Ebay Positive Feedback

How To Make A Dollar has hit a new milestone in our pursuit of $1,000,000!  We received our first feedback on ebay... and thankfully it was positive!

Since we are now a 100% positive feedback ebay seller you should buy one of our listed items.  http://myworld.ebay.com/how2makeadollar/
Especially the mothers day card!  Out bid the current highest bidder... are you really going to let them love their mother more than you love your mother???

Unique Mothers Day Card

Mothers day is coming up soon.  Howtomakeadollar offers a very unique service of providing personalized online cards.  Mothers day is a great opportunity to take advantage of this feature.  We have listed our service of providing a unique personalized mothers day card on ebay.  If you would like to have your mother featured on her own website for the day that contains a personalized sonnet, love poem, and/or haiku written by us, for you... place your bid.

To get an idea of how your page will look, you can see several previous personalized cards here, here and here.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=200468391272&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT#ht_500wt_1071

Check out other great Mothers Day gift ideas... www.todayisjustforyou.com

Tips for selling things on Ebay

We have blogged recently about selling things you get for free on ebay.  Well, we have started taking our own advice and getting free stuff and selling it on ebay.  So far we have made $32 in the last 3 days.  So far this appears to be our most profitable idea.

Recently we sold an item on ebay and we were able to ship it for $3.50.  Since I was unable to get in touch with our accountant, I had to use my own financial skills.  I assumed I would be able to sell 5 of the same item I was able to ship for $3.50 and ship 5 of them for $4.95.  Well as you can imagine I was a little surprised to find out it actually cost $13.95.  So instead of making $18 off of our recent sale we only made $9.  Its $9 more than we had before,  which is good, but not as good as $18.  So when you are listing an item make sure you know how much it will cost you to ship it before you end up having to pay more to ship it then you get for selling the item.

We have actually blogged about this concept before... but since that was three months ago and we have a short memory we forgot.

Mother Mary Food

I'm sure you've heard about appearances of Mary (the mother of Jesus) in various items. I remember hearing about Mary appearing in people's french fries, mold spores on a window, and pepperoni pizzas. There is a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to this phenomenon. Usually when you hear about this kind of thing you probably shrug it off and forget about it. Fortunately for you, Howtomakeadollar never forgets anything, and we actually specialize in all things related to mold spores, french fries, and pizza. With our excellent memories, strong practical reasoning, and opportunistic cooking skills, we've stumbled upon a fantastic money-making opportunity for Mary enthusiasts.

You see, Mary appearances can be extremely valuable. In 2004 a woman found Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich and sold it for $28,000 on Ebay. 

Now before we explain how you can get in on this racket, you need to ask yourself some serious, soul searching questions. First of all, is it ok to eat Mary? Are you blessed if you eat the Mary pizza? Are you cursed? If you don't eat it, then what do you do with it? Do you hang it on the wall? What if you eat part of it and then hang the leftovers on the wall? These are the decisions you must make if you are a true Mary enthusiast. 

Personally, as a frequent eater of pizza, grilled cheese, and french fries, I'm about 50% sure that you are most blessed if you eat Mary. If she appeared in your food then I take that as a green light. If she appears as mildew on your window, that is probably a sign that your window is dirty. 

Now, how can you make money off the Mary phenomena?

Make Money by Eating Lots of Mary Food

Business Description: People travel all around the world to see Mary appearances. As I mentioned above, someone paid $28,000 for a partly eaten Mary sandwich. Obviously these people are on to something. Mary food provides major blessings. If you want your business to be blessed, then you need to get lots of Mary food and eat it. If eating it doesn't work then you need to get even more Mary food and hang it on your wall. The more Mary food you have, the more you will be blessed. Its very simple.

"I like what you're saying, but where can I get lots of Mary food?"

Glad you asked.

You can buy it from Howtomakeadollar. We will gladly sell you Mary toast, Mary pancakes, and Mary sandwiches for a dollar. One of our contributors is pretty sure he can procure some Mary waffles too. However, these are more expensive because of the difficult waffle market.

"This sounds completely reasonable to me. Can I see photos of the Mary food before paying for it?"

No.

"Well, alright... This seems like a very trustworthy and reputable website. How do I order a dozen?"

Email us at Howtomakeadollar@gmail.com

Another way to make money off this:
Sell toasters or frying pans that are manipulated in a way that causes them to look like Mary. Of course, these won't be "real" images of Mary because they are artificially created, and if people are buying your toasters, then presumably they are aware of this. So if you make these toasters, you may as well offer all kinds of images on them. My suggestions are Mary, Che Guevara, and maybe Abe Lincoln. I think the irony of having Lincoln on one side and Guevara on the other would be ironic enough to sell a lot of these. Mary, of course, should stand alone on her toast. I think there are other good images you could use as well.

Make Money at the Olympics

The other day I was going about my business, making money hand over fist, and watching all my stock investments go up while the market went down, and checking out my supermodel wife, when it hit me. The Olympics are this year. Like now. Who knew? Actually, they start today, Feb 12. In Vancouver British Columbia, which is in Canada.

Three ways to make money at the Olympics

Get really good at a sport

1. Pick a sport that you think is an Olympic event

2. Get really good at it by playing first person video games and watching it on TV. This will give you some basic knowledge of how the sport works. The rest is just fitness, dieting, and motor skills, which anyone can do

3. Go to Vancouver

4. Win a gold medal in dramatic fashion, say, with a broken leg, or by beating some Russian guy.

5. Suddenly become really rich. (Not sure who pays you for this, but someone will)

Follow Athletes Around

If you don't feel like playing the requisite video games to become an Olympic athlete you can make money by following athletes around.

1. Find an Olympic athlete. You can identify them because they are usually extremely muscular, good looking, and fast. If you find an athlete that is not all of the above, you should look for a different one, because that one isn't going to win.

2. Follow athlete around.

3. When the athlete drops something, pick it up

4. Sell item on Ebay, or Craigslist if the item is really dirty and broken

5. Take pictures of athletes clothes, and any members of the opposite sex that appear with the athlete

6. Sell photos to gossip magazines.

7. Take pictures of athlete injecting self with steroids

8. Sell photos to athlete

Use an Athlete as a Human Billboard

You will need:

1. Post-it Note

2. Sharpie

How it works

1. Sneak up behind athlete just before the event starts

2. Write the name of your business on the post it note

3. Slap post-it note on athlete's back

Grand Duchy of Luxembourg

If you want to make more money, why not live in the country with the highest average income?  That county would be Luxembourg, or as it's officially known, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.  With a population less than that of Albuquerque, the GD of L is the land of financial opportunity, especially in the sectors of banking, steel, and "industry".  As a Luxembourgian Industrialist, you would enjoy a higher average income than your American peers while consuming fine delicacies such as fried river fish, cooked cheese, and bouneschlupp.  You may also find it necessary to become trilingual, as most Luxemburgers speak French, German, and the made up language, Luxembourgish.  There are few left in the world that speak it, so learn that gibberish before it's completely forgotten.  There are technology opportunities too, as Luxembourg has recently caught on to the internet and its moneymaking potential, attracting internet startups and companies such as eBay and Skype.  In conclusion, though it is landlocked and bordered by Belgium, Luxembourg citizens enjoy a high quality of life and the highest average salaries in the world, so pack a bag, hop on a plane, and emigrate to Luxembourg!

Thanks to wikipedia for many of the trivial tidbits included in this post.

How to make $1.13 on Ebay

Howtomakeadollar is pleased to announce its first profitable idea!

Shortly after Christmas, I got on Ebay and sold a few items that I didn't want. I sold an old DVD of Good Will Hunting, a devotional book called "A Year with C.S. Lewis" that I never read, and never planned to read, and a box of body butter and shower gel that I "won" from some guy at a gift swap at work.

If you've ever bought anything on Ebay, you already have an account, and it is really easy to sell something. If you've never used Ebay before, I don't know what to tell you. You are clearly not the kind of person who is likely to be very successful in life, and you should quit trying.

I didn't know what the demand for these items would be, so I just marked everything for a dollar. All three items were bid higher, and I made a total of 9.75.

You are probably wondering why the title of this blog is how to make $1.13 right?
Shipping costs

You have to list shipping prices on your item, but I didn't know how much it would cost. Also, Ebay was being weird and would not let me charge more than $3.00 for shipping. I don't know why that happened, or how to avoid it. Anyway, I lost a lot of money on shipping and only came out with $1.13

That being said, I assume the people who bought these items are *regular readers* of this blog. If so, you can feel free to send a few dollars to me to cover the total shipping. You seem like nice people

*Howtomakeadollar is pleased to announce that our readership has expanded significantly around North America and as far away as Nauru, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and our daily reader numbers have multiplied by a factor of 20 in the past month.

**Seriously. Two people from Nauru have visited our site and spent time reading it. One of them even left a nice comment that we had to delete because it was too nice. See our post about Nauru