for $3-4. There is one that sold for $9!!

However, once you’ve paid your listing fee, final value fee, and the initial cost of the newspaper, is there much profit in it? I don’t know, some of these sellers are charging $8.95 to post the newspaper, maybe there’s a few dollars there.

Further searching revealed a lot of listings for bundles of magazines stories which didn’t sell, or sold for a few dollars.

I’m not convinced that selling newspaper and magazines stories on Ebay will give you a decent return for your time, and it certainly isn’t a “business” that will give you a residual income. Perhaps if you have nothing else to do, and you read these magazines anyway, it may be worthwhile cutting them up and grouping similar stories in bundles, and see what sort of money you can get for them. You may get more for your clippings if you mounted them in an inexpensive mat and frame to make them look better.

One thing I really want to do with this blog is share money making ideas that I have reviewed or personally tried, so I’m going to give this a go. I have purchased a copy of the Brisbane Courier Mail featuring Barak Obama’s inauguration for A$1.00, and I’m going to list it on US Ebay, to see if it sells.

Check back in a week, and I’ll update this post to show the result, and we can see if it’s been a profitable exercise.

Related posts:

1. Selling On Ebay From Home
2. Selling Websites For Profit – Does It Work?
3. Selling Photos Online For Cash
4. Selling Startup Websites

Starting selling on Ebay from home is as simple as clearing out your unwanted household items, and taking photographs of them.  Set yourself up with an Ebay account and a business Paypal account. Your best bet is to start with a business account; this is free to you, but allows your buyers more options to pay for their purchases. Decide on your starting price and auction duration, list your item and wait for the sale. Sounds pretty easy, eh?

There are other things to keep in mind. Firstly, Ebay charge fees. There is a cost to list your item, and a final value fee, which depends on your sale price. Paypal also takes a fee, again depending on the sale price. It’s easy to look at your sale price and think it’s all profit, but it’s not.  You also need to be accurate in listing your postage costs, as you don’t want to be out of pocket for postage, and buyers don’t like having to pay more postage than listed in the auction.

Many people who start selling unwanted items on Ebay from home end up going further with their business.  For any business to survive, it needs a constant supply of stock to sell. People can choose a couple of ways of getting more stock.  They can scour yard sales or antique shops for bargains that would sell well online. They can start dropshipping products, or they can sell information products such as ebooks, reports or software. Ebay have recently changed their guidelines, and you can no longer sell a downloadable item such as a pdf, so you need to be able to ship your product on a CD. Fortunately, there is an easy way of doing this too. We’ll investigate these options in future blog posts; they’re not difficult when you know how.

You can set up your Ebay account by clicking here. You can also set up a Paypal account by clicking here.

The pros of selling on Ebay from home are that it’s easy and cheap to get started, you needn’t carry any stock in the early days and there are thousands of possible buyers who will see your item for sale. The cons are that it may be very time consuming to list individual items, Ebay and  Paypal fees can eat into your products, and if you’re selling physical products, you’ll have to make regular trips to the post office.

If you’d like step by step help in setting up your Ebay account, Vickie Sayce has written an inexpensive ebook which goes into great detail about selling on Ebay from home specifically while you’re looking after your family. I’ve read her book and it’s well laid out, easy to follow and doesn’t leave anything out.  You’ll be selling on Ebay from home in no time with her help. You can find her ebook here and it’s available as an immediate download after purchase.  I can thoroughly recommend it.

Related posts:

1. Selling Magazines Stories On Ebay
2. A Business Selling Home School Teaching Aids
3. Selling Startup Websites
4. Selling Photos Online For Cash