Sell things you own on eBay

For many this will be a complete adjustment to some of the skills that they already have.  They will need to learn new skills in order to be successful in selling their products and services.  You can learn how to sell some of those things just sitting around at your house, through understanding of the ins and outs of auction services such as eBay.  Perhaps you are interested in other Internet income generating ideas, and need to learn new skills in order to be successful in this area.  When you learn how to sell, you will begin to understand some of the marketing and sales techniques that will allow you to be successful.  These sets of skills can be used for just about any endeavor that you are looking to get involved in.

Learn to sell with online courses

There are a variety of websites that can help you learn how to sell.  These sites may teach you how to sell products on your own website, or even affiliate marketing.  With the Internet being such an untapped resource for potential earnings, we begin to see more and more people explore this.  With the economy being in such a difficult state, there are more people willing to learn to sell on the Internet.
There are often many websites that will offer programs for small charges.  These will help you to learn how to sell.  These can be a great tool for those that may not know how to sell, especially using the Internet.  They will explain the different ways as well as the potential to begin to learn how to use the resources of the Internet.  You can learn how to sell items that are collecting dust, or begin to sell information that can lead to earning potential.
 

Be open minded to selling

As long as a person has an open mind and willingness, you can learn how to sell just about anything.  You need to have a good positive attitude, as well as the time and the energy to begin your journey into sales.  This will not turn you into some use car salesperson, but will give you the tools to be successful in learning how to sell just about anything.
Take a look at a variety of websites that offer tips and tools on how to sell.  Before you choose a program, make sure you know that it is from a reputable source.  You can take a look at what other people have said about that particular program as well as their success.  You can always check with the Better Business Bureau to make sure that the company has a good reputation.  If you learn how to sell using the technology at our fingertips, you may find yourself far out earning what you have in the past.

Related posts:

1. Learn how to invest

How to invest in the stock market

Just to make this clear from the get go, Learn new Skills does not and will not recommend specific stocks to invest in or not to invest in. In other words, the “Learn how to invest” article series does not contain specific stock advice, only information about methodology and principles for your investing education only. What stocks you decide to place your own money in will be your own choice. None of the companies mentioned in this article series are in any way affiliated with this site or endorsed by this site.

Ah, great, now that we have got that out of the way, let’s look at the different methodologies investors commonly use when they invest in stock. As a side note, learning about investing is a lot about looking at what the time-proven investors have done, like Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham. You will never find a detailed roadmap by studying them, but you will clearly see the framework they use to choose the stocks they invest in. Now, back to methodologies.
 

Value investment – Value investing – Long Term Buy and Hold (LTBH)

The investment style popularized by Warren Buffet and conceptualized by his mentor, Benjamin Graham, is in simple terms a method of buying companies with a long history of solid earnings, and with products that never go out of fashion (often because they have never been in fashion).

Value investors, or LTBH investors for short, often study the balance sheet in detail, and do Discounted Cash Flow analysis’s of the company’s cash flow to arrive at their estimate of value. This leads to one of the main tenants in LTBH, the specific notion of price vs. value.
 

Value vs. Price

Warren Buffett is famous for saying that price is what you pay for the stock, value is what you get. And these two are often completely out of synch. As an example, for much of decade of 2000, stock prices were far ahead of a stock’s, or underlying companies’, value.

A stock is simply a piece of paper (or electronic equivalent these days) that documents your ownership of a fraction of a company’s assets. This means that you actually own a part of the profit the company makes each year. You are in essence a company owner, on a small or large scale. This is very important to understand before you start to invest. Successful investing isn’t about lottery tickets, it’s about company ownership.
 

Learn how to invest = learn how to value a company

Since there is no way of concluding in a definite manner what a company is worth, the skills part comes to play in how good you are at estimating said companies worth. This is exactly where Warren Buffett excels. He is extremely good at valuing a companies assets and their long term earning power. He is also very attuned to recognizing management that can be trusted, and that has the talent to bring the company forward, even though he often says he wants to buy companies that could be run by monkeys (because their products are so good). Or perhaps that was Peter Lynch who said that, never mind.
 

Trustworthy management

This is another main principle in value investing, to find companies with management that can be trusted to do what’s best for the shareholders. With company scandals like Enron and Arthur Andersen starting to fade from memory, it is important to remind oneself that the people you are letting run your business are important. Investing in a company with bad management can literally be like throwing money out the window.

How do you spot good management from bad? Reading the annual reports from the company and noticing how the CEO communicates with the stockholders is one of the best ways to gauge the competency of the management. Also looking at the company’s track record for the last 5-10 years can give you clues. But ultimately you want to buy stock in a company where bad management really wouldn’t make that much difference. Yes, bad stewardship over years could dent the return on investment, but not bankrupt the company, as in the case of Enron and Andersen.

That’s about it for part 1 of the Learn new Skills article. Read more about investing in part 2 of Learn how to invest – coming soon

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