Make Millions Being a "Middleman." It's Easy!

Here's one of the best work from home ideas. If you're serious about making money, anyone can do this and many have.

This article is more of a concept than it is an exact "how to" article. That's because market's change quickly and people have different passions. I can't tell you exactly what to do because a good idea now could be worthless in a year (or less), but the concept will always be successful.

The concept is basically being the middle man for other businesses. If you can market, you can sell anything. Why not sell for another company and let them do all the work? This is different from affiliate programs because they’re set at 10%, or whatever. You could make up to 150% with this concept.

I got this idea years ago (maybe 20 years ago) when I saw a guy on the show 60 minutes who felt there was a need in the flower market for home delivery. He got local extension phone numbers relative to each major city and started advertising in the yellow pages nationwide with big ads for his flower shop (and he doesn’t even own a flowershop). His big professional ads made his company look like they were the foremost experts on flowers. He then got the yellow pages for all of the major cities where he was advertising and put al of that cities local flower shops in a database. Then he called all of the flower shops to get their prices and their delivery area. When people called to place an order after seeing one of his yellow page ads, he quickly looked up which flower shops would deliver to them and which offered the best price. He took the order and added 25% to it for his own profit. He then passed the order off to the local flower shop where the customer lived.

This guy started this business by himself (as a one man operation), but the story on 60 minutes showed him with four workers in a room in his house, taking orders fulltime. Some people reading this article may say, "Wow, that's a lot of work." It is. Making multi-millions is VERY RARELY real easy work. At the time of the story the guy made over $20 million dollars profit in a few years. I don't know what happened to this guy's business when it was all said and done, but even if he closed up shop the next year after I heard about him, he already banked $20 million in a few years, enough to never have to work again if he chose not to.

How could this guy without a flower shop, never even seeing a flower, be one of the most profitable flower shop businesses in the country? Answer: MARKETING! Anyone who looked in the yellow pages could have ordered from the same store he did, and would have paid less money. But people don't waste their time calling the little free one line listings at the end of every category. You know the ones, company name followed by phone number. Why should anyone call them? Half of those companies aren't even in business anymore. People start with the big ads first then work their way down. And this guy had a real BIG AD which stated basically that his company had everything you could ever want in terms of floral arrangements, and fast delivery to anywhere in town. Once again this goes to show you the power of marketing. He's taking someone's order and adding money to the bill, then calling the flower shop down the street from the customer that just called. Genius!

I did this with a website design business early on in my internet career. I was pretty good at website design, but why waste my time doing the work. So I marketed the website design services, secured the jobs for $2,000 each then got another company to make the websites for $500 each. I made $1,500 for just taking an order! I made sure the websites were GREAT by my standards, but I didn't do the actual graphic or coding work.

I also did the same thing with a printing business, years ago before the market got saturated. There was a real cheap local printer I knew of who had great prices on flyers and business cards. Way cheaper than anyone online. So I opened a printing shop. Flyers and business cards - Fast and cheap! The orders were small and light so they could be shipped around the country. I made a couple grand a week from this business, but it ended about two years after it started when 50 new print shops hit the net, and cut up the pie.

This is why you see such a variance in prices on the net. I was looking to order some louvered racks and about a dozen companies were selling them online. The first companies that popped up on the internet sold them for $440 each, kind of high so I kept looking. Another ten companies had the racks for $250-$300, so I bought five for $250 each. A few months later when I needed to buy more, I found a company selling the exact same racks for $140 each! Guess what. Many of the companies (if not all of them) who were selling the racks at a higher price just took my order, added $100 to each rack, then called the last company I found and told them to deliver them to me. This happens every day with probably over 100,000 businesses on the net. If you can market, answer the phone, and take an order you can make money.

Another lesson is that the company selling the racks for $140 could have made a killing if their website was easy to find on the net, instead of taking me months to find. Their poor marketing really hurt their business.

So What Should You Get Into?

You have to find a market or find products that aren't saturated yet. Something that when someone types it into a search engine the prices that come up are comparable to what you can sell this item for. Also look for high ticket niche items that you can add $50-$100 on and it wouldn't look too obvious because hardly anyone else sells the item.

Some businesses took me months of research to develop the concept, and then the business I developed from the concept made me $200,000. This is how making money works.

Even if I posted a simple million dollar idea on this website, that didn’t cost too much to start, it would no longer be a million dollar idea after 1,000 people tried it the same week. Million dollar ideas are just that, because of their lack of competition. Once the whole world is doing it, not only is it no longer a million dollar idea, the idea isn’t even profitable for anyone anymore.