Garage Sale Promoting For Quick Easy Money

This is where you enter the picture. Your enterprise will be an ongoing garage sale of items donated and collected from these people who lack the inclination to put on garage sales of their own.

Step one is education: Spend a few weeks visiting all the garage sales, swap meets and flea markets in your area. Find out what's being offered for sale, what people are buying, and how the merchandise is being sold. Generally an item is tagged with a price, but the seller is open to almost any reasonable offer from the customer. Another thing you want to make mental note of is the way the merchandise is displayed, and how the customers are allowed to browse.

You start your own garage sale by cleaning out your own basement, attic, closets and garage. Talk to your relatives and friends; tell them what you're going to do and ask them for donations of no-longer used or unwanted items. It's here that you'll get your first experience in negotiating, and finally, an agreement for you to display and sell other people's merchandise for a percentage of the sales price. You'll find people explaining that they really don't have a use for a specific item or they really don't want to keep storing it, but because of sentimental reasons, "just hate to give it away."

Once you've had a little experience with this type of seller, you will be able to advertise in the newspaper that you buy garage sale items, or take them on consignment for a percentage of the final sales price.

It's best that your wife handle the garage sale itself - greets the potential customers, "shows them around," and generally engages them in conversation. If it's a woman staging the garage sale, then arrangements should be made to have an other woman "mind the store" while she's out digging up more items for sale.

The advertising angle is really quite simple, and shouldn't cost very much either. You should run an ad in your area shopper's newspaper for about three days in advance of, and up through the day of your sale. Once you're operating on a full time, every-day-of-the-week schedule, you'll want to change your ad schedule and the style of your advertising. But in getting started, go with small classified ads simply announcing your garage sale, emphasizing that you've got something of interest to everyone - everything from A to Z. To get ideas on how to write your ad, check your news pa per for a week or so; cut out all the garage sale ads you can find; paste them up on a piece of paper. Then, with a bit of critical analysis, you'll be able to determine how to write a good ad of your own by determining the good and the bad in the ads you've collected. Something to remember: The bigger and better your sale, the bigger and bet ter your "getting started" ads should be. And the secret to outstanding garage sale profits is in having the widest or largest selection of merchandise.