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Here’s bad news if you’re having a big problem with debt. It’s that there is no secret or magic way to get out of debt fast. You would need to do one of two things and both would take some time. The alternatives are you that could either scrimp and save and use that money to pay off your debts or you could find ways to earn more money.
Selling items from your home
One way to earn extra money is to buy products in bulk and sell them from your home as yes, this is possible. However, this does not include foodstuffs. If you want to sell food products from your home, you would have to contact your local health department as there are a number of restrictions on products designed for human consumption. In fact, you might have to have some type of license.
Use eBay
If you were to decide you wanted to earn extra money by buying items in bulk and selling them from your home, a good place to sell them is eBay. Thousands of people do just this. For example, you might be able to buy computer hard drives in bulk, then list them on eBay individually. Your profit would, of course, be the difference between what you have to pay for the drives and what you could sell them for – plus shipping and handling.
Be a smart buyer
The important thing here is to be a smart buyer, which means knowing what items would sell for before you buy them. Novice eBay sellers often make the mistake of paying too much for items and either can’t sell them or are forced to take a loss on them. Fortunately, eBay has an option where you can search for items see what they actually sold for. This would tell you what you could expect to get for items, which in turn would help you understand what you would need to pay for them and still make a profit.
Drop Shipping
There is also a way to buy products “in bulk” but without having to warehouse them yourself. It is called drop shipping. The way this works is that you find a company whose products you would like to sell and that will give you a better “price” for marketing their products. For example, you might be able to find a hard drive manufacturer that would be willing to give you a price of $69.95 for a product that retails at $99.95. You could promote the product on eBay, take orders at $99.95 each and then pocket the $30 difference. However, again you need to make sure that you could sell those hard drives for $99.95 each as you will have a lot of competition, including maybe even the manufacturer itself.
Affiliate marketing
An alternative to drop shipping that has become very popular over the past 10 years is called affiliate marketing. The way this works is that you find products that you can sell as an “affiliate” and then market them on your own website. How do you find products to sell? You could go through companies such as Commission Junction (www.CJ.com) or Share-A-Sale (www.shareasale.com) that aggregate companies looking for affiliates. These sites not only list companies by the type of products they offer, they will also show you the commissions you could earn and how popular are their products.
