Got some stuff you don’t want anymore?   Why toss it when you can sell it?!   There are many cheap or low cast avenues for selling your stuff online and off.   What sort of stuff?  Well…pretty much anything you think might turn a buck.

Now, stay back all you veteran online sellers.   I know a lot of people reading this post have been selling online for a while, so these suggestions may be “common knowledge” to a lot of you; however, the intent of this post is as a starting place for people who are new to the idea of selling online.

Yard Sale - Yeah…this isn’t really an online venue, but it’s so obvious that it needs to be commented on.  A liesurely drive through any neighborhood on a weekend afternoon will turn up several hundred yard sales.  Why can’t you do it, eh?   Take all that stuff you were left with after cleaning out your garage or attic and put some price tags on it.   Setting up a yard sale only takes a few hours of work.   Transporting all the suff you don’t want to the nearest thrift store or city dump could take almost as long.   Why not let other people pay you to haul your stuff off?

Don’t think you have enough stuff for a yard sale?  What about your neighbors?   Talk to a few of your neighbors about setting up a multiple house yard sale!   Who knows, it may even turn into a drunken block party which is always fun!

eBay -  It’s becoming harder and harder to sell things on eBay, becuase they have pretty much been overtaken by people in the get rich quick frame of mind trying to push all sorts of shoddy, second rate crap from dubious drop shippers, but there is still opportunity there.   Especially if you have a unique oddball product.   Here are 9 no fuss ebay selling tips to maximize your odds of getting a sale.

Amazon.com -  Yep, you can sell your stuff on Amazon.com…and not just books.   Although they do make it very easy to sell books, and let’s face it, you have too many books!   You KNOW that most of the books you have you’ve only read once and will never read again, but you keep them around the house because you think they make you look smart and educated, even though most of them have titles like “Lusty Bossoms on the High Seas”.   You know what would make you look smarter?  Selling that crap for some extra cash on Amazon.com!

Amazon.com makes selling books incredibly easy.   Their database of published material is so vast that if it was printed out it would stretch from Yanktown, Georgia all the way to Gruntsville, Georgia over 4 Quadrillian times!   This means, that instead of having to input every tiny detail of each book you want to sell, all you have to do is enter the ISBN number, and POOF! Amazon.com does the rest!

Craigslist - Craigslist is a huge FREE online classifed ads system broken down by regions.   So you can list your things for sale in your specific neck of the woods!   And…it’s FREE!   Why pay your local newspaper a listing fee to place a classified ad?  The only thing your local newspaper is good for now days is lining the bird cage…which you’re going to sell on Craigslist anyway.

atOncer.com -  This is an eBay alternative that is completely free.   Whereas eBay charges a listing fee, and other tiny fees for additional options, atOncer.com charges nothing!   Granted, it’s not nearly as popular as eBay, but they’re free, so what the hell do you have to loose?   In addition to being an online auction house, they also offer you the ability to set up your own store!  So if you’ve got more than a just few things to sell - maybe you produce some sort of crafty item like woodburnings, dolls or shrunken heads - you can set up your own free online store!

These suggestions only scratch the surface.   There will be more to come in future posts, so check back!

Amid the sea of useless, money scamming work from home opportunities flooding the search engine results pages you may sometimes stumble across a work from home opportunity that is actually legitimate.   Naturally, you may have to spend so much time weeding through the SERPS before you find a legitimate work from home opportunity that you’ve already spent the equivalent of a full 8 hour work day!

Now, when I refer to work from home jobs, I’m not referring to get rich quick schemes. I’m talking about JOBS - whether working for someone else, or yourself - but I mean performing a service that you do to earn money for the time you spend.   NOT some work from home get rich quick scam where you pay someone for some secret bit of information then spend the next 3 months following poorly written steps out of a second rate eBook you downloaded for $47.   I’m talking about a real job - part time or full time.   You do something specific, and someone pays you for it in a timely manner and on an agreed upon rate.   This could mean actual employment for another company, or working freelance.   But it is legitimate work from home stuff.

There are many companies that have taken to farming out their call center / data entry jobs, because it is something that can be done from anywhere.  Anyone with a phone and an internet connection can do one or both, so it saves companies money to outsource this work to home bodies like you and me.  They don’t have to expand their facilities to accommodate a larger work force, and they (sometimes) can pay a slightly lower rate - which you can gladly accept because you will be saving on gas!

So, to give you a head start, I’ve gathered some of the most appealing and legit work from home opportunities I’ve been able to find.

Convergys -  Employees filed incoming calls - tech support, customer service and sales.

IntelliCare - Call center work for the healthcare communities.   Employees may field both medical and non-medical calls.

LiveOPs - With LiveOPs you are actually a self-employed independent contractor.    You set your own hours.   Calls can range from support to sales.

Staffcentrix -  This company caters to offering work at home job opportunities to military spouses.

Team Double Click - Team Double Click specializes in offering small businesses virtual assistants.   You can be a virtual assistant!

West at Home - With West you will work the phone “obtaining, entering and verifying customer information, answering questions, resolving issues, explaining sales features or offering additional products or services, all while providing exceptional customer service.”

Working Solutions - Get a home based job as a customer service agent for many industires.

We’re all looking to make an extra buck.   Whether it’s to save up for some special toy we want or to supplement our existing incomes to give us a little more breathing room.

But some of us are looking to make an extra buck, because we don’t even really have a buck to begin with.   We’re looking to make an extra buck, not for that cool toy we want, but because we’re desperate to make ends meet.   This situation can lend itself to an easily manipulated frame of mind.   If you’re out there looking to make an extra buck because you desperately need it, PLEASE be careful you don’t get suckered and scammed!Any Google search for “work from home”, “business opportunities”, etc., etc., is likely to yield nothing but get-rich-quick schemes with very, very enticing promises that from a desperate point of view can sound perfectly logical, easy and - most importantly in desperate times - quick.

I’ve been expecting a check in the mail for the past few days - a legitimate check of additional income I spent 15 hours in the cold earning by being an extra on the TV show “Friday Night Lights” a couple of weekends ago (you can actually read about that on my movie blog, Movie-Blast! by clicking here) so you can imagine my glee when I received a check in the mail today.  Not the check…a check.

The check I received was MUCH larger than what I expected to earn from FNL, so at first I wasn’t sure what was going on.   Then I looked more closely…and discovered a SCAM!The check is a REAL check - one thing making this scam VERY inticing - for $4,700.  Not bad!   And is accompanied by a very formal sounding letter which states that:

“We are pleased to inform you that you are one of the lucky winners of SHOPPERS LOTTERY.   You are entitled to the sum of $120,000 USD.”

Sweet!   So, If I’m entitled to $120,000…then what’s this relatively tiny check for $4,700?!   Well…it’s for the scam, of course!Apparently, I am supposed to deposit this check into my account and then send BACK $2,980 to the prize people to cover “Government/bond fees” and then the additional $115,300 will be sent to me.   Yeah…bullshit!

The scam: I deposit $4,700, get back $2,980 which I send to the prize people, then the original $4,700 check bounces leaving my account grossly overdrawn, while they hare sitting pretty with $2,980…which I had been required to send via Western Union, Money Order, or some other method which guarantees them the money.

Sorry for the dirty words here kiddies, but this shit really fucking ticks me off.   Sure I’m clever enough to spot this scam, and sure, most of you are too, but there a lot of people out there - people in that desperate frame of mind - who are not clever enough to spot this.  Not becuase they aren’t smart, but because they are in a position where their judgement is clouded by genuine NEED.

So if you are in that frame of mind - and that’s why you’re reading this blog to begin with - please, please, PLEASE be mindful when you’re out there looking for extra cash.

For reference, here’s the info from the scam I received.

Bank on Check: Harris Bank Roselle in Illinois (yes, a real bank)

Name of Phony Company: Fileds Incorporated

Address of Phony Company (US): 1 Ice Cream Dr, Dunkirk, NY 14048

Address of Phony Company (CAN): 17 Richmond St, London, ON CANADA H3C 4W7

Phone No. of Phony Company: 416-825-5663

Here’s the exact scam reported on Rip-Off Report.com: http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/395/RipOff0395998.htm

I make most of my sales through the CafePress Marketplace which means that most of the people who buy my products never even see my store. However, I have been having an increased number of sales of my Texas themed products from my actual shop. This has prompted me to redesign it. You can take a look at it by clicking this very SEO friendly link: Texas T-Shirts.

You might a notice that this store is NOT a customization of one of the templates hosted at the CafePress site. Nope, this is a completely original site hosted on my own hosting account and it uses a cgi script to “pull” my products from my CP shop. This nifty little cgi script is call CP Shop and can be purchased here:

http://marty.net/go2/site/view/marty/101

I highly recommend it.

Well, I’m now living proof that if you pursue doing what you want to do in a field you want to be in you can end up doing it for a living.

It was less than a year ago that I went on Craigslist to try and rustle up some side work as an HTML handyman when I landed a few gigs with a successful SEO company.   Now I’m going on board with them full time as their Lead SEO Technician.   I’ll be making more money with them than I do at my current 9 to 5 office job, and I’ll be working from home.   We’re busy as hell, so there will be a lot of work for me, but it’s fascinating stuff that I love to do.

And, they are a good company.   As many of you know, finding a good, trustworthy SEO company is like finding a good, trustworthy mechanic…next to impossible.   That’s one thing I dug about this company from day one: they’re straight shooters that don’t promise what they can’t acheive and often acheive results beyond what they do promise.

Well, folks, it came in…my first triple digit check from CafePress. Up until this check, I’ve only received checks in the $20.00 to $40.00 range.

The really cool thing is that my current commissions are already up to over $120.00! Here’s the pic of my fabulous CafePress check (click for larger image):

I’ve been thinking about writing an eBook on how to get started with CafePress. It would start with ultra basic info on getting an account set up and then get into the nitty gritty of making profitable designs, SEO, trend marketing research…what do you think? Should I spend the time on that? Let me know!

It’s scheduled to be mailed out on the 15th!   My first commission check from CafePress in the triple digits.   $220 and some change to be sort of exact.   Not bad at all.   A hefty chunk of that came from the shopping rush of the holidays, but I’ll take it!

Hopefully once a few other projects I have going on wrap up or slow down I can add more shirt designs to the shop.

I’ve been trying to hustle up web design work in order to bulk up my own portfolio before implementing a hardcore SEO campaign on my own web design site. As I’ve mentioned before, Craigslist is a great place to snag small web design gigs, but there are also several sites out there that specialize in helping freelancers find work.

Here’s a few I’ve been checking out over the past few days that look really promising. These also offer freelance opportunities for other skill sets such as writing, media production, marketing, accounting, etc.

All of these have free basic memberships, but most require some level of paid membership to get real benefits from the service:

Guru.com

DesignQuote.net

WebDesigners123.com

iFreelance.com

Project4Hire.com

ContractedWork.com

FreelanceAuction.com

eLance.com

GoFreelance.com

One of the great things about having a WordPress blog is that there are tons of cool plugins available on the net to make blog management a breeze. Here’s 3 plugins that I can’t live without.

Google XML Sitemaps Generator - This plugin is incredible. Every time you publish a new post it automatically generates a new sitemap of your blog AND submits it to Google. This saves you the hassle of doing this by hand - which can take a while - and it means that your site is always up to date in Google’s database. I’ve seen brand new posts of mine turn up in Google searches within just a couple of hours of posting.

Optimal Title - This little plugin reverses how WordPress displays your post title so that the post title comes before your blog name.

Instead of: MyBlog >> 10 Reasons Why Your Breath Stinks

You get: 10 Reasons Why Your Breath Stinks << MyBlog

This makes posting to social bookmarking sites MUCH quicker, and it looks better in search engine results.

NOTE: You must set your permalinks (post links) so that they display the post’s title and not the default dynamic link name. You know, that link that looks something like: ?=23…that doesn’t tell people or search engines anything!

Here’s how:

• Go to OPTIONS in your WP Admin.
• Select PERMALINKS.
• Under COMMON OPTIONS select CUSTOM, SPECIFY BELOW, and
• In the CUSTOM STRUCTURE text box put: /%postname%/

There you go!

Kimli Flash Embed - If you use the visual editor to write your posts you may have noticed that some things don’t end up displaying exactly how you’d hoped, especially if you wrote your post with direct code. The WP visual editor will often strip out HTML tags that your post needs. WP seems to have a particular disdain for the <object></object> and <embed></embed> tags, which are a little important for embedding media.  This plugin can make embedding flash players turn out the way you want.

I don’t know about you, but even if I have several thousand hits to a blog post, if there are no comments on it, I get a little depressed. Sure, I can tell myself that no one commented on the post because I was so absolutely right-on with my analysis, opinion, and prose that my readers were simply rendered speechless, but I only believe that when I’m fall-over drunk.

The truth is, people don’t comment on blog posts for two reasons:

1) No one else has already commented on the post. Well, if no one else has posted on this post it must not be worth it…I’m sure as hell not going to waste my precious time if others haven’t!

2) There’s really nothing worth commenting about. That sounds horrible, but it’s not really an insult. If you post a list of…oh, let’s say…10 Free Internet Tools You’ll Love! people will generally like it, get something out if, and move on. Very seldom will someone post on something that they agree with or that helps them out. Not because they’re rude, just because you have put it up there for the taking…so they’re taking. No worries.

But you can urge people to post if you stir up a little controversy!

Now, I’m not talking about destructive controversy. Not racism, or hate speech. Not something that will turn people off of you completely. I’m just talking about a little, subtle jab. I’m talking about, well, dork controversy.

Let’s say that you write your 10 Free Internet Tools You’ll Love! and you forget to mention (dramatic music) the Firefox browser. You have just created controversy. People who use the Firefox browser are like junkies addicted to open source crack. You haven’t dissed Firefox, so they can’t hate you, but they can sure as hell bang out an “I can’t believe you left out Firefox! Sheesh!” comment to get the ball rolling. And you better believe all the pro and con Firefox geeks will fall right in line, posting like feverish little howler monkeys with ADHD.

Recently, this happened to me…sort of accidentally.

I decided to write a post on MovieBlast! about actors who are also musicians and who are actually sort of good at it. I knew right off the bat that it might stir up something simply because I didn’t have time to list every single actor in a band. But what really put it over the top is that I didn’t mention Jared Leto’s band 30 Seconds to Mars.

Apparently 30 Seconds to Mars fans are just as psychotic as Firefox users! I’m still getting steady comments on this post and it’s almost been up a full week!

In conclusion I would like to say that if you’re not using Firefox to download your 30 Seconds to Mars mp3s then you should burn in hell. Thank you.