How To Make $5000 A Month Selling Used Books On Amazon.Com

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http://www.sellyourbooksonline.com/

The following guest post is by Adam Bertram.

Do you like to read books? Are you an avid reader that is consistently buying books at bookstores, Amazon.com, yard sales, book sales, etc? If you’re like me, I have tons of books that I buy usually brand new, read (or at least try to get time to read) and then let sit on the shelf. It wasn’t until a few years ago that is where they sat. They just sat on the shelf collecting dust. I would occasionally walk by and notice them and think to myself “Maybe one of these day’s I’ll get to reading them again.” You know how that goes. Months would go by and they would still be sitting there taking up space. I thought to myself there’s got to something I could do with these books to get them out of here but no one wants a used book, right? Should I donate them to get a tax write-off or look into selling them? I chose the latter and I’m so glad I did.

I chose to sell books on Amazon. I’d seen the Used section that is under every book on Amazon and wondered to myself how people get their books on there. After a little research and tinkering around I was finally able to get my first books on Amazon. I couldn’t believe I could charge $10-$20 for used books that I thought had no value and I especially couldn’t believe when they actually sold within hours! My books were selling faster than I could list them for! It was amazing!

Little did I know that I would continue on this path and starting buy books for the purpose of resale. It was then that I considered myself a full-fledged online bookseller. I was snatching up books left and right as quickly and as cheaply as I could at used book sales, Salvation Army and Goodwill thrift stores, yard sales or wherever I thought I could find books for a dirt cheap price. I really didn’t have that hard of a time because I found out that most people thought the exact same way I did prior to my discovery. People just didn’t think that a used book had any value anymore. Friends and family were actually GIVING me books which I was turning around and selling for HUNDREDS!

Selling books on Amazon is something that I have perfected over the few years that I have been doing it. It is an extremely easy, low risk, no capital required way to bring in a few hundred extra dollars a month to branching out to make it a full time business! If you can acquire enough books then you can make as much money as you want! I’ve got to the point to where I’ve grossed close to $8,000 month just working part time. Did I mention I’ve been doing this on the side?

To get started selling books on Amazon, here are a few things you’ll need.

1. Take Action – Everyone would like some extra money every month but don’t have the gumption to actually do something about it. I’m telling you about this opportunity and it’s now up to you to decide if you’re going to do something about it.

2. Desire to Learn – If you’ve never sold books before, you’re not alone. I had no idea what I was doing when I first started either. You don’t even have to be a book lover, per se. You just have to have the desire to learn something new and stick with it. There’s a learning curve just like any other potential business but if you really want to do it you can.

3. Acquire Inventory – You’ve got to find books to sell to make any money obviously. Since books are pretty much everywhere you probably won’t have to look that hard. A few tips are used book sales, used bookstores, yard sales, flea markets, thrift stores and the list goes on.

4. Get a Process Down – This will take you a little while to get the process down of acquiring inventory, listing your books on Amazon, sending the books to your customers, answering customer emails, etc. It may be a little tough at first but once you really get the hang of things it’s a cinch. Everyone will have a different way of selling books on Amazon. That’s one of the reasons why I love doing it.

I hope that I have at least sparked a fire in you to get out there and get started! If you’ve never thought of selling used books think again. Selling used books on Amazon can be one of the most rewarding businesses that you’ll find and with some initiative and some hard work I promise that it will pay off in spades.

I have been an online bookseller for over 2 years now. Selling books on Amazon and other sites has allowed my wife to stay at home with our daughter and has helped pay our bills (over $1,500/month) for over an entire year now with money continually accumulating in the bank. It’s been a blast but has been some hard work and some long weekends but who else can say that they’ve profited over $5,000 month working about 20 hrs/week from home? I have a blog at sellyourbooksonline.com that I post regularly about tips, lessons learned, money saving tips and other useful information along with an email newsletter and even an eBook outlining my experience. Stop by if you get a chance.

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[Via - Business Opportunities Blog]

The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions

IdeaSpotting: How to Find Your Next Great Idea

How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide by Dan S. Kennedy

101 Businesses You Can Start With Less Than One Thousand Dollars: For Stay-at-Home Moms & Dads

Make Your Ideas Mean Business

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It's pancakes. In a can. It's made $15 million.

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http://www.batterblaster.com/

In 2001, Sean O'Connor was a co-owner of Thee Parkside, a San Francisco club that served up punk bands alongside yak burgers and bear-meat chili. When the dot-coms collapsed, he pared down the menu to focus on cheap, creative snacks. During an experiment with whipped cream canisters and funnel cake -- a project that failed miserably -- he stumbled on a better idea: putting pancake mix in pressurized cans for quick and easy breakfasts.

By 2005 O'Connor, now 38, had left the restaurant business and filed patents for Batter Blaster, an organic pancake-and-waffle mix in a pressurized can with a point-and-shoot nozzle.

Through word of mouth, social networking and publicity stunts -- traveling 180,000 miles in an Airstream trailer to visit county fairs; rallying a team to cook 76,382 pancakes in eight hours to set a Guinness World Record -- O'Connor and his 16 employees have gotten Batter Blaster into 13,000 outlets nationwide, including Costco and Whole Foods stores.

"We aren't feeling the recession like everyone else is," he says. "We are one of the few truly innovative products to come out in the egg and dairy set."

In 2008 Batter Blaster's annual revenues hit $15 million. O'Connor expects the total for 2009 to surpass $19.5 million.

"It sells incredibly well. It's a convenience item and great for the elderly, who make single servings, along with parents, single people and campers," says Jeff Mejia, director of perishables for DPI Specialty Foods, which distributes the product to Albertsons, Bristol Farms and Jensen's stores. The product retails for $4.99 a can.

There's no denying the lowbrow reputation of sprayable foods. (Think Easy Cheese and Reddi-wip.) O'Connor argues that what Batter Blaster lacks in cachet, it makes up for in a hassle-free, fun-to-use design that appeals to families.

That sounds about right to chef Manuel Trevino of the newly opened Travertine restaurant in New York City. "I would most likely only use it when cooking for my kids," he says. "You will undoubtedly be sacrificing a little flavor for fun, but utilizing a spray makes it easier to master the art of creative pancake-making, which children tend to love."

O'Connor is banking on kid-friendliness. His plans? More versions of the product that add new flavors, along with brightly colored batters, in the mix.

For more unusual ways to make money, visit this site

[Via - CNNMoney.Com]

The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions

IdeaSpotting: How to Find Your Next Great Idea

How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide by Dan S. Kennedy

101 Businesses You Can Start With Less Than One Thousand Dollars: For Stay-at-Home Moms & Dads

Make Your Ideas Mean Business

Link of the day - If You Sell Links On Your Site, I Will Buy Them Off You

Be Fit, Stripper-Fit.

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http://www.sfactor.com/

An Exotic dancer who wants to be an actress? OK. But the other way around?

Meet Sheila Kelley, a star on NBC's L.A. Law and in films such as Cameron Crowe's Singles. Her career detour began back in 2000, when she portrayed a stripper in the film Dancing at the Blue Iguana. "The more I moved, the more my body responded. I shed weight, and my muscles got long and lean," Kelley recalls. "I was feeling cocky, sexy and hot. My whole relationship with the world changed."

After the film wrapped, Kelley gave birth to her second child and gained 55 pounds. "I was feeling miserable," she says, so she set up a dance studio in the office of her husband, actor Richard Schiff--and included a pole and chair. "My body popped right back into shape. I was reclaiming myself as a woman, and other women started noticing. The other moms would ask, ‘What are you doing, and can you teach me?' So I started figuring out a way to teach this experience."

Almost a decade later, Kelley is the entrepreneurial engine behind S Factor, a fast-growing chain devoted to pole-dancing workouts fusing ballet, yoga and striptease. In addition to opening seven locations from Los Angeles to New York City, Kelley wrote The S Factor Book: Strip Workouts for Every Woman, released three DVDs and launched a line of apparel, all bolstered by spots on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The View and 48 Hours.

"S Factor is a movement--not just a physical movement, but also a movement of women taking back their feminine bodies," Kelley says. "It reminds me of a masculine martial art. We're combining the power and strength typically associated with men with the sensuality and curves of women."

Kelley is currently overhauling the curriculum, and she has plans for a second book as well as three new videos scheduled for release in 2010. She still acts, but S Factor commands most of her attention. She regularly teaches classes and travels to collaborate with instructors and students.

"I'm an accidental entrepreneur. I set out to find something I loved to do, and to have fun," Kelley says. But unlike most entrepreneurs, she rarely brings her work home with her.

"The great perk is that I can share this with my husband, but I only dance for him two or three times a year," she says. "I don't want him to take it for granted."

For more unusual ways to make money, visit this site.

[Via - Entrepreneur Magazine]

The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions

IdeaSpotting: How to Find Your Next Great Idea

How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide by Dan S. Kennedy

101 Businesses You Can Start With Less Than One Thousand Dollars: For Stay-at-Home Moms & Dads

Make Your Ideas Mean Business

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Hood Tours

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http://www.lagangtours.com/



LOS ANGELES — The tour organizer received assurances, he says, from four gangs that they would not harass the bus when it passed through their turf. Paying customers must sign releases warning of potential danger. And after careful consideration, it was decided not to have residents shoot water guns at the bus and sell “I Got Shot in South Central” T-shirts.

Borrowing a bit from the Hollywood star tours, the grit of the streets and a dash of hype, LA Gang Tours is making its debut on Saturday, a 12-stop, two-hour journey through what its organizer calls “the history and origin of high-profile gang areas and the top crime-scene locations” of South Los Angeles. By Friday afternoon, the 56-seat coach was nearly sold out.

On the right, Los Angeles’s biggest jail, “the unofficial home to 20,000 gang members in L.A.,” as the tour Web site puts it. Over there, the police station that in 1965 served as the National Guard’s command post in the Watts riots. Visit the large swath of concrete riverbed taken over by graffiti taggers, and later, drop in at a graffiti workshop where, for the right price, a souvenir T-shirt or painting can be yours.

Alfred Lomas, 45, a former gang member and the creator of the tour ($65, lunch included), said this drive-by was about educating people on city life, while turning any profits into microloans and other initiatives aimed at providing gang members jobs.

But aside from its unusual logistical challenges — the liability waiver describes the tour as “inherently dangerous” and warns of the risk of death — the venture has also generated debate about its appropriateness. Chicago has a tour of Al Capone sites and Las Vegas has one devoted to the mob — but this gangland lore is still happening.

“Everybody says we are the gang capital of the world, and that is certainly true, no denying that,” said the Rev. Gregory Boyle, who has spent decades trying to steer people out of gangs into legitimate work. “It’s hard to gloss over that. But there are two extremes we always need to avoid. One is demonizing the gang member, and the other extreme is romanticizing the gang.”

Others fear that the tour, which initially is to be conducted monthly, may conjure up the so-called slum tours of shantytowns and impoverished areas of Rio de Janeiro and Soweto, South Africa, which bring tourists close, but not too close, to misery, with questionable benefit.

Jan Perry, the Los Angeles councilwoman who represents a large area covered by the tour and conducts her own tours for prospective business investors, said she was wary of the endeavor because its gang connotations could discourage investment.

“It should focus on deliverables, and I consider a deliverable a grocery store,” she said.

But Mr. Lomas’s supporters, including associates of the Dream Center, a Christian-based social service center where Mr. Lomas works driving a food truck for the needy, said the tour would raise awareness of needs in depressed communities.

Kevin Malone, a former general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers who came to know Mr. Lomas through the center and is one of the financial backers of the project, said he might accept the criticism “if it was somebody other than” Mr. Lomas.

“But I know the guy’s heart,” he said. “He is not taking anything out. All he is doing is serving and giving. If that is exploitation, I hope somebody does that to me.”

In true tour-business form, LA Gang Tours has its share of hype, starting with its rather imprecise name.

The odds of seeing an actual gang member on the street at the appointed hour — Saturday morning — are low, though Mr. Lomas said four or five members will be on the bus to keep watch and offer their stories. Many of the sites, like the location of the Symbionese Liberation Army shootout in 1974, take a lot of explaining to link with contemporary gangs (Mr. Lomas’s research was done on the Internet and by talking to old-timers.)

If the gang territory highlighted seems heavy on Mr. Lomas’s old stomping grounds in the Florence district, it is because it overlaps with turf prominent in the history of gangs, including his own, Florencia 13, one of the largest and most notorious.

Mr. Lomas rejected initial plans to drive through two housing projects, a concession, he said, to critics concerned it would be insensitive.

To some, it is no wonder that, in a city known to have more street gangs than any other, as well as a close association with theme parks, somebody would come along and tap the tourism potential of gang culture.

“What the heck, market what you got,” said Celeste Fremon, who writes the criminal justice blog Witness L.A. and has studied the city’s gangs.

Although she disputed whether several of the sites had a solid gang association, she said, “if it makes money for a good cause, more power to them.”

Mr. Lomas, who wears long-sleeved shirts to conceal his old gang tattoos, including one slithering up his neck over the collar, makes no apologies for what he calls an unconventional attack on the gang problem. He has little patience for traditional gang counselors and programs that he believes have done little to curtail gang membership.

“The war on gangs in L.A. is like the Vietnam War,” he said, giving an unofficial preview tour to a reporter and photographer. “The Americans thought they had all the answers and were very arrogant in their approach, and assumed they would defeat these poor peasant people. Like that, this is actually an unconventional war and you are going to have to approach it in an unconventional way.”

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[Via - NYTimes.Com]

The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions

IdeaSpotting: How to Find Your Next Great Idea

How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide by Dan S. Kennedy

101 Businesses You Can Start With Less Than One Thousand Dollars: For Stay-at-Home Moms & Dads

Make Your Ideas Mean Business

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Casttoo Success Story

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http://www.uship.com/


http://www.casttoo.com/

If there's anything less pleasant than breaking a bone, it's having to stare at a drab, ugly and increasingly dirty cast over the weeks or months it takes for recovery. Enter Casttoo, a Colorado firm that makes tattoo-like decals to transform those unsightly orthopedic eyesores into graphic works of art.

Available in a wide variety of original designs based on themes including fantastical creatures, tribal images, sports and holidays, Casttoo's decals are crafted from an adhesive film that fuses with the plaster cast in seconds when blasted with a hot hairdryer. Prices range from USD 20 for a small design suitable for children's wrist and arm casts to USD 40 for an extra-large design that fully covers an adult half-leg or full arm. International shipping is available, as are customized designs; consumers can even send Casttoo a digital file of their X-ray for conversion into an on-cast decal. Through a partnership with 3M, meanwhile, Casttoo offers “starter kits” for clinics and hospitals including customized logos and 100 decals in a variety of sizes.

Whether it's casts, cars, garage doors or parking lot walls, opportunities abound in bringing a splash of art and personalization to an otherwise unadorned part of life. Next up, we'd expect to see Casttoo allow customers to upload their own designs, beyond personal X-rays—and maybe even kick off a crowdsourcing effort whereby the best such customer-made creations are ultimately voted into production (with rewards, of course, for their creators).

For more unusual ways to make money, visit this site.

The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions

IdeaSpotting: How to Find Your Next Great Idea

How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide by Dan S. Kennedy

101 Businesses You Can Start With Less Than One Thousand Dollars: For Stay-at-Home Moms & Dads

Make Your Ideas Mean Business

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A $6 million cargo cult

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http://www.uship.com/

(CNNMoney.com) -- In 2001, Matt Chasen's mother wanted to send an antique dresser from Ohio to Texas, but was staggered when she received a $1,000 shipping quote -- far more than the dresser was worth. Unable to find a cheaper option, she never sent it.

One year later, Chasen reserved a nine-foot truck to move from Seattle to Austin. When he arrived at the rental center, the only one left was a 20-footer, so he took it. Standing in the back of the cavernous vehicle, he thought of his mother.

"I thought, 'Wow I wish I could have gotten in touch with people with half-empty trucks to move my mom's dresser,'" he recalls.

The idea: Inspiration hit Chasen, 34, like a Mack truck. Why not create a sort of eBay for shipping, a Web site that would make the process cheaper and more efficient by taking advantage of all the empty trucks on the road?

Chasen's wife told him it was the dumbest idea in the world. Undeterred, he brought the concept to McCombs Business School at The University of Texas, where two of his classmates -- Jay Manickam and Mickey Millsap -- later joined him as co-founders of uShip. In 2004, they launched the site, which solicits shipping requests from the public and lets freight companies with extra space bid for jobs. UShip earns a 10% transaction fee for each delivery.

That spark of an idea has gone on to save thousands of dollars for people like Jerry Eldred. The 52-year-old stumbled upon uShip during an online search after he received $7,000 quotes from big moving companies to move his two cars and his household possessions from Fremont, N.H., to Austin, where he got a new job. Eldred found uShip and then found a New Hampshire driver with an empty truck who moved everything for $3,800.

"You have to do the homework yourself but it makes it much easier to find a deal," says Eldred.

The risk: Not everyone wants to help people like Eldred or Chasen's mother. Many drivers simply aren't interested in the hassle of picking up and moving a bunch of random stuff, whether it's a broken-down bulldozer or grandma's piano, suggests Tim Barton, CEO of Freightquote.com, an 800-employee Kansas City company that also offers competitive bidding and brings in $400 million in annual revenues.

And uShip faces another quandary: in a weak economy, Chasen can expect plenty of excess truck capacity, but fewer people who want to ship, while good times will bring the reverse, explains Kevin Sterling, a transportation analyst at BB&T Capital Markets. "They've got to manage that," he says.

The reward: While bigger players like Freightquote.com and CH Robinson Worldwide may be ideal for the shipping needs of large companies like Wal-Mart, uShip may be a good fit for small businesses and individuals who are unfamiliar with the trucking industry, suggests Sterling.

"The need is there," he says. "Small businesses may not have access to a large truck broker, and uShip is probably a cheaper alternative."

Although Chasen initially thought uShip would be used to mainly ship household items like his mother's dresser, the listed items have ranged from a warehouse full of a million baseball cards to military tanks, boats and airplanes. The 50-employee uShip has grabbed investment dollars from Benchmark Capital -- the venture firm that took a $5 million gamble on eBay back in 1997 -- and estimates that it doubled its annual revenues in 2009, to approximately $6 million.

Since uShip launched six years ago, shippers have paid more than $125 million for services brokered by the company. Nearly 900,000 listings have been posted to the Web site, attracting bids from tens of thousands of transport companies.

For more unusual ways to make money, visit this site.

The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions

IdeaSpotting: How to Find Your Next Great Idea

How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide by Dan S. Kennedy

101 Businesses You Can Start With Less Than One Thousand Dollars: For Stay-at-Home Moms & Dads

Make Your Ideas Mean Business

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Without electricity, a car, or a cell phone, Amos Miller turned his dad's Pennsylvania farm into a $1.8 million national food retailer

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Imagine trying to build a national food retailing business based on mail order, far-flung distributors, and trade shows—without using the Internet. No e-mail newsletters or Web site for taking orders and handling complaints, no Facebook fans, or Google ads, or Twitter following.

That's not all. Imagine doing it without using cell phones or computers. No BlackBerry for expediting orders. No CRM software for segmenting customer lists. Absolutely no texting.

Let your imagination go a little further and picture doing it without driving a car or without using electricity. No quick trips to the post office to ship orders, and no fax machine, scanner, or copier.

This is the world of Miller Farm, a Pennsylvania food producer that has grown to $1.8 million in annual sales from less than half that four years ago. The farm is so busy it's turning away orders from food cooperatives around the country.

But data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture suggest what an anomaly Miller Farm is.

While farming is undergoing a renaissance of sorts, with more than 300,000 new farms started from 2002 to 2007, accounting for nearly 2 million small farms, making a good living is becoming tougher. The USDA in its 2007 census said the number of small farms with $100,000 to $250,000 annual sales (its highest revenue range for small farms) declined 7%.

The driving force behind this anomaly is 32-year-old Amos Miller. He's not growing his business bereft of so many modern conveniences out of some sense of purity or to prove a point, but rather because he is Amish. As part of their religious beliefs, the Amish turn their backs on modern-day conveniences and are highly visible in the areas of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin where most live, notable for their dark clothing and their horses and buggies, which compete with cars and trucks on local roads. They avoid even having their photos taken, which is why we can't include a photo of Miller and his family.

Located in Bird-in-Hand, Pa., Miller Farm was started by Amos' father, Jacob. Amos says he and his dad concluded in 2000, based on conversations they had with customers and representatives of organizations that promote nutrient-dense foods, that interest was about to grow significantly. The two of them focused on expanding the farm's product line, so they now offer 31 products, from grassfed beef (including not only various steak cuts, but marrow bones, ox tail, and tallow) to milk-fed pork, pastured chicken (including chickens not fed any soy), and 16 varieties of cultured veggies (including fermented ketchup, cabbage juice, and tomato salsa).

The interest in such foods has helped drive the rapid growth of farmer's markets, private buyers clubs, cooperatives, and community supported agriculture (known as CSAs, whereby consumers commit to buying a particular producer's foods for a season or ongoing). Once popular mainly for vegetables, CSAs now exist for meat and even for fish.

"It used to be that organic was all the rage," says Dan Kittredge, executive director of the Real Food Campaign, which is part of advocacy group Re-Mineralize the Earth. "Now everyone has organic." Nutrient-dense food is the new rage and gives "the advantage back" to small farmers who leverage the notion that certain foods, such as fermented vegetables, grass-fed beef, and pastured chickens, are more nutritious than conventionally produced products and may help consumers strengthen their immune systems. "There is money to be made here," he says.

And making money is what Miller Farm is doing. "I can't meet all the demand," says Amos Miller. He relies on additional supplies of product from his brother, John, who "grows the produce that we ferment and process here," and from three other neighboring Amish and Mennonite farmers.

What distinguishes Miller Farm from others, such as celebrity farmer Joel Salatin's farm in Virginia, which has helped popularize nutrient-dense foods, is that Miller has gone national—and done it without modern conveniences. His main concessions to modern life are a generator for refrigeration to cool certain foods and a landline telephone (717-556-0672) to take orders from distributors and mail-order customers. He also relies on FedEx for shipping orders to customers.
Courting the Foodies

To market his wares and network, Miller regularly attends events popular with foodie types. At the annual conference of the Weston A.Price Foundation, held in November at a hotel outside Chicago, he and several other Amish manned a large table in the exhibitor area, selling large jars of fermented veggies, maple syrup, and homemade spelt noodles.In December, at a conference in St.Paul, Minn., of sustainable farmers and their customers put on by Acres USA, Miller's offerings were a little different: at breakfast time, slices of dense grain bread slathered in butter and honey; and at lunch, plates of bread with homemade liverwurst and salami.

How did he get all that food to the conferences if he doesn't drive? He rented a refrigerated truck and hired a non-Amish neighbor to drive it. He stored the food in dozens of coolers with refrigerant chemical blocks.

"He's a hustler," says Pete Kennedy, president of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, who mans a booth near Miller's at the Weston A. Price Foundation conference.
The Blessings of Dirt

The conferences bring in not only direct revenues but also customers from around the country. For instance, many of the attendees at the Weston A. Price Foundation conference are involved with food cooperatives back home that are seeking the kinds of foods Miller's farm produces. The orders pour in from individual consumers the old-fashioned way—via snail mail, as well as via the farm's conventional telephone line. The farm receives regular orders from food cooperatives as far away as Florida and California.

While he says he's proud of the fact that "we're making a lot of money," Miller notes that elders in his church worry about the growth. "They discourage us getting too big," he notes, in part because they don't want Amish farmers to be tempted by the marvels of modern technology. "As long as we don't rely on computers and electronics, they're okay."

Miller says he doesn't get frustrated by not having modern conveniences. In fact, when he's at trade shows, he usually can't wait to get back home. "The city is a pretty sterile environment," he says. "But if I did it once a month, I'd get lost, I'd forget what it's like to get dirty."

For more unusual ways to make money, visit this site.

The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions

IdeaSpotting: How to Find Your Next Great Idea

How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide by Dan S. Kennedy

101 Businesses You Can Start With Less Than One Thousand Dollars: For Stay-at-Home Moms & Dads

Make Your Ideas Mean Business

Link of the day - If You Sell Links On Your Site, I Will Buy Them Off You

Asafumi Yamashita - The Celebrity Gardner, Who Makes $150,000 A Year

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Asafumi Yamashita runs his fingers delicately through a bushy green tomato vine, plucking handfuls of blueberry-sized fruit. The bright red micro-tomatoes, bursting with potent, sweet flavor, will soon be on their way from Yamashita's greenhouse in the French town of Chapet to legendary Paris restaurants Pierre Gagnaire and l'Astrance.

Yamashita is a celebrity gardener, one of a select group of small producers who supply some of the world's top chefs. A stark contrast to giant agribusinesses, micro-entrepreneurs such as Yamashita thrive by offering personal service and exquisite products that chefs can't find elsewhere. "Asafumi's Japanese vegetables taste so sweet they're almost fruit-like," l'Astrance head chef Pascal Barbot says. "His vegetables are truly unique."

The Japanese-born Yamashita, 56, found his place in this exclusive club almost by accident. He first came to Paris at age 22 to study French at the Sorbonne, staying on for a few years before returning to Tokyo to start an import-export business. But he quickly grew restless. "I craved tranquility, the open air, something less mundane," he says.
Backyard bonsai

Returning to France in 1989, he set up a bonsai-growing business in his backyard in Chapet, about 30 kilometers northwest of Paris. He chose bonsai because his father had raised them, and because the miniature trees "were all the rage in Paris," he recalls. Besides selling bonsai, he rented them to hotels and restaurants, including a Japanese restaurant called Benkey. He became friends with Benkey's head chef, who suggested that he start growing Japanese vegetables that weren't available locally and supplying them to Japanese restaurants.

With an initial investment of only $500 to buy seeds from Japan, he planted his first crop in November 1996, including such vegetables as komatsuma, a kind of spinach, and hatsukadadikon, Japanese radishes. Within a year, he was supplying 12 Japanese restaurants around Paris.

But Yamashita soon set his sights on a new clientele. "I believed my vegetables were Michelin three-star quality," he says. "I was determined to sell them to cooks who would know how to prepare them and let their true flavors come alive."

Yamashita gained entrée to the elite world of haute cuisine four years ago through his friend Yuzo Uehara, a Japanese chef working in Paris. Uehara had trained Christian Le Squer, now the head chef at Ledoyen, one of only 10 Paris restaurants awarded Michelin's highest three-star ranking. Armed with an introduction from Uehara, Yamashita arrived at Ledoyen's kitchen bearing a basket of his homegrown vegetables. When Le Squer tasted one of Yamashita's fruity white turnips, or kabu, he was floored. He hired Yamashita on the spot as one of his regular suppliers.
Keeping It Small

After that, Yamashita's reputation quickly spread by word of mouth. "I never did any marketing to gain new clients," he says. His business now grosses about $150,000 a year, supplying vegetables to seven clients: six Michelin-starred Paris eateries and one local Japanese restaurant.

Yamashita could easily expand his operation, which consists of six greenhouses on an acre of land behind his house. He has a waiting list of prospective customers, including the in-house restaurants of swanky Paris hotels Le Meurice, the Bristol, and L'Hôtel de Crillon.

But he wants to keep the business small. He has no employees, preferring to garden alone and with his wife, Naomi, and making an annual trip to Japan to select seeds for the next year's crop. "I can only produce so much in my backyard, about 80 to 90 kabus and 30 kilos of vegetables a week," he says. "The restaurants end up fighting over my vegetables."

Fighting—and paying dearly. Yamashita's micro-tomatoes cost a mouthwatering $40 a pound, while his komatsuma sells for $13 a pound, and his kabu for almost $9.
Garden Cubism

Staying small allows Yamashita to give his clients the personal touch, delivering vegetables to restaurants himself rather than using a distributor as most producers do. The arrangement also gives him a chance to rub elbows with some of the world's best chefs—and sometimes advise them on how to prepare vegetables. "I once told Pierre Gagnaire to stop slicing my kabus and cube them instead so they could retain their sweetness," he recalls. "He listened to me and now serves them that way."

Now he's starting to develop a following among discriminating French diners. L'Astrance chef Barbot recently called Yamashita to place a big order for micro-tomatoes at the request of a special client. "It was none other than Catherine Deneuve," he says. "Apparently her granddaughter adores my tomatoes."

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