Back In Japan & A New Idea
I’m back in Japan, spent most of the weekend unpacking and trying to get my Internet connection up and running. Those issues have been resolved so it looks like I can get back to writing.
Those of you who read this blog when I first started probably remember that before I was doing this full time, I was selling stuff on eBay. If you live in a foreign country, you can make a nice living selling stuff to people in the US through eBay. I finally quit not because of the money, but because I wanted a job that I could do basically anywhere (it’s kind of hard to drag all your supply stock back and forth between the US and Japan).
The issue now is that I have a decent amount of stock that I never got around to selling before doing this full time. This was made readily apparent as we started to unpack the stuff we left here from storage.
Now the obvious thing to do would be to sell the stuff on eBay like I had been doing in the past and this is the approach I would take if I needed to raise some money quickly (or get rid of all the stuff quickly). The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this may be a good opportunity for me to create some new satellite sites in a different way than I have been creating them up until now.
Instead of creating content, I will be creating content around a product that I would be selling. Since I already give a fairly lengthy explanation about the antiques and other items I was selling, there should be a good opportunity to not only sell the product, but also have relative ads appear that could generate additional income.
I’ve asked Nate to put together a simple photo with description format that I think will offer us a lot of opportunities to expand our satellite sites in a different way than we have been doing. While there will certainly be issues to resolve, I think there is quite a bit of potential for long term income streams.
In keeping with this year’s theme of “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all,” we have decided to place all income created from the sale of excess inventory to travel in Japan and beyond. I figure that we have about $10,000 in inventory - the only question is how long will it take to sell via the websites versus on eBay. If nothing else, this should make for an interesting experiment and hopefully reduce the amount of stuff we have by quite a bit…
Good luck Jeff. Glad you made it to Japan safely.