Lessons from the Master

Just been looking at ebay...

It's a great source for ideas. I'm interested in guides, manuals, study courses that are currently listed on ebay.

From this research I get ideas for new products. I'll have a look and see what's currently on offer and whether I could improve on it or dig deeper for a more targeted micro niche.

Anyway, a couple of examples I found today were these:

http://tinyurl.com/bssrj3h


http://tinyurl.com/c7jeo8h

Both are guides for people who are thinking of running their own mobile catering business.

If you look at each listing, the first one is for a guide that sells for £2.99.

Not a huge price, but when I looked this morning, it had sold 17 copies within the past 10 days.

Now, I'm sure they sell about that 50 copies every month ... so a steady £1,700 per year.

The other guide is a more substantial publication that sells for £25.00 and it has sold 16 copies so far, and will probably sell 20 per month ... every month.

So a steady £6,000 per year.

Here's the best bit ...

The information being sold can EASILY be found for free online or from a magazine bought from a newsagents.

But what these two sellers have done is create there own guides from a mixture of information that they've compiled and then listed them on ebay.

Now, let's suppose you wrote a simple 30 page guide (should take you a day or so), sold it for £2.99 and sold 20 per month.

You then wrote 20 other short guides, selling similar numbers.

You'd generate an income of £12,000 per year ... and once you've written the guides there is no more work to be done ... except look for other markets to exploit.

So, for what ... about 2 weeks work ... you could have a ready-made publishing business making you a nice yearly income from very little work.

Interesting isn't it?

On top of this, you'll build a super responsive mailing list that you can then offer other products to - whether it be up sells or cross sells.

And you could then rent the list out to others - (£30 per 100 names).

I'm sure the list of 'catering guides' buyers would be worth a lot to suppliers of catering equipment.

If I sold one of those guides, I'd look to do a JV with a catering supply company and share any revenue ... could add an extra £5k to your yearly profit.

You could then write a guide on how you created this mini publishing empire and sold that for £97.00 - you'd get a lot of buyers for this sort of guide.

From past experience, a guide like this could easily sell 3,000 - 5,000 copies.

Start looking at the numbers and all this becomes VERY exciting.

Food for thought (excuse the pun)!

Source: Robert Evans