The Importance of Repeat Customers

Like any small business, a big part of your survival will depend on repeat customers (and survival is too strong a word here, since there really aren't any overhead costs!). A more appropriate statement would be "BIG success will depend on repeat customers." This is actually good news for you. The simple reason? It is very easy to get repeat business as long as you are willing to put in just a little bit of extra effort.

You want to make sure you are an honest and direct salesperson, reliable, trustworthy, and that you always follow-up with your customer once the transaction is complete.

Doing these simple things will make you stand apart from 90% of the competition. Here are a few great tips to keep getting repeat business so that you can make more money for less work in the long run:

TIP 1: Excellent Customer Service: This may seem like an obvious one, but give every buyer EXCELLENT customer service. Want to know why? PEOPLE WHO BUY CONCERT AND EVENTS TICKETS ARE GENERALLY PEOPLE WHO LIKE TO GO TO THESE THINGS REGULARLY. In other words, they probably hit up many concerts and sporting events every year. They will remember you if you are helpful, and with so many scammers out there, after a few good transactions, they may start going straight to you every time. After all, you know how to get tickets in the first ten rows and they don't!

TIP 2: Send a Thank You Note: Here you can thank them for their purchase, ask them to bookmark you as a favorite seller on Ebay, and ask them to recommend you to their friends. In the thank you note you can include your other current listings. You can also ask them to join your...

TIP 3: Create a Mailing List: Talk about missing the boat if you don't have a monthly mailing list! Here you can remind your prior customers about upcoming concerts, as well as your current auctions. After a while, you will start to see that a ton of your income comes from repeat customers who like to deal with just you for their concert needs!

Start making money from home now!

How to Set Up Your Ebay Listings to Optimize Sales

The auction listing is easily one of the most important selling factors, and yet I see people mess it up all the time! If they would just tweak their auction listings a little bit, they could sell their tickets for so much more! Want to know the two main reasons their ticket listings are costing them money?

REASON 1:

The buyer never notices or finds the listing because the seller didn't set up the title page correctly (which means instead of being on the first page of search results, you're near the bottom, or not listed at all).

HOW TO FIX:

This may seem obvious, but include the full name of the band/teams, the venue location, the city, and the word "tickets" in the title. If you don't use all of these, you will be losing out on many potential bids! Make sure to use all the allowed characters (total of 55).

Also, be sure to list your auction as soon as you buy the tickets, and make sure the duration of the auction is 1-3 days - this will keep you at the top of the searches, and you will be selling during the highest demand (with 10 day auctions the demand drops significantly and those sellers sell for way less than they could have...not a smart move).

REASON 2:

The buyer doesn't make a purchase because the page doesn't look professional, and therefore, doesn't inspire trust. Remember, a lot of these tickets go for hundreds of dollars, and in some cases, thousands. Most buyers will spend an extra hundred dollars to buy from someone who has a trustworthy page.

What are some simple ways to make your page look trustworthy?

HOW TO FIX:

-Link to other auctions of yours! If they see you are a professional who runs this like a business, and you have other auctions going, that will improve your credibility.

-Set up an ebay storefront! It is extremely easy to set up, you can display all your auctions there, and once again, it inspires credibility.

-Have a regular page template to make listings easier and improve your credibility. This can include a logo, contact information, a return policy, recent feedbacks, and more! You can also include things like the BuySafe and Squaretrade logos.

-Become a powerseller! This may seem like a daunting task, but there are lots of simple tricks to raking up lots of sales fast; before you know it, you will be at 100 sales, and after a year, you'll be at a 1000! By that time, you will have made a lot of money too. That's the beauty if this business, the longer you're in it, the less time it takes to make more money!

-LAST TRICK: INCLUDE A FREEBIE!!! If you are selling 2 tickets to a U2 concert for $500, include a free t-shirt! Something that costs you $20 at the local store will enable you to sell those tickets for $100 more! I don't know why this works, but it has driven up my bids by so much more than the cost of the freebie! It's amazing!

Learn more here!

Proper Research is the key to Success

One of the easiest ways to fail at this business is to not do proper research. Many people become excited to make money, buy a bunch of tickets that they expect to resell for a profit, and end up with a bunch of tickets no one wants to buy. This happens to newbies ALL THE TIME. Why? They don't do proper research!

Want an example? Jimmy Buffet tickets are a pretty safe bet; he has a pretty loyal fan base. However, he tours every year and guess what? Some venues are more popular than others EVERY SINGLE YEAR. If you do your research, you will realize that for some venues you purchase any tickets you can get, other venues you only buy tickets if they are close to the stage, and some venues you don't purchase at all. Doing this kind of research doesn't take that long, but it will definitely save you from losses and multiply your profits.

On the other hand, a band like U2 is huge and only tours once every 3-5 years. With a band like theirs, you may want to purchase any tickets you can get. With them, you can rest assured that you will AT LEAST make your money back, but much more likely will make some big profits.

So how are some ways to do some research?

1. Regularly check on sites like pollstar.com or ticketnews.com. These sites are great for tour announcements, ticket news, and more. With the kind of information they provide, you can much better figure out the demand of upcoming shows so you can make smarter purchasing decisions.

2. Keep records of how your past ticket sales have done. This obviously be extra work at the beginning with no immediate reward, but a year down the line, you will have some great information that can help you make better decisions. You will also start to notice trends, like how some cities generally pay better overall, some venues pay better overall, or certain bands have higher demand in certain cities (like if there is a concert at a band's hometown). How else would I know about the Jimmy Buffet concert trends? And its exactly that kind of information that will distinguish ticket brokers who do OK at this, and those who make really great money.

The Ebook I personally wrote after years of experience has more information like this, but in much greater detail. For more information, read about A Day in the life of a Ticket Broker.

The Best Sports Tickets and How to Get Them

You can make a lot of money selling sports tickets online. If you can get your hands on some of the major sporting events, you will be making some BIG money. So what are some ways to score some great tickets?

1. Season Tickets. What's my recommendation for season tickets? For MLS, Cubs and Red Sox tickets will make you the most money, especially rivalry games. For NFL, if you can get your hands on Packers season tickets, you will also do extremely well. Outside of those teams, and maybe a handful of others, I would stick to your local teams. You can still make money with them, and also go to the games yourself if you either can't sell them or would rather go to the game. You may also want to start researching how your local University football or basketball tickets sell online too. If you live by a major football school, you can certainly make some good money there. Speaking of college football...

2. College Bowl Games Tickets. These game tickets can sell for huge money, especially if the teams are rivals. The funny thing about these tickets is that they actually go on sale way before the teams are chosen, usually in the late summer or early fall. In other words, you can purchase these tickets when nobody is thinking about them, and once its late December, suddenly the demand is going be huge and you're going to have great seats for these events! Try and go for the bigger bowls like the Capital One bowl, Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl, etc. for the best return on investment.

The best thing about bowl tickets is that once you have them, you are asked if you want to renew them every year after that, and sometimes even upgrade your seats! Talk about an easy and steady source of income every year. And if the BCS Championship is announced at the same venue where you had tickets for the prior bowl game, you will get offered tickets for the BCS Championship game as well! And with tickets to the BCS Championship, you can easily double your investment on tickets, even if you are in the nosebleeds.

3. NCAA Final Four Tickets. The way to get these tickets at face value is actually through a lottery system the NCAA has on their website every year from March through May. The application costs $170, but if you don't win, they refund your money. You can also apply up to 10 times to improve your chances, but each time costs an extra $170. If you can sit on that money, it's definitely a good idea to go for these tickets, because if you get them, you can make some GREAT money.

4. Super Bowl Tickets. The mother of all sporting events! If you can get good tickets to the Super Bowl and the two competing teams are major teams and/or rivals, you could quite possibly pay your rent or mortgage for six months! It works the same every year to get Super Bowl tickets: a lottery. Send in a paper with your name, address, phone number, and email to the Super Bowl Random Drawing location between Feb. 1st and June 1st. The location is at Strongsville, OH (the address is on the official site).

Each year 10% of entries win, so be sure to send an entry for yourself, each family member, and all your friends. You'll find that every year someone you sent the paper for wins, and a lot of these people don't want those tickets, so they're yours!

The Ebook I personally wrote after years of experience has more information like this, but in much greater detail. For more information, you can purchase the Ticket Broker Ebook!

How to Purchase Concert Tickets like the Pros

If you have ever tried to buy tickets for a high-demand concert or sporting event, you have probably realized that it is extremely difficult. In most cases the show sells out in 10 minutes and you weren't able to get a ticket.

What you don't realize is that many of the best seats have already been sold before the public sale, and during the public sale, the best tickets that were left have gone straight to the professional ticket brokers. How do they do it? What are some of the best ways to buy tickets like the pros?

1. Join fan clubs and other premier clubs that have ticket presales.This includes AOL, LiveNation, and American Express Gold. All three of those have excellent presales that can make you some serious cash. Also join all the fan clubs of all the major bands out there. Those bands usually offer presales to people in their fan clubs so that the fans can get the best seats. You can bet those fan clubs have lots of ticket brokers in there as well.

Presales are definitely a major resource for getting great seats that sell for profit, but some concerts go on sale publicly to everyone at the same time. In other words, no immediate advantage for everyone...or is there?

In this case, you will have to compete against everyone else on the planet trying to get good seats. However, you will be much better prepared. Here are some great tips to make sure you still get the best seats:

1. Login to Ticketmaster 10 minutes before the concert sale starts, and get ready for battle! At the :59 before the hour, start to refresh your page every ten seconds.

2. Know before the concert what you are willing to buy and what you aren't. Stick to your rules you made during your research (a previous chapter)! For most concerts it isn't worth your time to buy tickets farther back than the 15th row. Know what you want and stick to it, and keep refreshing the page until either you get them or the show runs out. This will save you a lot of time from considering and weighing whether you want your tickets; if they don't fit your criteria, just move on!

3. Link your computer time to the official atomic clock time at www.time.gov. This is what Ticketmaster uses, and is what you should use too. You will know the exact second a show goes on sale.

4. Make sure not to hit refresh too often, or ticket master will block your IP address! Don't refresh more than once every ten seconds on the same window. Of course, the way to get around that is to...

5. BEST TIP: Download Broker Browser 2.0! Ticketbroker and other online ticket sellers can tell if you have multiple browser open because of the session cookies, so they block your IP if you refresh too often even on different browsers. However, Broker Browser makes it so that each open window has a different IP. Know what this means?

You can refresh every second! Talk about improving your chances to get great seats! I would recommend having 10 windows open before the concert goes on sale, but really go with the best number that you can manage.

The Ebook I personally wrote after years of experience has more information like this, but in much greater detail. For more information, you can purchase the ebook at How to Become a Ticket Broker.