I’m not going to discuss the revolutionary way that home computing and the internet have changed our society. It’s way beyond me anyway. What I am going to discuss though is the way the internet has opened doors for us which had previously been closed, and the growing opportunities that this presents us with increasing our incomes. Specifically how anyone can harness the internet to start a business and earn some extra income.

Everybody must have heard about EBay now. You think of EBay and you think of an online auction site, but there’s more to EBay than online auctions. EBay presents anyone who wishes to do so to start a business with minimum costs and risk. You can easily earn an extra income from eBay to supplement your pension and even start a full-time or part-time business. Many people are already earning their full-time incomes from EBay and even more are earning a part-time income.

Before the internet, if you wanted to earn some extra money from selling then you had to either haul your goods to a market or car boot sale or sell through the classifieds of the local paper. The former method required a lot of physical effort and the latter usually a lot of wasted money and people trampling through your house.

Why You Should Use EBay to Start Your Business

Today you can enter the EBay market place with no physical effort and little money. The eBay marketplace is full of eager shoppers browsing daily, millions of them, all you have to do is find something they want and give it to them. Selling on EBay could not be easier. Here’s the process:

• Find a product
• Take a photo of it
• Write a description of it
• Place it on EBay
• Choose a payment method

And that’s all there is to it. When your product sells, you simply post it off. If you’ve never used EBay before you may feel a little nervous, that’s ok we all have to learn and approaching a new venture with a few nerves is natural and preferable to recklessly diving in.
If you are new to eBay, I would advise you to sell a few things while you become familiar with answering emails and the selling process.
You’ll soon get the hang of it and discover the potential of eBay to earn you an extra income. Let’s look at the advantages of this avenue into business.

Virtually No Start-up Costs

If you wanted to build an online business you would have to invest in a website, this will cost you a few hundred pounds and if you are selling goods then the site will have to have a shopping cart which may take the cost to the top end of a £1000.00 for a professionally designed secure site. Of course, you can always find someone to knock you up something cheap and cheerful if you shopped around.

Once you have your shiny new website all filled with products to sell you then need people to visit it. It’s your job to get them there and this takes time. By starting on EBay, you save the money of the website and your goods are instantly displayed in front of thousands of people every day. EBay gets the traffic for you.

When I first started out with my online business, I made the mistake of buying a website too early into my venture. All my sales came from EBay my website just had a few sales and these came from the people I had sold to on eBay and informed them of my site in correspondence.

It took about six months of hard work before my website started to earn an income. The start of my business was totally dependent on EBay. Today sales just keep growing month on month.

I started by selling a few items in auctions. Today, twelve months later I have an Ebay shop with about 250 items listed. I intend to increase this to 500 over the next few months.

Can EBay Be A Real Business

If you buy a product from source A for £3.00, add £3.00 to it and sell it to source B for £6.00, you have engaged in a business transaction, once you’ve paid your costs, for arguments sake let’s say £1.00 you have made £2.00 profit. Perform this action on various products for various prices and you are definitely in business. Doing the same as all the high street stores and market traders. You will also have to deal with the day-to-day problems that every business has to deal with. Like for example, sourcing stock, postage, customer complaints, introducing systems to streamline your operation and save time.

You Choose Your Work Load

If you just want to earn a part-time income to supplement your financial position then eBay is the way to go. Let’s say for example you’d like some extra money (who wouldn’t?) but don’t want to be tied to your computer all day long dealing with orders. On EBay, you can arrange it so all your sales take place over the same week. You could put some work in for a week then relax for the rest of the month having earned yourself some extra income.

Will Every Item I Place On EBay Sell?

No, it won’t. Like selling anywhere, many factors have to come into play in order for your item to sell. A few years ago, a friend and me sold second hand computers as a part-time venture. On weekends, we would load the van up with computers. This was a heavy job carrying computers and monitors. We would drive to a computer fair. Off load all the computers set them up and stay there all day.

Most of the time we didn’t make a single sale. So we had to load all the computers back into the van, drive home and unload them all. At the end of the day we lost money, so we actually paid to do all that work.

I make more in a month on EBay than I made in the sixteen months of running that venture. The point is if an item does not sell, it’s no big problem. All you have done is list it on EBay, you have not had to waste an entire day like we did frequently and return empty handed.

If you’re looking to supplement your pension, build a retirement fund, just earn some extra money or start a fully-fledged online business then EBay is the best way to go. You can get up and running within an hour for little cost. You can even open an EBay shop if you want to sell lots of stock. There’s no physical effort involved. The EBay market place is teeming with buyers all you have to do is reach them. Join the millions of people around the world who are discovering the magic of eBay as a source for earning extra income or starting a business.

Does anybody in their fifties believe they will be looked after by the state when they reach retirement age? I don’t. What is there to look forward to twenty or thirty years of trying to survive on a state pension that will barely cover living expenses. The whole idea of retirement is now being questioned. The sixty-five year old cut off date, when you are supposed to become idle after a lifetime of working is looming towards many people like a dreaded tsunami.

They view it with horror. What is retirement anyway but enforced inactivity. I know many people look forward to leaving the daily grind and travelling the world, of taking life easy and that’s fair enough if that’s what they want, good luck to them. We have to appreciate though that many people want to keep working for as long as they can. Many wont have any choice but to continue working because their pensions have disappeared. Destroyed by the corruption in the system we live in.

The recession we are heading into is looking worse every week. The predictions from the “experts” are becoming more dour with every utterance. Remember, it was only six months ago that our leaders were consoling us with the lies that Britain is better placed than any other country to whether the recession. Now, in six short months we are now told that we are in the worse position than any other country to whether it.

Who knows where we are heading. One thing is for sure though. We can’t trust the same politicians and business leaders to get us out of this mess. It was after all them who got us into it. Their short-term planning looking for the quick profit or fast vote regardless of the long-term impact on society their policies would have, have led us to the brink of economic meltdown.

We have to take care of ourselves. It’s up to us to make plans for our future. It’s up to us to take action to protect our livelihoods. As businesses start to shed many of their long-serving middle-aged workers, self-employment will be our only option if we want to stay active and secure our financial future. It will need a new way of thinking, jettisoning old beliefs that are no longer relevant. No more blind trust in the state, bankers or business leaders. They should be made more accountable. Change is coming and we need to prepare for it.

He earned over nine pounds an hour in his last job and his household expenses were such that he could not take a huge drop in pay. On visiting the job centre. The first time he has ever visited it in his life, never having being unemployed before. He was shocked to see the only jobs on offer were paying the minimum wage.

When he pointed out to the woman who was interviewing him that he could not live on such a low wage, that it would just about pay his mortgage, she shrugged and explained to him that he’d be lucky to get anything better. She told him there were a few casual jobs available through agencies that she could place him with.

He again explained that he couldn’t live on the minimum wage, it would not cover his monthly bills. She told him in that case he would have to try to find a job himself but he had to report to her to check on his progress. My neighbour was shocked at the low wages on offer for experienced people.

My neighbour has just come face-to-face with the new economy created by successive governments. It’s a low wage economy, deliberately created by our governments. They have used threats, mass immigration and outsourcing to drive down wages to such an extent that they are now unliveable wages. The so-called “experts” who have created this disaster are then cutting VAT to encourage people to spend more. Well to all you experts out there, busy pulling the levers trying to kick start the economy. The solution is simple increase the minimum wage to an amount that people can survive on.

And when I say people I mean real people. Not some pathetic politician who claims he can easily live on the current minimum wage for a week. The economics are simple. People have stopped spending because they don’t have any spare money to spend once they’ve paid all their bills. I asked my neighbour what he was going to do. He shrugged and said he didn’t know but he wasn’t working for the minimum wage. As the economy gets worse, and the only jobs on offer are so low paid they are pointless. It’s becoming more important than ever that we have a plan ready to help ourselves because no one else will help us. Least of all that corrupt self-seeking bunch of politicians who form our government.

Let’s face it. These guys have been bluffing for years. Lining their own pockets on the grounds that they have some secret knowledge that keeps the wheels turning. In reality they didn’t know what was happening or how it was happening it was just happening and they took the credit for it. Paying themselves huge bonuses as a reward.

Now the wheels have fallen off they are stood around looking for anyone to blame. “Forces beyond their control”, if this is true then why were they awarding themselves huge bonuses? If they didn’t have the skill, knowledge or expertise to keep the forces within their control why have they been getting paid?

Meanwhile the man who saved the world, the great Gordon is busy throwing our money around as usual and denying that any of the blame is his. Let’s get this right, this is the man who was chancellor for over ten years. The man who dictated financial policy for ten years, the man whose disastrous pension tax grab destroyed the private pensions of millions, but nothing is his fault. Gordon like the rest of the freeloaders that live in Westminster you are deluded. Living in a universe the rest of us don’t inhabit.

Any credibility that was left in our bankers and politicians has disappeared for good. It’s a question of trust and we have lost the little trust we had left. Personally I think all the politicians should be sacked and forced to get a job in this low paid shrinking crackpot economy they have all helped to create. Let them live on the minimum wage and see how they like it. That won’t happen though. While the rest of us are struggling in the economic storm, lashed by the winds of falling wages and rising prices, our dishonourable gentleman will be sat by their fires, warm and cosy thanks to the money they shamelessly steal from the rest of us.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not devaluing the importance of planning and research but I do think that we can get bogged down in planning. I mean what is the point of producing a three-year forecast profits spreadsheet based on guesswork. If you haven’t started your business you can’t predict profit potential. You need some hard data to work with.

When I first decided to start a business I read all the usual blurbs and instructions on the business sites and provided by the banks, and to be honest there was so much information I was starting to get depressed. It looked like you couldn’t start a business unless you had an MBA in business studies.

I wasted too much time trying to create some fancy business plan to please who? Why was I listening to advice from the banks about business plans, I mean if you were taking business advice would you want to listen to organizations which have bankrupt themselves and taken the country with them. Who are the banks to offer advice. I think they are now completely discredited.

Eventually I asked myself why I was labouring over a business plan that meant nothing to me. I wasn’t after any money from the banks so what was I doing wasting my time following their instructions? And wasting my time was exactly what I was doing.

What’s the point of spending months writing some fancy plan that no one was going to see. I finally woke up and ditched the business plan and the marketing plan. My plan was simple; I wanted to set up an extra income stream. I wanted to do this by starting a business part-time. I didn’t need to write that down. I didn’t need to make pointless profit projections. I needed to take action and just do it.

So I jumped in. I bought some stock and started selling it. I invested in a website, I established relationships with suppliers and I was in business. As I got feedback from the marketplace I made adjustments to my business based on hard feedback. Things happened which I could never have expected and I came up with solutions then moved on.

Before I knew it I was in business, solving problems daily. Coming up with new strategies. Buying new stock and up to my eyes in everyday business activity. I learned more in a month of being in the marketplace than I would have by reading all the tons of books out there about how to start a business.

So if you’re thinking of starting your own business. Forget about reading all the opinions from people who have probably never run a business and just dive straight into it. Take action! Taking action is the most important thing. You can deliberate forever, plan for perfection that you’ll never achieve or just jump in. I recommend the jumping in. Once you commit yourself you will start receiving hard data back from the marketplace, from these facts you can base future decisions.