Selling Bookmarks for Profit

By Stephan Miller
Posted Tuesday, August 3, 2004

Everyone has passions and interests that they can cash in on, even if they don't have the time to write an ebook. Where is this gold mine hiding? In your bookmarks, in your favorites file. Whetever you call it, there is money hiding there, just waiting for you to cash in on it.

No matter how strange and unusual your interests are, there are others out there that share the same passions that you have and if you can get them to the information quicker they will pay you, not much, maybe $5 but find 1000 of these people and you have created a small fortune.

What you are betting on is they don't have the time or knowledge to do the massive amount of searching that you are willing to do. But they will pay you to find this free info for them.

I was skeptical when I started to try it. Why would someone buy a list of links? Because the search engines are becoming unruly. When is the last time that you typed a few search words in and actually found everything you were looking for on the first search page? When some search engines became pay-per-click, that was another sign that something better was needed. A site should be rated on content, not on how much money and advertiser pays or if you put all of the correct metatags in.

My first experiment was selling a list of links to wholesale performance automotive sites and articles that I found on the web. I timed it right, too. Right after "The Fast and the Furious" came out. Total profit $1000 in four weeks on eBay. Then I worried about feedback. Would my customers think I ripped them off. Guess what. I consistently get a higher percentage of customers that give good feedback quickly on my various link lists. This list was an example of using trends for profits. The trend is hot. There are millions of newbies. They want the info fast. Upside: quick money. Downside: short term.

My second one was to do the same thing, but for my favorite vintage motorcycle. One model, that was all. Not for all makes and models. I have consisently made about $40 a week on eBay for about 8 months now off of just this list. It always sells. This is an example of finding a niche. Upside: longterm, few or no competitors. Downside: no huge deposits.

So how do you start. First you need a desktop search program like Copernic, Webferret, or Arrow Search. There are probably others out there now, but these are my main three. I recommend Copernic because you can save your searches and customize everthing in the program. If you do, go for multiple "exact phrase" searches until you find everything you need.

You will also need to break your favorites into seperate file folders so you can organize them. Or get a bookmark program like AcqUrl. Do your searches and click the links. If a site looks promising, bookmark it to look at it later. Don't look to far into it at this point or you will get sidetracked into surfing. You can always surf later. How do you know when you have found enough? When you are near the end of your search and great sites are getting few and far between. But remember the more links you find, the more your customers will love you and the sites will the greatest contents do not always have the greatest search engine ranking.

When you are done looking, you can export you bookmarks from Internet Explorer or your bookmark manager. In Explorer, go to File and then Import/Export. It will create a html page with all of your bookmarks as links, but you are not done yet. Open the page in your html editor and as you browse through the sites, add a desciption and rating to each site and remove those sites which don't meet up to your standards. The page doesn't really have to look pretty, just informative and functional.

Now you can either sell your page as is or compile it into an ebook. The benefits of the first is that you can send the list in an email or as an attachment. The benfits of the second is that your cuctomers can't resell your ebook. Yes, there is such a thing as compilation copyright. Write a short intro to your list and it is your property, but with just the page, your customers can strip the links and sell them as their own. Either way you choose to go, you can use the process outlined in "Automated Ebay Sales" to create quick profits. The book is available for free at the website. (www.profit-ware.com)

About The Author
Copyright 2002 Stephan Miller
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Stephan Miller - Ebay seller, software developer, and writer.
naphets66@hotmail.com