In a word, I would say things are going “okay”. While we were living in Busan, I spent most of my time building Keys To China, as well as writing my own Busan itinerary. Most of my focus on the site the past few months has been getting people to write itineraries.

Solving UnAnchor’s Chicken and Egg Problem

One of the largest challenges I face with making UnAnchor successful is solving the chicken and egg problem. Itinerary writers want users to be on UnAnchor, but users will not go on UnAnchor unless there are itineraries. My initial plan to solve this problem included reaching out to fellow travel bloggers and the Travel Blog Exchange community. I had good luck with finding places to guest post, as well as getting interviewed. Unfortunately, the traffic that resulted from these posts and interviews did not result in itineraries being created. After reflecting, I believe the traffic the blogs brought in was the wrong kind of traffic. These were people interested in travel in general, and reading good travel stories, not writing itineraries to make money. (However, I believe a lot of these people stuck around and now follow our blog instead.)

Trying Something New

I’m a big fan of test and measure. Try lots of things; drop the ones that don’t work, keep the ones that do. So, I’ve stopped trying to actively guest post and instead I’m now focusing my efforts on niche bloggers.

The niche blogger I’m specifically looking for are those who focus on a particular city or country. I realized niche bloggers are great candidates to write itineraries after meeting the author of Chris In South Korea. Chris has an awesome blog on South Korea, is an expert on Seoul, has a stream of visitors looking for information on Seoul, and is always looking for ways to monetize his blog. I’d love to help Chris and other niche bloggers like him monetize their blog traffic, while helping travelers find amazing things to do.

Now my goal is to find people like Chris who blog about a major city or area. So far, my search has been going well. I’ve emailed quite a few bloggers and gotten good overall response from them. Hopefully this will help push UnAnchor forward.

As always, if you know someone (or are someone) who is interested in writing an itinerary for UnAnchor, please let me know or just refer them to the site. For the first 50 itineraries, submitted, I’m going to be giving the writer 90% of what they charge, rather than the normal 75%. If you’re looking for an example itinerary, shoot me an email.

Finding a Co-Founder

I’ve long believed that my best chance of success with UnAnchor was to find someone equally passionate about travel and the idea as myself. I’ve been passively looking for a co-founder. Recently, I posted an ad (free) to CoFounderGoogleDocs.com. Someone contacted me through my post and after having a lengthy conversation with him, we’ve decided to do a trial run working together. After the trial run, I plan on writing a post to discuss how things went and how we approached the trial run.

Suggestions?

Lastly, I’d love to hear your thoughts or suggestions on solving my chicken and egg problem. How would you recommend I find qualified people interested in writing itineraries for UnAnchor? I can’t promise I’ll try out your suggestion immediately, but I do promise I’ll add it to my ongoing list of ideas. Send me an email (Jason.Demant [at] gmail [dot] com) or leave a comment below.

P.S.  Check out the new “I Love Travel Writing” Facebook Group

If you love travel writing or just want to find out more about it, check out my new “I Love Travel Writing” Facebook group. Internet permitting, I try and post something new to discuss about travel writing 5-times a week. Thanks to James for this suggestion!

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For the past month or so, I’ve been working on a new side project. Unfortunately, this has taken a lot of my focus away from UnAnchor, but I’m excited about the opportunity the side project will addressing. The company’s name is “Keys To China” and it’s a place for job seekers to look for jobs in China and for companies to recruit candidates from outside of China. In this post, I’ll be explaining more about the company.

Keys To China was founded by a former Seagate colleague of mine (as well as a loyal LAC reader), Vivian Keys. The idea, at its simplest, is to match candidates from outside of China with jobs inside China.

Vivian was born, raised, and went to college in China. She speaks the language and understands the job market. She was struggling with the technical aspects of creating a website and approached me with suggestions. I decided to take it a step further and offer to create the website for her. Thankfully, many of the core features were similar to those required to create UnAnchor, so it didn’t require me to learn a lot of new things.

While I could try and butcher further explaining the site, I’ll let Vivian explain further:

Why are Chinese companies looking to hire people from outside of China?

The short answer is many different reasons. Here are a few:

• Many companies have moved their R&D center to China and while they hire mostly local, there are always a select few positions which are offered to expats.
• In one particular example, VMWare looked for people with a particular technology skill-set that only existed in the United States.
• Yet another scenario is if a Chinese business is looking to expand into the United States or European markets.
• Another example is if they’re trying to get listed on NYSE or Nasdaq stock exchanges. The companies need people with the right experience and language skills.
• Chinese companies are also trying to lure back the many workers who have left China and are living abroad.

Are there opportunities for non-Chinese speaking in China?

Of course. Again, back to the VMWare example, they weren’t particular about the language. They really needed someone with the technical knowledge. The local engineers can’t effectively communicate with the headquarters back in the U.S., so English speaking people are better than locals.

Then again, knowing some Chinese makes everyday life much easier, even when it’s not in the job description.

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As for how this will affect UnAnchor, the answer is I hope it won’t. I still plan on focusing most of my time going forward on UnAnchor — writing itineraries, marketing, and continuing to develop the site.

If you have a moment or just so happen to have an interest in looking for a job in China, head over KeysToChinaJobs.com and check it out. As always, I’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions on the site.

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There was no big announcement or marketing media blitz, but I’ve officially launched UnAnchor.com. A previous post explains my vision for the site.

The website is far from done however. I heard an interesting quote the other day that reassure me this is okay: “if you’re not embarrassed by the initial launch of your website (version 1.0), you waited too long” — I read and listen to many people and I’m not sure who said this.

While I’m proud of what I’ve done so far, there are many features missing. Rather than develop these without user feedback, I’ve decided to launch now, start trying to find itinerary writers and customers, and find out what features they want. (This entrepreneurial strategy is courtesy of Mixergy Interviews, 37Signals, Jason Cohen, Dharmesh Shah, Jason Calcanis/This Week In Startups)

Chicken or the Egg?

The initial obstacle I face is a classic “chicken and egg” problem. I need itineraries to sell to users, and I also need users to attract itinerary writers.

The good news about UnAnchor is that it’s unlike eBay, Craigslist, or GroupOn (other sites that faced a chicken-and-egg problem), where one needs a critical mass of people to make the website effective. With 1 itinerary, I could get that itinerary ranked in Google, promote it on Twitter, buy Google Ad-words and sell it. Sure, it helps if I have many people surfing on the site looking for itineraries, but it’s not a requirement.

With this in mind, I’ll be focusing on recruiting itinerary writers initially – after all, I need something to sell.

The “$0 Recruit Itinerary Writers” Marketing Plan

I’d love to be able to throw money at this problem, but for now, this isn’t an option. Instead, my initial plan is to reach out to my favorite fellow travel bloggers and beg and plead for an interview, review of UnAnchor.com, or a guest post. Readers of these travel blogs are perfect for writing itineraries – they are smart, passionate people who love traveling and are interested in making extra money. I’ll be reaching out to Christine Gilbert (Almost Fearless), Chris Guillebeau, Foxnomad, ManVsDebt, Kirsty Henderson (Nerdy Nomad), NomadicMatt, Nora Dunn (The Professional Hobo).

In addition, I plan on connecting with people on the Travel Blog Exchange (TBEX). TBEX is a large community of travel bloggers (over 2,500 in fact). I’ve been looking into it, but am still trying to figure out how best to go about it while trying not to seem “spammy”.

A third interesting tool is Twitter. Twitter allows you to set up monitored searches, such that every time someone tweets out “travel itinerary”, for example, I could be alerted. With this set of people, I could then send a message to them, telling them about UnAnchor. I want to be careful with this one as well, as it also could be potentially “spammy”.

I’d like to end this post by making the ridiculous observation of: “Wow, the Internet is really cool”. I was able to build a potential business for essentially nothing (maybe $100) and now will be marketing it – again, for essentially nothing. It’s an amazing thing and it’s an amazing time we live in.

Am I missing something in my Marketing plan? Did I miss your favorite travel blogger? Let me know, or better yet, make me an introduction!

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After many hours holed up in our Seoul apartment, I am ready to begin launching the site and I need your help to do so.

I’d like your help in testing out the site. This will only take a couple minutes of your time and will be an enormous help to me.

Head over to http://www.UnAnchor.com and please consider the following while using the site:

1. If the homepage was the first time you had ever heard of UnAnchor, does it explain the site well enough? What recommendations do you have to grab and explain the site to users?
2. The “About-Us”, “Become A Writer”, “Itinerary Recommendations”, are they clear?
3. Create an Itinerary (you’ll need to create an account to do so) – What could be clearer in this process? Do all of the places to input the itinerary make sense? Can you find help if needed?

If you have any other feedback on the site, please let me know. You can do so by leaving a comment below, emailing me at Jason [at] LifeAfterCubes.Com or using the Contact form.

Final note – purchasing an itinerary will not actually charge your credit card yet.

As always, thanks for your support!

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In a previous post I discussed my decision to start and build UnAnchor.com – a platform for users to create do-it-yourself travel itineraries for other travelers to purchase. In this post, I’m going to discuss how I’m actually going about the creation of the site.

To be honest, I have very little experience in building web applications. In college, I took a few computer science classes where I learned the programming basics – but other than that, I really don’t have much experience. In essence, I started from the beginning.

I decided to go the book route and read the electronic version of “Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript: A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites” – it was an excellent book. It taught me the basics I needed to get going. Many of the code examples they gave were extremely practical and I was able to directly use them in building UnAnchor. I constantly refer back to the book as I run into issues.

My biggest resource, though, is Google. I continue to be amazed by the amount of helpful information there is out there on every topic. Here are a few excellent sites I’ve discovered so far:

• Stackoverflow – Question and Answer site for all technical, back-end queries
• HotScripts – Good collection of pre-built scripts
• Doctype – Question and Answer site for the front-end (HTML, CSS)

How’s the site coming so far?

It’s going well. I’m finishing a good amount of the back-end items at the moment and then will get started on making it look pretty (front-end). I’m targeting early-April for a beta launch and so far I still believe I can hit that time period. I am going to need some help, however, and I’ll be asking for it in future posts.

Off-Topic Thought

Sharon and I recently watched the excellent documentary, “A Map For Saturday” – it’s about a twenty-something filmmaker who quits his job at HBO to travel around the world for a year. He stays at hostels, lives out of his backpack and video tapes the entire experience.

If you’re at all curious as to what Sharon and my life has been like the last 5 months, or just want to see a really well made documentary, I highly recommend it. Thanks to John, who told us about the movie!

Photo Credit: Anders Adermark

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Getting Started on eLance

I’ve discussed before what an amazing website eLance is. Elance has people for hire if you’re in need of anything from web development, to accounting, to a lawyer. In the same respect, if you are able to do anything from writing, to design, to sales – eLance has people willing to pay you money.

Here’s a quick step-by-step on the sign-up process with eLance:

1. The first decision is your membership level. The key difference between the paid memberships and the free membership are the amount of projects you can bid on in a given month and the amount of categories you can bid in. The categories are actually slightly annoying. Elance offers 8 different categories of work and as a provider, you can only bid on projects within the category you’ve chosen. If someone puts a project in the wrong category or if your skill-set overlaps multiple categories, you’re probably going to have to upgrade. But for now, I recommend starting with the free membership – you can always upgrade later.
2. Next, add some preliminary information about your business. You can always come back to this later to really fine tune this area (which I recommend).



3. After finishing the preliminary information there are 3 steps remaining in being able to complete your profile and begin bidding on projects. Passing the admission test, verifying your phone number and verifying your country.



4. The admission test is very easy. There is some reading they recommend you do before you take the test and while most of it is common sense, it’s worth skimming through. Here are a couple question examples from the test.

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5. The last two steps are self-explanatory.

Before bidding on a project

I’d recommend spending a good amount of time filling out your profile as completely as possible. As someone who’s purchased services from eLance, any information you can provide to tell more about yourself and why you’re worth the amount you’re going to charge is time well spent.

Finally, I recommend adding applicable “skills”. It involves taking a test, but again, it shows you know what you’re doing. The Microsoft Excel test I took was surprisingly difficult, but if you know your stuff, you should have no problems passing.

Finding a Project & Bidding

One of the nice things about eLance is that people who post projects can specifically ask certain providers to bid on their projects.  This means that once in a while, you don’t have to find a project, it’ll find you. But this is rare and has only happened to me a couple of times. You’re better off browsing and searching through the project list.

Tip: Make sure you’re only searching for projects within your category, as those are the only projects you’ll be able to bid on with a free account.

Once you find a project, the next step is putting together a bid. This is a critical step. Spending extra time putting together a well thought out bid that specifically addresses the project’s needs will significantly increase your chances of winning the project. I also recommend asking questions before you bid if there is something that is unclear about it. It’s great to win a project, but if you can’t get a good sense of how many hours the project will take, then you risk over or under bidding.

After winning the project, the real fun begins of delivering what you’ve promised! For advice on this, I’d recommend eLance University as a starting point.

My eLance Story

Consulting was something I was particularly excited about. After spending some time putting together my eLance portfolio, I was able to find my first client. The project was essentially a Microsoft Excel dashboard with a couple of other requirements. After a couple phone calls, I realized how difficult managing this relationship was going to be from Southeast Asia while traveling with spotty Internet connections. It just wasn’t going to work. I was able to refer the client to an ex-colleague and leave the relationship in a good enough place where I can contact him in the future. I learned quickly why it’s important to have a steady Internet connection and a more solid structure to your day. Constant travel is not a good way to begin a consulting business.

Resources

“I Will Teach You To Be Rich” had a number of comprehensive articles on consulting and earning money.

Location Independent has a great community of people to help you find skills to consult with as well as transition your consulting gig to one in which you can work and live anywhere you choose.

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Building it myself

The primary motivation to build the website myself boils down to learning the skills to build a web application. Building UnAnchor.com will require I learn a slew of web development skills, all of which will transcend beyond this initial website. They will help with any web application I choose to build in the future. Additionally, this skill could allow me to consult for building web applications or even apply for a web developer position (ideally for a startup).

The downside about building it myself is the amount of time it’s going to take. My knowledge in this area is little to none. I understand basic programming concepts, databases and some other web basics, but other than that, I’m a complete novice. Building this website will require a lot of time and most importantly, patience.

Hiring a Consultant

The primary benefit of hiring a consultant is the speed in which I would be able to get a website up and running. If I found the right consultant (a task within itself), I might be able to have a functioning website up in a matter of weeks. The sooner it’s up, the sooner I could start earning an income again. Additionally, it would be done by a professional and hopefully with professional standards – ensuring security and compatibility across different computers and browser types.

The downside about hiring a consultant is putting out additional money that I really don’t have. If I moved some things around, I’m sure I could find the money, but it doesn’t seem like the responsible thing to do at this time with no money coming in.

My Decision

At the end, the decision came down to this question: how sure am I that UnAnchor will be successful? If I was certain it would be a success, hiring a consultant would be the correct decision. I would ideally be able to recoup the consultant costs in a reasonable amount of time, as I would be off and running with a successful website. However, as with most things in life, I’m just not that certain. I’d rather hedge my bets, learn a new skill and build the website myself.

Final Thoughts

I’ve explored this decision discreetly, either to do it all myself or to hire a consultant, when in fact there are many ways I could blend the two together. I could hire someone to do the visual design for example. There is a good chance that as I get into building the website, I may hire a consultant to help with various pieces.

Yet another approach is to bring in a web development partner who is passionate about the idea and is willing to be compensated by future profits. However, for now, I’ve decided to build it on my own. I do, of course, reserve the right to change my mind.

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts via email or in the comments on building it myself versus hiring a consultant, what’s your recommendation?

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Our Southeast Asia leg of the trip has now come to an end. We’re headed to Beijing for Chinese New Year and could not be more excited about it. After Chinese New Year, we’ll be settling down for 6 months in South Korea (city still to be determined). While we’re not done traveling, it oddly feels like our vacation is coming to an end. Once in South Korea, it’s time for me to get serious about earning money.

There have been a few options I’ve been exploring in my pursuit of making money while traveling. They are as follows:

• Consulting – During my time in Finance, I spent a lot of time using Microsoft Excel. So much so, that I feel comfortable attempting to help others. I was able to find my first client using eLance, but I ended up passing on the project. I’ll discuss this in a future post, but it became  too difficult to manage without a reliable Internet connection.
• Niche Marketing – I’ve been reading a lot about this topic lately. As I understand it, the most common type of niche marketing is to build a search engine optimized webpage targeted towards a specific topic. You build a great website that explains the topic, but also contains links to related products and/or services where you earn a commission from sales. The beauty behind these sites is that they typically take a lot of work to do upfront, but once created should provide a steady flow of income with minimal maintenance – the much sought after passive income.
• Building an Online Business – My dream has always been to start a business; to turn an idea into reality, create value for my customers, and have the luxury of being my own boss. The question always was: what do I do?

Of these 3 options, I’ve decided to pursue building an online business.

Thanks to a great idea from a friend, I’ve decided to build an online website where fellow travelers can purchase travel itineraries.  I think of it as the “App Store” for itineraries. For example, if I were headed to Beijing for 10 days (which I am), I’d be able to purchase an extremely detailed itinerary of what I should do for the 10 days that I’m there. Or, if I were spending a month in Thailand, or 2-days in Prague there’d be an itinerary for that.

I plan on trying to recruit fellow travelers, also looking for ways to make money while traveling, to write the itineraries. Once written, I plan on selling the itineraries using Google Text Advertisements and through traditional searches.

The last thing I did was purchase a domain. It took a long time of searching, but I was very happy to find UnAnchor.com.  (There’s nothing there yet.) I’m looking forward to sharing the process as well as more on the idea in future posts.

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One of the topics I like to write about are my attempts to make money while we travel. I previously wrote about selling books on Amazon. This post discusses my attempt at creating a portable barbeque–a “Nas-Que”.

My previous boss, Jeff, always had a product idea he was certain would strike it rich. The only problem was, he never had the opportunity to get the product passed the idea stage. As you could probably guess from the title of this post, his idea was a portable barbeque that is in the shape of your favorite Nascar. I was skeptical about the idea, but I believe Jeff is a smart guy and he seemed quite certain the product would be a success. I was interested in trying out something entrepreneurial so I decided that I would test the market with the product.

Here was my three step plan to test the market:

1. Create mock-up images of the product –making it look as realistic as possible.
2. Create a mock website where customers would be able to “buy” their very own Nas-Que. While checking out, however, they would see an “Out of Stock” message. Using Google Analytics, I can track how many people went through the checkout process and “purchased” the product.
3. Finally, using Google Adwords, Craigslist and eBay, I would market the product and see what kind of results I would net.

Step 1 – Mock-up Images

eLance is an amazing website. If you’re interested in having a website built, a product manufactured, need legal services, or almost any other type of business service, eLance is your answer. Thousands of individuals, small and large companies are on eLance waiting to bid on your projects. Many of the bidders are located abroad or are individual contributors and thus you can get a project done at an extremely reasonable price.

For the portable Nascar barbeque, I created a word document with extremely detailed specs (Click to download). I took screenshots of the car I wanted it to look like and had examples of similarly sized portable barbeques. I gave the exact requirements for the images I was expecting and put the project up to bid.

In only 2 days, I received 6 bids from people all around the world. People from Bangladesh, UK, Tennessee and others were all bidding to create the portable barbeque images. Each bidder submits a proposal with an amount they will charge and also typically gives examples of their previous work. I sent each bidder some follow-up questions and ultimately chose an individual from the UK who bid $170 to do the project. All of the money is handled through eLance, so just like eBay, eLance stands behind its service and will help settle any disputes if they arise. Fortunately, there were no disputes whatsoever for this project. My UK consultant was fantastic. After clarifying our preferred working methods, he went to work. I asked for preliminary mock-ups and frequent check-ins to ensure we were headed in the right direction. Within 24 hours of starting the project I had very basic mock-ups in my inbox awaiting my feedback. We handled all communication with email and I would typically wake every morning with the latest revision in my inbox waiting for feedback. Within 4 days the project was complete, the images turned out fantastically and my consultant was paid.

Step 2 – Creating a mock website

The goal of this step was to create as realistic of a shopping experience as possible. I won’t go into great detail on creating the website — I’m not an expert by any stretch of the imagination. I purchased the domain name using GoDaddy, built the site using old-school HTML, and used some free Asian labor (Sharon) as my graphic designer. After a very frustrating week building the site (I’m not very good with HTML), it was finally ready to go!

The website was by no means professional looking or could even come close to passing for a true corporate website. But for what I was doing, I thought it was good enough. I think it gave off the impression that we were running the business out of a garage.

Here’s the address of the website, it’s still up: http://www.Nas-Que.com

Step 3 – Marketing

This was the fun part for me. I finally got to try my hand at Google Adwords. Again, I’m not going into detail on Google Adwords because there are thousands of better resources than myself. I’m an absolute beginner but I found it to be an amazing marketing tool. I was able to get a number of people to the site without spending much time or money. I also put the product up on a couple local Craigslist ads…because it’s free. And finally, I put the product on eBay, with the plan to cancel the auction before it ended. I was most interested in using eBay to test the price. I did an auction to see what price people were willing to pay for the barbeque.

What were the results?

Ultimately, I spent around $200 pursuing the idea:

$170 for the 2 images
$10 for the Nas-Que.com domain name
$25 on Google Adwords
$0 on Craigslist
$0 on eBay

I ended up with 5 solid leads. A couple people wanted to know if I had other drivers and others simply wanted to purchase. I was pleased with these results. For the amount of advertising I did, the ROI (return on investment) could very well be there for this type of product. However, after putting a lot of thought into further pursuing the idea (the next step would be licensing and creating a prototype) I decided against it. I know next-to-nothing about barbeques and even less about Nascar. I want to be passionate about what I do; I don’t want it to feel like a job. Sure, I could learn about barbeques and Nascar, but at the end of the day it just didn’t feel right.

I informed Jeff that Nas-Que was going back to just an idea. The experience was a great one however. I had never done something like this before. I gained experience with eLance and Google Adwords. I was extremely impressed with both and will certainly be using them for future projects. Perhaps a consumer electronics product next time though…that seems a lot more up my alley.

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After selling my own books for a while, I then expanded into selling my friends books. It’s extremely easy to do. In this post I’ll show you how to do it and give some of the tips I picked up along the way.

Step 1: Listing items
As long as you’re an Amazon member you can begin selling products immediately. The best way to add items is by searching for the ISBN number in the Search field. The ISBN number is usually found near the UPC code:

Next you’ll want to ensure that you found the right book. Double check the edition number, as well as paperback vs hardcover. After confirming you found the correct book, you can click on the Used link to look at all of the Used books that are for sale:

To sell yours, click the “Sell Yours Here” button on the right-hand side:

Step 2: Condition and Description
You’ll now need to enter the condition of the book as well as a description. Amazon gives you the condition guidelines, which I would recommend reading.

On the description, people generally mention the speed in which they typically ship the item out, if there’s any highlighting, damage to the cover or anything else unique about this particular used version of the book. My generic description is:

“Good condition! Great price! Ships next day!”

Step 3: The all important Pricing step!
I recommend looking at the different prices of the listed books and not just jumping to beating the lowest price by a penny (although, most of the time this is a good strategy). Many times however there are gaps between sellers. For example, the lowest priced seller could be selling the book a few dollars less than the second highest seller. In this case, I typically choose not to be the lowest price seller and opt to take second place and make a few more dollars. Here’s an illustration:

Seller #1: $79.99
Seller #2: $87.99
Seller #3: $88.00
Seller #4: $88.00

In this situation, I would choose to price at $87.98. Meaning I would need to wait until 1 book is sold before mine is sold, but it’s typically worth it to get the extra few bucks. Plus, with most books, sales go very quickly. I would not recommend this strategy if it means going outside of the top 5.

Tip: Always offer “Expedited Shipping”. You’ll be surprised by how many people are willing to pay for the faster shipping. And typically the difference in price to ship the item is less than the additional $3.00 Amazon charges, meaning more profit for you.

Tip#2: Condition hardly matters. Most people tend to buy on price, as long as the book is in acceptable or above condition. However, condition could be used as a “tiebreaker” — meaning if you’re priced the same as another seller, but your book is in better condition, your book is typically purchased.

Step 4: You’ve sold a book..time to ship!
Congratulations on selling a book! You’ll need to log in to your “Sellers Account” to access the shipping information.

Next, you’ll need to print the packing slip. I typically print 2 copies. The first copy I stick inside the book as a receipt and the other I use to cut out the address to place on the wrapped book.

For wrapping the book, I went as cheap as possible and wrapped the book in Trader Joe’s paper bags. It takes a little more time (which I had), but it’s also free. I sold over 45 books over the summer and did not have any issues or bad feedback regarding the packaging. You could also look for cheap plastic envelopes to put your book inside.

For shipping, I recommend using the Post Office’s “media mail” service. The books typically arrive in 5-7 days and usually costs less than $3.00.

Step 5: Keeping track of your P&L (How much money you’re making)
I’ve created a great spreadsheet for keeping track of how much money you’re making. There are two worksheets in the spreadsheet. One is for keeping track of your own books and the other is for keeping track of selling books for your friends (it shows how much of the profit you keep versus what your friend has made).

In the shipping column, make sure to also include any shipping materials cost in addition to the cost of actually shipping the item (if you use Trader Joe’s paper bags, you don’t need to add anything!).

Download the spreadsheet (.xlsx file)
Have an older version of excel? Download the older .xls version.

Step 6: Maintenance
I recommend looking at your pricing at least once a week and adjusting accordingly. Most of the time you’ll be adjusting pricing downward, as people come in and undercut you by a couple pennies to be the lowest price. However, there will definitely be times when a gap exists and you’ll want to adjust your pricing upward (See step 3).

Getting Started
I would recommend simply listing a couple books and trying out the process yourself. However, you’re eventually going to run out of books. I chose to ask friends if I could sell their books. Rather than having their books sitting around, a few took me up on the offer. I asked for 20% of the profit and all they had to do was hand the books over and I sent them a check a couple weeks later. It was really a win-win.

How did I do?
Over the summer I sold over 45 books for myself, Sharon and 3 other friends. I made just about $450 in “profit”. (Most if it isn’t true profit because the cost of the books were higher than the price I sold them for, but after all costs from Amazon, the post office, etc…this was how much I made.) I also made almost $600 for my friends. Finally, it was fun. It’s really exciting seeing the “Sold, Ship Now” email from Amazon. A lot of people look for a way to make money, this is an easy, great way to start!

Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions.

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