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When I was a kid, I used to read a lot. I really enjoyed mystery stories. My favorite series during my early grade school years was “The Happy Hollisters,” later progressing to “The Hardy Boys.” In my early years with the company I was employed with, I had opportunity to travel a lot (I was the only one who wasn’t married). During my travels, I always looked for copies of the books I used to read as a child and began to come across Happy Hollister books. Let’s suppose for the sake of this example that I had acquired over a 100 duplicate copies I wanted to sell. What can I offer potential buyers of a simple item such as this?
Brainstorming is one way to look at something to determine if there are other ways to approach the product. It generates lots of ideas and solutions (good and bad). Big companies use this process to look at their existing product lines to examine area for improvement, as well as develop new product ideas.
If you have family members or others who are interested in similar things, get together and talk about you product. If you don’t have someone to help you with this process, then do it by yourself. There is much you can learn by following the brainstorming process. When you brainstorm, you are tapping the creativity of not only yourself, many people. By not placing limits on their creativity, lots of ideas will be generated. Many will be way out there, but there will be some that will be usable, and others that will spark additional thoughts of creativity within the minds of the participants. You may even come up with a whole new business idea from a totally unrelated brainstorming session. A high level look at the brainstorming process will give you an idea of how to approach the process:
Using our hypothetical example of the Happy Hollisters, let’s assume our goal here is to sell the books individually. Keep in mind, that this is only an illustration and prior to investing significant efforts to develop a residual income item, we would want to make sure that our auction item ‘will’ actually attract visitors. To start off our brainstorming session, I introduce the team to the books, discuss the goals of this session (find a way to successfully sell my books on eBay and produce residual income) and give them a copy of the titles of all the books in the series to help spark ideas.
Title List:
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In a typical brainstorming session I might get the following types of ideas:
Who would want the books?
Similar books to the Happy Hollisters
Detective Stories
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In looking at the above list, I only have a
very high level view of topics. Most would be difficult to make into a
business without a more in-depth review to see if there is an opportunity
lurking behind the header. I certainly have not defined a method of
producing residual income at this point in the process. Some of the topics
will be important later when I am working on the design of my auction as I
want to be very informed about what is being sold. However, for this
example, I’m curious about the writer. Did Jerry West write other books
I would be interested in? In doing a little research, I find out the
following:
Jerry West didn’t write the books. That was the pen name of Andrew Svenson for the Happy Hollister series. The original series was based on his own family. Andrew Svenson also wrote a number of other series under various pen names:
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Wow, lots of worthless info? What can I do
with this information? Probably nothing that will in and of itself produce
income on even a short-term basis. It might, however, begin to generate
ideas for a monthly newsletter on books and their authors, if I were going
to pursue this long term, or may serve as background info for my auction
description. It could just be a dead end from a residual income
standpoint. I really don’t have an interest in children’s mystery
books, so I decide to take another stab at the whole mystery idea and see
if there is something else there. In a second brainstorming session, I ask
that our ideas drift outside of the box a bit with the idea of “where
might similar things produce residual income.” Starting with the same
list, the group comes up with the following:
| My first category is still important as we haven’t researched whether we can actually sell the books yet.
Who would want the books?
I’m not as interested in the next few categories so we’ll not focus here. Similar books to the Happy Hollisters
New ideas from the team.
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This last round of brainstorming has some better possibilities for success. I remember that my daughter was able to purchase Hollister t-shirts all summer long for between $0.50 and $2.00 each. Much cheaper than the original $15.00 - $40.00 at our local mall. I now also have an outlet for Hollister clothes my daughter has outgrown. This idea presents real possibilities for getting the books sold and since I have a box full of Hollister shirts and a reasonable likelihood that I can get more name brand clothing, perhaps there is real opportunity here.
Next I decide to research a bit and see how Hollister shirts are selling on eBay. My first search is for Hollister Shirt:
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In searching the completed auctions, I find that long sleeve shirts are selling better than short sleeve, unless the shirt is a Polo style, fully colored, or a bit on the frilly side.
I notice in the results that there are lots of no-sales, but perhaps this is just Poor Auction Keyword choice on the part of the owner. I’ll have to keep this in mind if I want to make this my final business, but Keywords will be discussed in detail later in Step 6.
Next I try searching on “Hollister Shirt Long.”
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Mostly all successful sales in first 200 returns.
Next I try “Hollister Shirt Tee.”
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Same result! Mostly all successful sales in first 200 returns.
Fortunately my stash is in these exact categories so it looks like we may have an opportunity for residual income (not to mention a method for selling the books)!
Summary
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While this process was pretty much an example, I was able to identify a potential business for next summer as I gather Hollister shirts from local garage sales. You never know where a brain storming session will take you! If you’re ready, let’s move on to Step 1 and get rolling!
Now that you have something in mind, how can you become a specialist in that area? I don’t know if you are familiar with
Anthony (Tony) Robbins or not. Today he is a millionaire and one of the most respected motivational and life changing speakers in the country. At one time in Tony’s life he was incredibly overweight, on the verge of being evicted from his apartment. He probably felt like many people out there today; “there’s nothing special about me.” Tony decided it was time for change. Real change. He began to immerse himself in self-help books. He studied every aspect of the topics until he began to make changes in his life. His changes affected others. Tony took his knowledge and looked at ways that he could make a real difference for others. Today Tony is one of the most respected individuals in his field.
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