I am not new to the ebbs and flows of eBay reselling, but this time I have to start doing something different. At the time of this writing I have been experiencing slower than usual sales on my eBay store. That’s not really news. It happens. Is it a glitch? Do my items suck? Is the economy bad?

It feels like it is all of the above, but there is no way to tell. I have decided to make some changes to how I approach my self employment / entrepreneurship that will hopefully help me financially and mentally.

Essentially, with current financial forecast looking a hazy for a while I want to concentrate more in my eBay store’s best selling categories and start working harder towards other established revenue streams.

From Everything To Niche

For a long time, when I first started reselling I would grab anything that would sell for a profit. When I was still building up my inventory it was essential to come home with as many valuable items I could. Now that I have a fair amount of items, my sourcing strategy has changed significantly in the past 6 months.

I’ve finally started to understand the benefits of niching down to fewer categories and have been embracing that. I noticed a year ago that one of my best selling categories somehow was hats. It wasn’t like I purposely bought a bunch of hats, but that was a certain item that just starting selling consistently for me.

A few other categories I have been dabbling in is wood rubber stamps and music CD’s. I fell into rubber stamps after my mom donated a huge collection of her old ones for me to sell, and they did incredibly well. I’ve been buying them up ever since if I can get them cheap enough and sell them as singles.

Music CD’s is a newer one. I’ve had a JFJ Easy Pro for a while and wanted to make some use of it when I found out that rock CDs have a solid sell through rate. I found a huge lot of them at a local thrift for .25 cents each and was hooked on selling them. I’m attracted to the consistent easy to source bread and butter profits.

Overall, sourcing and listing has been much easier. I’ve been able to narrow my search to areas that I know provide items in my wheelhouse, and listing with basic templates in place has more than halved the overall time. If I keep listing at this pace I can continually grow my store and out list my sales. Its renewed my fire for reselling.

Multiple Revenue Streams

One thing I think is really important when leaving any traditional employment is to have multiple streams of income. Let’s face it, neither your or my business is as financially stable and secure as a company like Wal-Mart.

Since eBay has been my main income, its very stressful when sales are slow. It doesn’t help when you check YouTube and the whole reseller community is making videos also complaining about slow sales. You do everything you can within your store to boost your numbers, but it makes you feel a little crazy.

Whether the slowdown comes from the economy, eBay, or my garbage items, it broke me this time. I decided to do what I can and just leave it alone. Now I am trying to focus my efforts into blogging and producing content around my reselling business.

Affiliate Marketing

This is a precarious subject to just talk so openly about. Some people like to be a little hush hush that they make money from affiliate ads, but I truly feel like it is so common and engrained in internet culture that it exists that you should just own it.

Like all of you, I buy things and have opinions on it. Why not produce a piece of content around a product I purchased that may help others see a real person using the product and their thoughts on it. I’m not talking about anything new here, but I am trying to get myself psyched up for it. I don’t see myself as a salesman, just a dude trying to share some real thoughts.

Basically, I’d like to start making conscious efforts to share reviews of products that I have purchased and really like. I want to be open about the affiliation and make sure I am being totally honest in my feedback.

Blogging

Blogging ain’t dead! I hope! I’ve made many blogs in the past and none of them got to big success. I’ve got to a point of profitability just not that big payoff you want when you watch channels like Income School. Unfortunately, I let my old blogs fall apart as my interests changed and I felt confined in the niche.

Although, I am not following the traditional approach of niching down, I have high hopes this blog will work out. Even though doing video aka YouTube would probably yield fast results I am just more comfortable here, like this. I don’t mind being on camera, but I don’t want to be a “YouTuber”

YouTube

Upon writing this I decided to check on my channel and see how it’s doing. I recently passed 300 subscribers. So, first let me say thank you for that. To anyone who is subscribed to me I very grateful. But, I don’t know what I did. I have only 10 videos on my channel and the algorithm just picked me up.

The thing is, it would be obvious to keep riding that train and give YouTube what it wants. It just sucks that the video that got popular was me when I was in a frustrated, low-effort state, and using another controversial YouTuber as my click bait. The thing is, I did all that because I thought it would work, and it did.

A lot of people agreed with my thoughts and it got a lot of good feedback. Its just not the type of content I’d like to continue making.

I am a little gun shy now when it comes to making another video. I want to make content just sharing what I am doing from a layman regular guy perspective. It just seems like when you post something on YouTube your opinion just seems larger than life and you better know what you are saying.

I want to still pursue making videos, but I want to reframe how I approach it. I don’t want to chase the algorithm.

The Economies Future Looks Bleak Or Is it?

Here in the United States after COVID we have been in an constantly inflating economy. Prices for everything across the board have jumped significantly. Wages have stagnated at most jobs unless you hop from job to job. Federal minimum wage is STILL stuck at $7.25. What the actual fuck!?

Its obvious that right now we are either in a recession are fixing to be in one. There’s more and more people falling behind on house and car payments. Consumer spending has changed drastically since base needs are taking priority over “wants”.

I feel like the government tried tricking us into thinking somehow all that money they printed off for nothing would be okay when it was obvious to anyone financially educated or not that something was wrong.

I don’t know if the financial side of YouTube has me running for the hills, but I think its good to err on the side of caution when it comes to ones finances. Having all of my eggs in one basket like eBay is frightening.

This blog post is me basically advising myself on something I believe about the state of things right now, All anyone can do in financially unstable times is work hard, make more money, and waste less of it.