Shown above is the December 1996 issue of Sports Illustrated For Kids magazine. If you came across one at a garage sale would you even give it a second glance?

If not, it’s possible you’ve just walked past several $100 bills. But you need to know what makes some of that particular issue worth $500-$600 or more and others not worth the paper they’re printed on.

This is the kind of information about magazines that will be contained in each monthly issue of The Magazine Gold Newsletter.

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Over the years milk has been packaged in a wide variety of different types of milk bottles. While nearly all of them are collected to some extent, there is one specific sub-niche that attracts the most collector interest and that sub-niche is 1 quart pyro milk bottles with diary, town, and state names on them.

Pyro refers to the method by which colored graphics were applied to the bottles. Pyro bottles are found with various colored graphics, but mostly in red, green, blue, orange, and black. They were made in several sizes and shapes but our focus here will be on a very narrow sub-niche of these bottles.

The only ones you should initially consider will have ALL the following characteristics:

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It’s only three weeks until April 15th and Terry Gibbs’ latest newsletter article - Are You Wasting Your eBay Profits? - provides some solid information about not giving Uncle Sam any more of your eBay profits than absolutely necessary. If you aren’t in a position to make full use of Terry’s tips for 2005, now’s the time to set things up so you can in 2006.

Rob talks about using Key Performance Indicators For eBay (don’t let the words intimidate you) in a recent post. If you’re up for it, he even includes a challenge for you set your own.

In The Long And Short Of It Pam talks the potential of increasing ending prices for your auctions with a combination of research and taking care of potential buyers.

I love selling ephemera which just happens to be the name of a blog published by Marty Weil that I recently came across and have found to be interesting reading. Marty’s blog will give you some idea of the kinds of paper products that can do well on eBay.

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This evening at 5:30 the University of Minnesota and Holy Cross College will face off in the first game of the NCAA Western Region Hockey tournament at Ralph Engelstad Arena in Grand Forks. By the time the tournament ends Saturday night around 10:30 the NCAA will have generated $718, 578 in revenue from the three games played at “The Ralph.”

This is the first time a Western Regional has been played in Grand Forks and, because of the size of the arena, the attendance figures and the revenue generated will be records for a Western Regional tournament simply because no other venue in the Western Region has the seating capacity of Engelstad Arena.

From the three games played here in Grand Forks the NCAA will take in between $200,000 and $250,000 more than ever before for a Western Regional.

That may well be $200,000 to $250,000 more than they will ever make again from a Western Regional tournament also. Simply because the NCAA thought they could implement some policy changes and pretty much ram them down the throats of any college that hoped to host a NCAA regional or national tournament.

However, it looks as if there is a very real possibility that the University of North Dakota may tell the NCAA to “stuff it - we aren’t playing that game so you can take your tournament somewhere else. We don’t need it.”

What does all this have to do with eBay?

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Within the last twenty-four hours I witnessed a classic example of one of the biggest differences between those who succeed and those who fail - both on eBay and in any other area of life.

I am part of a closed discussion forum on the net. It’s a relatively small group of people involved in various on-line businesses. It was begun about five years ago as a brain storming group consisting almost entirely of people looking for ideas and ways to succeed on the net. Since that time, some have become very successful but many are pretty much just where they were five years ago.

Yesterday morning one of the other members began a discussion with a question which began “I’ve been thinking about this for the last year or so and can’t decide if it would be worthwhile or not.” He then went on to outline an idea and ask if people thought it was a viable idea.

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Acquiring the knowledge/experience to consistently buy eBay inventory at garage sales takes some time and research. The good news is that the two best research tools are readily available at no cost. These two tools will also work just as well for researching antique/collectible items or non-antique/collectible items found at garage sales.

The first tool is the garage sales themselves.

When most people talk about buying eBay inventory at garage/yard sales they envision finding a rare piece of Roseville pottery, Tiffany glass, or some other high value antique they can buy for a few dollars and sell for several hundred or several thousand dollars on eBay. You hear stories about this happening and it does – but only on very rare occasions. That’s entirely the wrong way to go about it.

Rather than rushing in, taking a quick look around and then leaving for the next sale, if you slow down a little, a morning of garage sales can be a learning experience. Take some time at each sale to look around and see general kinds of items are being sold. Handle some of the items. If a sale has a lot of what look like quality used clothing, look at tags to check out the manufacturer. If there are a number of pieces of glass or pottery, turn them over and look at the back stamps to see who produced them. When you go back to your car, make some notes of the manufacturers so you’ll have them when you get home.

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Magazines are one of the best-kept secrets on eBay. While many sellers know about the collector value of vintage magazines such as Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, Playboy, etc., few are aware of the profitable market there is on eBay for both obscure vintage magazines and more common magazines that are being published today.

Beginning on April 3, 2006 The Auction Rebel will be making available a premium subscription newsletter titled Magazine Gold. The newsletter will be devoted entirely to exploring these little known magazine niches and profiting from them on eBay.

Read more about Magazine Gold.

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Here’s an eBay sub-niche for the garage sale addicts.

Remember all those cutesy Kleenex box covers everyone seemed to have 15 or 20 years ago? Well, many of the people who made those are still merrily weaving yarn through hundreds of little holes in pieces of plastic and there’s money to be made in this eBay sub-niche if you go about it right. Here’s some ideas about how to tap into this eBay sub-niche.

What am I talking about? The thousands of plastic canvas pattern booklets and magazines that are floating around out there. If you look on eBay, at first glance, this doesn’t appear to be an attractive eBay sub-niche, but done properly, this can be a profitable little niche.

First I want to say that there are very few items in this sub-niche that will bring $35 or more on their own. However, by packaging selected items into lots it’s not all that hard to get into the $35 to $50 range and some times higher.

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While you won’t find boxes full of these magazines every week, they do show up at garage sales, flea markets, and antique shops and when they do I recommend you grab them. What magazines am I talking about?

Vintage magazines from the 1960s and earlier that deal with period hair styles and the hair styling industry.

These magazines originally sold by subscription and at newsstands to women of the time. Each issue was well illustrated with period hair styles for the young woman along with articles for creating many of the styles. When found today, single issues from the 1960s regularly bring between $35 and $50 on eBay.

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Rob Whiteway has been publishing his eBay 4 U blog for a couple months but I just came across it yesterday. You may want to check it out.

Pamela Vasquez’s story about what happened when she dared step out of her comfort zone shows what can happen when you are willing to take a risk.

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