Affluent beggars
February 8, 2007 | Filed Under Entrepreneurship, Business Opportunities, Money making as young | Leave a Comment
You can earn a great amount of money by begging. As long as you do not waste it on alcohol and drugs you can live a pretty nice life. This family makes $300 daily by begging and sometimes as much as $800, they refer to themselves as “affluent beggars.”
Good to Great: 5 reasons why some beggars earn more money than you
July 26, 2006 | Filed Under money, short term profits, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips, Business Opportunities, Money making as young | 16 Comments
Get something for doing nothing. After walking around in big cities in Europe I have discovered the 5 habits of successful beggars.
1. Keep your voice down
Ask for some change, but do not be loud! Be soft spoken, almost silent. By keeping your voice down you force the unlucky by-passer to stop to hear what you have to say. Once they stop, your chance for success increases!
2. Be “honest”
They know you are not going to use their change to buy a bus-ticket. Try to give them a likable reason to give you money.
This works: ”Yo, I’ve been doing drugs for 2 days and really need to eat something, can you spare some change so I can buy me some bread?”
This fails: “Yo, can you spare some change, I need to take the bus”
In the first example you are undressing your soul in front of them, who can resist giving you money? In the latter example you are just lying and they walk away.
3. Be clean and nicely dressed
All great salesmen try to imitate the prospective buyer. By dressing similar to the ones you beg from you are bridging the gap between you and them. I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but it is easier to give to your own type! If they meet someone very different from themselves it is easier to just walk away.
4. Remember a sucker
If someone gives you money you better remember their face. Then you need to acknowledge them every day you see them by greeting them with “Good Morning Sir!”, “Lovely day, eh?” This will remind them about the day they gave you money, and they know you hope that they will give you more. It is painful to walk away from you after you have been nice to them by remembering their face. Two things happen, either they walk another way to work, or they will give you money to ease the tension they feel inside!
5. Learn to love rejection
95% will not give you money. Love it! You get the opportunity to show how good and clever you are. Shout after them “Have a nice day!”, “Thank you, bye”, “No problem, thank you very much Miss”, “Enjoy the rest of your day Sir!”
The result is that they will think: “Oh.. he was pretty nice.. maybe next time..”
Got more tricks used by beggars? Please feel free to share them.
Money making idea for a waiter with a $170 monthly webhosting bill
July 22, 2006 | Filed Under Entrepreneurship, Practical tips, Business Opportunities | 1 Comment
WaiterRant is probably the best place for inside stories from the restaurant business. He writes exciting and (at least it seems so!) true stories about his life as a waiter in a bistro. If you don’t believe me, just read this piece about “Daddy’s Little Girl.”
Strenghts of the blog:
Really good stories from a real waiter.
We all have a good idea of the restaurant business. We all think we know it. It is a topic that it’s easy for people to relate to.
Weaknesses and threats
The stories he writes are really looooong… it is well written, but it’s a bit tiring to read in front of the screen. People generally like quick stuff.
The blog is really popular and the dedicated server costs $170 a month. He now had to ask for donations to avoid losing money on his blog.
The opportunity
I thought of this when I was thinking of what books to bring for my beach holiday this year. Last year I read “Hotel Babylon” about the life on a luxury hotel in London. This year I wished I had a book of some of the Waiter’s best stories.
Why not look into self-publishing your own book? It seems like an ideal candidate. Successful blog, thousand of readers. Publish a “best of collection”, the initial spark of interest generated from your blog makes the title fly up the chart at Amazon and then the wheels start turning.. By searching in Google for “how to publish your own book” and “publish my own book” I found several companies specializing in it. You can print a paperback version from a few $ if you buy in bulk.
With such a talent for writing it would be very nice to see him cash in on it. What do you think about this idea? Does it have potential? Or is it better to focus on the PayPal tip jar?
Hmm.. this publishing thing? Here are some blogosphere links about publishing books:
An literary agent in stilettos throw in some advice for “Publish On Demand” people.
Bookseller chick explains how a book ends up in her book store
Big important person complains about peole who can not accept their novel being rejected
Niche social networks
July 13, 2006 | Filed Under Business Opportunities | 3 Comments
Trendcatching has written an interesting post about the social network Dontstayin. It targets the clubbers and party community and already has 160 000 members. Now, if I only could come up with a nice niche to exploit through offering an online community to them…
Make some money on Sunday’s World Cup final
July 6, 2006 | Filed Under Start ups, rich on eBay, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips, Business Opportunities, Money making as young | Leave a Comment
I surf around the money making sites of the blogosphere and found this little piece of gold: sell shirts that you make at a CafePress store on eBay.
Sunday is world cup final. Italy - France. Using this scheme you can make some money on Sunday. After the match is over you can sell shirts with the following slogans, sold on eBay (depending on the match incidents):
Italy - France: 2-1
Thierre Henry and Cristiano Ronaldo: The jokes of the Premiership.
It was not offside!
I am sure you can come up with your own suggestions.
Money making idea: Authors sign their books, you sell them on eBay for a nasty profit
July 3, 2006 | Filed Under rich on eBay, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips, Business Opportunities | 2 Comments
We know that books that famous people have signed fetch good prices on eBay. They know that if you come to their book signing with more than 2-3 books, something fishy is going on and they will be unwilling to sign it. Or, a more common hurdle, the book shop are restricting the amount of books you can buy. For example: “Max 2 signed copies per person.”
Here are the 4 steps you need to go through to cash in on the demand for signed books.
Step 1: A celebrity is visiting
Read the local papers and ask the local book stores about upcoming “book signing events.” When a famous writer/person is coming to town to sign copies of his/her latest book or autobiography, you better be prepared.
Step 2: Buy 100 copies of the book
Buy the book in advance through various stores in your community or online.
Step 3: Recruit 100 teenagers/children
Oh, the delight of using child labour. Recruit young people through your local school or sports club. Give them one copy each and tell them to go to the local shopping mall at the time of the book signing to get it signed.
Agree to give them $10 when they return to you with the book signed.
Step 4: Cash in
Now is the time to go to eBay and start selling the product. If you indeed did this with 100 books it will be wise to not put everything up for sale at the same time, slowly milk the cow to limit supply.
This scheme should have the potential to give you several 100% ROI. I have only tested it myself on a limited scale(4 books!). Add your comments, I am happy to receive input from others on the feasibility of the idea.
Make money on commuting
June 23, 2006 | Filed Under Start ups, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips, Business Opportunities | 1 Comment
A guy earns $100 - $300 a day by helping people to drive in the car commuter lane. The best part of it is that he doubles the price if there has been an accident and the traffic is particular bad that day.
Capitalism at its finest.
Business idea from Dane Morgan: Songversations
June 22, 2006 | Filed Under Start ups, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips, Business Opportunities | Leave a Comment
My comment on the opportunity: Pretty nice idea, I think it could catch on and go viral. Just wondering if there is an open source script already that you can use or if you need to develop the solution from scratch?
A downside of the idea is that the site will probably generate low value adsense ads so you need other ways like eg. Allposter to monetize it.
Healthy fast food: A profit opportunity for investors and entrepreneurs?
June 18, 2006 | Filed Under Investing in stocks, Business Opportunities | 2 Comments
Are the burger and french fries on their way down?
A post at Genuine blog made me think of the big opportunity that lies in creating a chain of fast food restaurants like McDonald’s. The unique selling point would be to sell fast food, but healthy food.
The reason for this is that there is a trend favouring healthy options instead of the unhealthy fast food. But.. before I commited myself to start a chain of my own I was looking into if there are other, easier ways to profit from this trend.
Buy shares in Subway?
After I watched Morgan Spurlock’s “Supersize Me” a few years ago I realized that this may be the start of the end for unhealthy fast food outlets like McD and Burger King. I actively started to search for stock exchange listed restaurant chains and fast food outlets that were offering a more healthy product in order to buy shares(stocks) for a long term investment. I had a very hard time finding any! The obvious choice would be to buy shares in Subway. The sandwich chain who offers healthy and good tasting food. Unfortunelately, Subway is a private company.
Innocent is an unaccessible angel
An UK option which offers healthy and good tasting drink products is smoothie producer Innocent. Unfortunelately, they are also a private company and therefore unaccessible for the small investor.
Do I need to make the healthy food myself?
Seems difficult to locate publicly listed healthy companies who compete with Burger King, McDonald’s and Dominos Pizza. Do you know any? Please leave a comment. At this stage, if I am gonna profit from this trend I need to either do it myself, or to go short in the big burger shares.