Earn Extra Money

You don’t need to be able to bake to start a birthday cake (cup cake, cookie, etc.) delivery business like this.  There are two ways to start a birthday cake delivery business.

(1) The non-baking birthday cake delivery business:
About mid-summer, before the college school year starts, contact local bakeries.  See if they will let you deliver their cakes to college students in exchange for a commission or flat fee.  Explain to them that your entrepreneurial actions will expand their client base quite a bit.

Here’s how you get started: Once you have a business arrangement in place with a local bakery, get free business cards from VistaPrint.com.  Include your contact information and information about your birthday cake delivery business on the business cards.  Make sure to include what items you are willing to deliver (if you deliver more than just birthday cakes, you can make money even when it is not a college student’s birthday).  Put your phone number (not the bakery’s) so you can get credit for the sales.  Then, make sure you get on the campuses of your local college and hand out your cards to the parents of college students when parents are on campus at the beginning of the year for move-in day and Parent’s Day.  This would also be a great time to collect names and email addresses for a mailing list.  Then, wait until parents call you requesting a birthday cake for their child or cup cakes and/or cookies during finals period or when their child is having a rough time.

Once you receive an order, you can place the order with the local bakery.  When the birthday cake is ready for delivery, you can pick the cake up and deliver it to the college student’s dorm room.  You can either work on commission (receiving a portion of the birthday cake’s cost from the bakery), with a flat fee (i.e. you could charge $10 to deliver the cake on top of whatever the cost of the cake is or both (in this case you could get a commission from the bakery and a flat fee from the buyer).

Note #1: Instead of free business cards, a refrigerator magnet with your contact information and services might be better, as parents will see it often, especially when they’re hungry and possibly when they’re in the kitchen talking on the phone with their college student.  You can also get cheap refrigerator magnets from VistaPrint.

Note #2: You likely don’t actually have to have a particular bakery’s approval to run this business, as you can just order the cakes as a regular paying customer would.  If you choose to go this route, just make sure that you don’t claim an official affiliation with a particular bakery.  Knowing that you don’t have to have a special partnership to get started can give you some leverage in negotiating that partnership, as you can inform potential bakery partners that you can go to any bakery to buy cakes.  That should give you a reasonable platform on which to negotiate a lower price for the cakes (which means you’ll earn more money per cake).  Additionally, be sure to ask for volume discounts, as you’ll hopefully be able to bring them a lot of business.

(2) The baking birthday cake delivery business:
This is somewhat self-explanatory, but you could easily work from home and run this cake delivery business.  You would just need to do the cooking yourself and perhaps you could capture more of the profit this way.  Be sure to check to see if you need to be licensed to sell food products in your area.

Most people who use the Internet know how to sell on Ebay or are capable of figuring it out, but many people are too busy and never get around to actually doing it.  You can sell on Ebay for other people.

Advertise on college campuses to get valuable stuff to sell on Ebay.

Why college campuses?
College students don’t have a lot of stuff, but they’re very easy to target with advertising and they always want to earn extra money.

Ways to advertise to college students:

• Campus flyers.  Be sure to advertise with flyers about a month or two before the end of the school year.  Use a headline like “Don’t throw things away.  Let me sell them for you.”  Try to remind students on the flyer that they’re going to be busy (especially towards the end of the year) and if they don’t sell their stuff, they’re just going to end up throwing it out at the end of the year or lugging it back home.
• Place advertisements in college newspapers.
• Hire a college student to go door to door for you examining/collecting things to sell on Ebay.
• Craigslist.org.  Place a free advertisement on Craigslist for your “sell your stuff on Ebay” service.  You won’t be advertising strictly to college students, but that’s good as you’ll be increasing your exposure beyond the college campus.  If you’re going to set a time and place to collect things to sell on Ebay, you might as well invite people on Craigslist to bring you their things as well.

Picking Up Stuff to Sell on Ebay:
Make this easy on yourself.  Pick a time and place where people can bring things to you that you’ll sell on Ebay.  Pick somewhere on a college campus (if allowed) or near a college campus in order to make it easy for people to bring you their items.  For larger items or items people are not willing to hand over to you, you can take pictures of items and collect information about them and sell them on Ebay with the knowledge that the college student who owns the item will allow you to pick up the item once the Ebay buyer has paid.

How to get paid?
You can either charge a flat fee when something sells on Ebay or you can get paid on commission.  Work this out with your suppliers (students, people from Craigslist and others) ahead of time.

Good luck!  I hope you earn extra money!

How many small businesses do you know that don’t have a website?  Believe it or not, there are thousands upon thousands of small businesses lacking websites — it’s amazing and it leads to an opportunity for you to make money.  There are very simple ways to create a small business website for free that are non-technical.  That means you don’t need to know how to write a single line of code in order to get started.  If you’re looking to make extra money by building small business websites for local businesses but you’re afraid of technology, refer your 13 year old to this post and ask him/her to explain it to you.

First, how is this a way to make money?  Well, quite simply, you can walk into every local business in your town and offer to build them a small business website.  You’re not offering a custom website with many consultations between you and their staff; you’re offering to bring them into the 21st Century, get them a web address and add a few pages of content that will be useful to their existing and potential customers (things like contact information, an about me page, a menu if they’re a restaurant, etc.).

If they tell you that they can do that themselves, ask them why they haven’t done it before.  If they tell you they don’t think it’s worth it to spend $300-$400 on a small business website, tell them that every time one of their customers searches for their business online and can’t find it, they go to another business (one of their competitors).  In addition, if you have informative content online, it is likely to be indexed by search engines, which means unsolicited visitors will stumble across your site.  Some of those visitors are likely to convert into business customers meaning that a small business website could bring in enough extra business to pay for itself shortly.

Remember, you’ll have to write content to add to each small business website.  I suggest at least five pages of text at about 400-500 words per page.  You’ll want to have all of the questions you want answered ready the first time you meet with the small business owner(s) so that you don’t have to keep going back to the business when drafting content for the website.  Alternatively, you can have the business owner(s) or a staff member write the text and send it to you.

Now, how do you actually build a simple small business website?  Well, there are two ways:

(1) Dev Hub

This way is:

• 100% not-technical.
• Has a lot of features but is not extremely customizable.
• Completely free.
• Does not involve hosting (it is taken care of for you and your client by Dev Hub).

A little more information: Dev Hub is a completely free web-based site editor that is no harder to use than editing an email.  It is perfect for putting up something along the lines of a five page website with a few pictures (just what a restaurant or similar small business would need).  I currently use Dev Hub for many small sites.  Dev Hub’s site editor remains free by making money from the websites that use its service if website creators choose to add revenue-sharing advertisements (meaning that both you and Dev Hub would share advertising revenue, but only if you chose to add advertisements to your small business websites).

For an example of a small business website built with Dev Hub, see LasVegasConstruction.com.

To get started with your own Dev Hub site, click here.

(2) Wordpress.ORG

Wordpress.ORG is a free blogging platform used by millions of blogs.  It is by far the favorite blogging platform of the blogging community.  It can easily be used to host pages of information as well (as opposed to a blog format), which is just what a small business website would need.

This way is:

• Not very technical.  You will need a hosting package, but (and this is a big BUT) many of the top hosting companies have an auto-install feature for Wordpress, so that you don’t have to do anything except go into your hosting control panel and click something along the lines of “install Wordpress,” depending upon your host.  I recommend BlueHost.com (used to host Earn Extra Money), as the customer support is superb (you can call or email them, but you can also go to the BlueHost.com homepage and use the live chat option at any point during the day, which lets you get your questions answered in real time without waiting on the phone – amazing).
• Extremely customizable.  On a Wordpress site, you can easily modify almost anything you would want to modify on a small business website.
• Free (except hosting).  Hosting should cost $60-$120/year for a small business website, but the Wordpress.ORG software is free.

Note: Make sure to go to Wordpress.ORG and not Wordpress.COM.  Wordpress.COM is very similar to Wordpress.ORG (they were built by the same people) but websites created on Wordpress.COM are more restrictive.

Originally, I was just going to post about YouRenew.com, a site that allows you to easily sell electronics (and is so easy to use that it gets my seal of approval) but I then discovered some other options for you to explore as well.  So, first YouRenew.com, then the other websites that allow you to make money recycling electronics.

YouRenew.com is a website that allows you to sell electronics, even if they don’t work.  Sure, you can probably sell electronics on Ebay for a little bit more money, but selling your electronics to YouRenew takes next to no time and thus can help you make money fast.  All you have to do to make money recycling is look up the model you’re looking to sell and select the condition from the options provided by YouRenew and the site will tell you how much they are willing to pay you.  You then send your item in (they pay for shipping) and, voila, they send you a check.  You can sell some electronics for a couple of dollars and others for a couple hundred dollars (certain phone models).

Other sites that allow you to make money recycling by selling electronics include:

• CellForCash.com
• Gazelle.com
• GreenPhone.com
• MyBoneYard.com

Are you a fitness buff?  If so, this part time business is for you.

Plenty of universities offer fitness classes to students for a fee.  It’s not widely known, however, that university gyms often hire graduate students and other university affiliates to teach these fitness classes (I’m not talking about gym classes for credit, but pay-to-participate fitness classes like “Beginning Aerobics” or “Intermediate Spinning”).  This is where you come in.  If a university is hiring people who aren’t career trainers or fitness instructors to teach fitness classes and you think you’re qualified, then keep reading.

How to get started:
This way to make money is really quite simple.  Simply find out which universities are within driving distance of your home.  Then, look up the contact information for each university’s athletic department and give every athletic department a call.  Be enthusiastic and have a pithy explanation of your fitness experience ready… and good luck!  Hey, the worst they can say is “no.”