Metro News Melbourne - Newspaper Online - Victoria au newspaper south eastern Bayside Melbourne

When you tell people stories about making money while you sleep or with no effort, the vast majority look at you with extreme scepticism and, even, contempt for wasting their time and trying to “con” them.

Most people also know that it’s true that you can make money online with no effort, or while you sleep by trading the markets, selling goods on eBay, or even your own website. However, these same people generally dismiss this as being only for the super intelligent, the overly technical, the crazy and the just plain lucky.

I am here to tell you that not only is most of this downright lies, but you would be severely short changing yourself and your family if you did not invest a significant portion of your endeavours online- and I am not necessarily talking about money.

Currently, approximately 10% of all sales of goods and services occur online, and that number is growing fast. Now you may say: well, that’s great, but what does that mean for me? And, besides, people spout those figures all the time and they sort of become a blur after a while.

That is true, statistics these days can be manipulated to tell any story you like. But in terms of goods and services sales there is more happening at eBay than anywhere else on the planet, even if you combine store groups together like Wal-Mart and its subsidiaries in the US, or the Coles Myer or Woolworths groups here in Australia.

These sales equate to about US$1,640 sales every second, which is about US$14.2 million in sales every day. In Australia, a car is sold every minute, a DVD every 30 seconds, and an item of women’s clothing every 14 seconds.

Can you imagine if Big W store sold 2,880 DVDs a day, or about 6,000 items of clothing? If they could manage that many sales they wouldn’t need to sell anything else!
Currently about 53,000 Australians have eBay as either their primary or secondary form of income, and about 35,000 businesses use it as their secondary stream of revenue.
In total, 20% of the adult population in Australia is a member of eBay, which is about 3 million people.

Currently, approximately 10% of all sales of goods and services occur online, and that number is growing fast.

I hope that put things into context for you. Contrary to what you may be thinking, this is not an article to laud eBay, or even to necessarily to convince you to start selling there.

Given those massive figures, eBay sales still fit into that 10% of total sales that I mentioned earlier. Remember, there are huge sites like Amazon and search engine giants like Google and Yahoo who also fit within that 10%, let alone all the other larger, medium and smaller players. If nothing else, this should illustrate for you how massive an opportunity there is out there - and internet trading is really still only in its infancy, even with all those impressive numbers. Cast your mind back just 10 years ago and most of these companies I mentioned didn’t even exist, and neither did the market itself.

Unfortunately I don’t have enough space here to go into step-by-step detail about what you can do, but I will give you a brief overview. If you want more information, go to the website below.

Did you know that you can get a book written for you for less than a $100, which you have full rights to sell? Did you know that you could get companies like Google, eBay and Amazon to send you cheques? Did you know that with an Australian site like LayBy.com, not only can you offer items for sale on it with someone else managing the process for you for free, but also you can make money when other people list items for sale and when you buy items? Did you know that you can make more money online with no stock or payment handling of your own, but just selling other peoples great products?

The list goes on and on and, as I mentioned, with all these things, it takes little time, little money and requires no technical knowledge at all.

The truth is that unlike real estate, share trading and business, online trading requires a lot less knowledge and far less money to get started, is easier and requires less time and effort - to do anything.

Chris Jacob is a director of Jive exchange www.jiveexchange.com/metronews