Category: WORK

Unlike the footprints we leave on the sand – our digital footprints last. They are so much more permanent and it is my responsibility to investigate, evaluate and then create the footprints which I leave behind. As an elementary teacher I have always been aware of the impact that I have on those students around me and so sensitive to what I say and do in public and private.

When I began teaching the internet was far less wide reaching that it is now and far fewer people were connected. With the explosion in connectivity and the digital environment in which I live, I now need to take control of the footprints which I leave.

I had already started to think about how I should ‘brand’ myself and how well maintained my main social media feeds were, but through this assignment I learned that there is so much more to do. I should not just be managing but taking ownership of the way I am represented in the digital world. This sciencedirect.com article has more. There are opportunities to share, connect and really establish my identity as well as clear steps that I should be taking to limit any negative or misplaced information. This is important to me as a person – as a father as well as a professional. The internet has changed the way we live and so I must change the way I manage my online presence. See the article Why You Need Online Reputation Management for more on this.

I thought that I wanted to use new media again with this assignment and so decided that I would create an infographic style image with Venngage and then add my words and comments in Thinglink. The reason was, that I wanted it to be something that I would look at time and time again so that I would use it. A plan is just a list of words unless it is used.

Retiring doesn’t have to mean you’re done making money. The internet has made it possible for a wide range of people to dabble in entrepreneurship with little startup cost and low risk. Seniors can make some extra money in retirement by selling items online. There are a few possible approaches you could take to this:

• Selling items you don’t want anymore, as you would at a garage sale
• Seeking out low-cost items at local stores, thrift shops, and flea markets to sell at a profit online
• Selling something you make, like homemade jewelry or woodworking items

Whether you decide to fully commit and treat it like a new business, or just want to make some money off the stuff around the house you don’t have a need for anymore, selling items online can be a good way to make some extra cash. But first you have to figure out how to do it.

The Best Websites for Selling Items Online

First off, you should decide where to sell your items online. You have a lot of different options, some of which may already be familiar to you.

eBay

eBay’s one of the biggest websites out there for online selling. That makes it a good way to reach a large audience. On eBay you can choose to either put your items up for auction, so they sell to the highest bidder, or you can pick a set price for each item you list.

The main downside of using eBay is that there are a lot of fees involved. There’s a fee to list your items (after a certain number of items), another fee after you sell your item, and more fees to spruce up your listings and bring more attention to them. If you’re not careful, the fees can bite into your ability to make much for your effort.

Amazon

Like eBay, Amazon’s popularity makes it one of the best places online to reach a huge audience of potential buyers. But on Amazon, you’ll face a lot of competition. Amazon stocks a lot of their own inventory, so in some categories you’ll be up against them directly when trying to sell your stuff, and they attract a huge number of other sellers as well.

As with eBay one of the main concerns with Amazon is the fees. They have different fee structures based on the frequency with which you expect to sell items on the site, but either way a portion of what you’d be making through the site will be going back to Amazon rather than in your pocket.

A nice bonus Amazon offers (for an additional cost) is taking care of the shipping process for you. You can ship your inventory to them and let them deal with the packaging and shippin of your products once they’re bought. If the idea of heading to the post office makes you less inclined to deal with online selling, then Amazon Fulfillment may be just the thing to make selling items online worthwhile for you.

Etsy

Etsy is an online marketplace that specializes in crafty and homemade items. If you’re selling something that’s a little more unique, like homemade soap or vintage clothes, it may be a better choice for you than Amazon or eBay. Etsy’s customer base isn’t as large as it is on the other two big sites, but it’s more targeted. Your audience isn’t people looking for any and everything, they’re people looking for unique gifts, crafts, and other items with personality

Like the other sites, selling on Etsy comes with its share of fees. There’s a fee to list items on the site, a final sale fee, and a Paypal processing fee. As on the other sites, you have to be careful with your pricing to ensure the fees don’t eat too much into your profits.

Etsy gives you a little more room to personalize your brand on the site, so buyers that like your stuff are more likely to remember and revisit your shop for future orders. If you’ll be selling items you create, the site gives you more of a chance to build up a brand and business.

How to Determine Pricing

This is one of the trickiest parts of selling items online. You have to make enough money to make your time and trouble worth it, but charging too much will keep people from buying (which also means your time and trouble weren’t worth it).

To figure out how to price your items, start by looking at what other people are charging for similar items. This will give you an idea of what people are willing to spend.

If you want to sell digital downloads (mp3, mp4, pdfs and so forth), look into a web host like MadBeeTech – they specialize in setting up websites that intend to sell downloadable files. You can learn more by reading the Why Your Website Is Going To Fail post.

Next, consider what the item you’re selling originally cost you. If it’s something you made yourself, what was the cost of the materials you used? To make a profit from your work, your pricing should go higher than the cost of materials.

If it’s an old item you’re selling, what did it cost you back when you bought it? For most old items, you shouldn’t expect to charge more than you spent – obviously a used item is worth less than a new one in most cases – but that original price does tell you something about the item’s initial worth. See more in this paypal.com post.

Then, consider what your time is worth. If it takes you five hours to take pictures, list your items, write descriptions, and lug them to the post office to ship them when they’re purchased, what amount of profit makes those five hours of work worth it to you?

And finally, you need to think about how you’ll deal with shipping costs. A lot of online sellers pass the costs along to their customers in full, but if your customers can find a similar item with free shipping, that makes your products less competitive. If you decide to cover any of the shipping costs yourself to entice people to buy, then you should factor that extra expense in when figuring out a reasonable cost for your items.

How to Accept Payments

A lot of the sites listed above will include a process for accepting payments as part of the platform they provide. For many of them, you need to have a PayPal account. If you don’t have one yet, setting one up is fairly simple. You can connect it to your bank accounts and transfer the money you make from your sales directly to your account.

For sales on a website like NextDoor, you’re probably best off taking cash or having the buyer transfer money to your PayPal account. If you trust the person, you could also accept a check, but that’s a risky option with strangers since you never know when a check will bounce.

Many collaborative entrepreneurs wonder if there is a silver bullet that would help them get their company to work right now. And there is a truth that every serial entrepreneur knows. There is a way to “succeed” systematically, and there is a way to “struggle” systematically.

It’s a mindset difference. Those who struggle always build a product before making sure people will buy it. Those who succeed, make sure others really want and buy their new products before they exist.

By selling their product or service before it’s ready, when time comes to build, they know that they’ll create a product or service that people really want. To see what I mean, these are three examples of this mindset applied to entrepreneurial celebrities in their beginnings:

Before creating an airline, Richard Branson got his flight to Puerto Rico cancelled which left him and a few others stranded on an island. He figured he had a problem and went to find a solution. He picked up the phone to find out how much a charter would cost. But instead of paying a whole charter on his own, he divided the price of the charter among the number of passengers and charged them $39 to rebook their seats. He offered the other passengers to pay and they were glad someone took care of it. This pre-sale Branson’s first experience in the airline industry, and the one who led him to create Virgin Airlines.

Before building a company, Steve Jobs also started selling blue boxes that allowed users to get free phone services illegally. First it was a hobby invention by his friend Wozniak. When he realized people were ready to pay for it, he knew he was in business. Then someone tried to rob him at gunpoint (a story for another tab) and he decided to try selling computers, which ended up being another pretty good business for him.

Before Starting Paypal, Tesla and Space X, Elon Musk learned how to run a business and pay his rent by hosting epic night-parties. He first rented a house and threw parties that attracted thousands of college students. Once he knew how to make money with his projects and was comfortable with a business, he either sold it or moved on to something harder and more complex.

In 2005 before turning Arduino into a company, the Arduino founders created micro-controllers to teach their students programming and prototyping with electronics. When they realized people were asking in droves how to buy it, this is when they realized it was time to turn it into a business.

Can you see what’s going on here? They all looked for people interested in what they were offering before they had anything to sell or made any significant investment. They avoided any risk. If you are a budding entrepreneur, you might think that you can skip this step. You know in your gut that everybody wants your idea. But from my experience, as we mentioned in the previous post, this is an excuse that helps us hide from the fear of being rejected or being stolen by others.

OpenROV started with a “simple” underwater robot for submarine exploration and have improved it over time to a much more polished and refined Underwater drone. Open Source Ecology started with a Brick Press to create building materials. Once they validated people needed it, they went on to develop the rest of the Global Village Construction Set to create a new open and ecological civilization from nothing. So don’t worry if your idea doesn’t have a 20 year plan to change the world and a huge community behind it.

First things first. You have found a few ideas. Congrats. Not everyone takes the time to lay them down. Now, if you want to turn them into reality, you must find if people want it enough to pay for your idea. This is hard and challenging. People might not be interested at first. You’ll have to tweak your idea or accept that it’s not a priority to others around you. You might even have to leave your idea and pick another one you had. But you will eventually start to see that your idea can help and have an actual impact on others. And this will be incredibly exciting and rewarding.

The community and the 20 year plan will eventually come after that, if this is what you really want you think is necessary. Don’t worry if you think your ideas aren’t good enough or might be too hard to sell. The real value of this exercise lies in learning how to quickly validate any idea you have. When you know how to validate any business idea, you’ll never wonder anymore “should I have tried this?”.

You may successfully validate your idea or not. If not, your main goal here is to keep moving forward with other ideas and repeating the process without spending a lot of money or time on a website, landing page, app or whatever. You really don’t need it. Just go after the low-hanging fruit and go manual without building a website or hiring anyone until forced to do otherwise.

If you already have a business you want to try, let’s stick to this one. If you don’t have any idea, go back to this post and come up with your own list of ideas. The point is to get started. If you don’t know how much to charge for it, think how much value it brings to the person you want to help, and divide it by 3x or 10x. For example, if you are selling a course, or a product that you know will make the other person $1000, you can easily sell it for anything between $100 or $300.

If you still don’t know how much your product or service is worth, go with $10. You’ll see what are the reactions from people before and after you deliver your services or product. Their feedback will guide you into increasing or decreasing the price. But always make sure that your price is always above your costs to build and deliver the product.