Send me to the grocery store for milk, eggs, and bread without a list and I’m in trouble. You’d better be near a phone so I can call and ask, “what was I supposed to get?”

Yet, if I walk into a booth at a flea market and see something good that I either saw a picture of, or read about, 10 years ago, a small voice in my head starts talking to me. Much of the time, I don’t know what it’s worth. I may not even know what it is. But I hear the voice, and when I do, I’ve learned to at least slow down and pay some serious attention to what I’m looking at.

Sometimes the voice is wrong. Sometimes I choose not to listen to it. But, over the years, I’ve learned that the voice knows what it’s talking about the majority of the time.

It doesn’t matter whether you look for things to sell on eBay at flea markets, antique malls, auction sales, thrift shops, book sales, garage sales, etc., having your own little voice traveling with you can make you a lot of money over time.

If you already have a little voice of your own, you know what I mean. If you don’t, here’s how to go about developing one of your own.

I indirectly touched on this briefly a short time ago in Knowing It When You See It when I said:

“The key to finding valuable eBay merchandise at thrift stores, garage sales, flea markets, auctions, or antique shops is having an “edge” by knowing a little bit more than most people about a lot of things. Much of that edge can be gained by spending an hour or two a week doing research on the Net and either bookmarking useful sites you find, or adding them to your RSS reader.“

“Knowing a little bit more than most people about a lot of things” doesn’t mean you need to become an expert on everything you might buy. All you need to do is expose yourself to information about a wide variety of things. From there, your brain and your little voice take over. The more information you expose yourself to, the more frequently you will hear your little voice and the more insistent it will become when it does.

Where do you find the information to expose your voice to? Right here on the Net. The Net is filled with “voice food”. All you need to do is take an hour or two each month to find it. Here’s a couple of examples:

Old typewriters often show up at antique shops/malls, flea markets, and auction sales. Some are worth a lot of money, most are worth very little. Most people selling one think if it’s old it’s valuable, but have no idea what individual brands and models are worth in relation to others.

If you do a search on Google for typewriter related keyword phrases one of the sites you would find is ETCetera - The Journal Of The Early Typewriter Collector Association. This is a quarterly publication with a subscription cost of $30 a year. Most of us probably don’t have enough interest in old typewriters to spend $30 for a subscription but, at the bottom of the page we find that the first forty-nine issues of this publication are available free in PDF format to be either read on-line or downloaded to your computer.

There is tons of valuable information in these forty-nine issues and you wouldn’t even have to read them if you didn’t want to. Just exposing yourself to the illustrations of the rare machines is enough to give your little voice something to talk about if you come across one of them months or years from now.

Another example of a similar tightly niched site full of information is Coxrail.com which is devoted to North American railroad stocks and bonds. Again, probably not a subject you want to spend weeks learning about. However, their archive of seven plus years of newsletters in PDF format is filled with “little voice food”.

Now lets look at BookRide the blog mentioned in the article quoted earlier. BookRide is filled with information about valuable books, nearly all of which would bring three or four figures or more on eBay or Amazon. Many of these books were published in the last 20-30 years and could possibly show up at book sales, estate sales, or, occasionally, even a garage sale.

Once again, most of people won’t invest the time to read the entire blog and try to retain all the information it contains. But when you are developing your own little voice, there’s no need to. Concentrate on just the books published in the last 20 or 30 years. Nearly all of these include a picture of the book. Simply download the pictures to a file you set up on your computer. Then, when you plan on going to a FOL or an AAUW book sale, spend a half-hour, or an hour, looking at the pictures on your computer. You will be surprised how much fodder that will give your little voice.

Better yet, save the photos to a Microsoft Word or some other word document, print them out, and put them in a looseleaf notebook. Then when you’re going somewhere you know you will probably have to wait for a while such as a doctors appointment, bring the notebook with and spend time looking at the pictures while in the waiting room.

There are literally thousands of this kind of “little voice food” sites on the Net. All you need to do is pick one or two things you want to learn about and spend a little time digging around in Google or your favorite search engine. Spending only an hour or two a week doing this will, over time, keep that little voice in your head busy and put thousands of dollars in your pocket.

Who knows? You may find yourself needing a list when going to the grocery store for three items also.