Here’s the idea.  Collect all of those thrown away couches, dressers, book selves etc.  Talk with the campus.  Offer a ‘recycling’ service to the campus.  Selling it that you are doing a ‘green service’ and saving the school money by not having to get as many dumpsters.

Here’s what you have to do:

• Talk to the school.  See if you can set up a central location.
• Rent a Uhaul for a day.
• Pick up the stuff.
• Rent out a storage location (or put it in your garage).
• Put the crap in the storage location.
• Save it until the beginning of school.
• Put all the stuff on craigslist.
• Collect the cash.

Simple and easy.  I am thinking about trying it out next year.  I just thought of it too late this year. Has anyone tried this before? What do you think?  Have you had any idea’s lately?

Here we go.

1. Decide what your niche is going to be.  This seems like a hard thing to do … it can be. Too many people try to do too many things.  Don’t make an electronics store.  Make a high end digital camera store. The more specific the better.  Or you can go after a specific demographic. Let’s assume you want to start an electronics store for college students.  That narrows down your market more and helps define a very good niche. Don’t pick a niche which you care nothing about.  It will be about 1,000 times harder for you to focus on something that you don’t care about or have no connection to.  If you have a connection and care about the niche you will more likely to succeed!
2. Ok now on to the very practical! Our niche is going to be an electronics store for college students.  We need to find a supplier for the electronics.  Preferably a supplier that will drop ship the products for us so we don’t have to hold the inventory ourselves.  If you are looking for electronics for example simply type in to google your favorite wireless router brand for example D-Link.  Go to D-Link’s page and normally there is a ‘Where to buy‘ section.  On D-Link’s site they have a quality list of Distributors which work with D-Link.  That’s gold.  If we go to Linksys’s website as well we find they have a list like this as well.  It was a little harder to find but I found it here. It just takes a little digging! The search feature on most sites is also very helpful! Now compare the two lists.  Everyone on Linksys’s list is also on D-Link’s list.  You just found a list of 4 suppliers for your products.
3. Fill out the applications for each of these suppliers.  Most of them require a application fee but once you start selling products you can recoup that fee from them.  Some of the application require references from other business’ that you have done business with … now that can be a problem if you are just starting out.  From the searching that I have found I couldn’t find anyone saying they couldn’t get an account with these guys if they didn’t have any references.  When you are asking for ‘terms’ you MUST have references including bank references!  They aren’t just going to give you stuff on goodwill and hope you pay them back. Yeah right!
4. The next step is setting up some sort of online store front. This is where you are going to have to do some research.  There are just too many options to say which one will work best for you.  Here’s a couple to get you started. Resource 1, resource 2 and resource 3.
5. On to the marketing. Now that you have your site and your products set up! Its time to get your name out there and tell people about your site.  I would suggest a couple of ways of doing this.  Forums, twitter, facebook, and other social highways.  They can provide some amazing traffic! Funny enough … the SBA has some great ideas as well.  Check them out here.

That’s the very basics of starting an online business.  I hope this has been at least somewhat helpful for someone.  What do you think? Is there any other good resources you know of?

Here it is.

**WARNING!** It is NOT done.  I still have a ton of work to do on it and you will tell its missing a ton of stuff.  Including videos, program files and other misc. files.

Please review it.  Let me know what you think. Comments are more than welcome! What do you think of the idea.  Etc.

For example.  I am against multi-level marketing in every way, shape and form.  I think that exploiting your relationship with someone that you are friends with to try and sell your product is a horrible misuse of your relationship.

Networking is a skill.  It needs to be done with some sort of tact.  I don’t know if there are some sort of rules that define how this works or not but there needs to be.  Here are some good ones but here are my rules of networking:

1. Don’t sell at any function other then sales meeting.
2. When you network REMEMBER names. I know its hard.  Work at it!
3. Make eye contact, be interested and don’t just think of them as a source of $$! They have a family, feelings and friends.  Ask about them.
4. Don’t abuse relationships.
5. Don’t EVER use other people’s Facebook friends, linkedin friends, twitter friends or anything social networking platforms friends to get a lead!

Networking is good.  Just don’t abuse your relationships and friends.  They are people too.