I have often felt that selling used books on eBay, Amazon and the Internet was one of the best home business opportunity for seniors or really anyone who wants to make money online without a lot of risk and upfront cost.

In my first book in the Official Geezer Guide series on starting an online business, I wrote about the used book business extensively. Because unlike the current generation, we seniors grew up reading and loving books and we seniors are now the fastest growing online market for all goods and services –but books in particular.

The used book business is a $6 Billion a year business and the online portion of that is now at almost 50% and growing every month.  Used books also do well when the economy is challenged as it is today because people still want to read, but they have to save money when they do it.

Last year I wrote a book on my main website, How To Make Money Selling Used Books on eBay, Amazon and The Internet.  I recently updated the book and added new bonus materials. How To Make Money Selling Used Books….is still one of the best-selling eBooks on the web and may soon surpass the Complete eBay Marketing System as my personal best-selling book of all time. The reason is simple:  It works!  I get tons of email from readers telling me about their successes.  In most cases the email are from people who are using online used book sales to generate extra money –but I also get email from folks who are making substantial amounts of money each month.

One of the markets I covered in How To Make Money Selling Used Books…was eBay’s Half.com, which is a fixed price site where you can sell books, movies and music.  Last week I discovered a great new selling tool called ScanLister.  There are three parts to ScanLister:

1. A small Scanning device that plugs into the USB port on your computer.
2. Scanning software that reads the scanned info and instantly creates a listing (with photo) that you upload to Half.com with the click of a mouse
3. An excellent training manual by a woman that consistently earns over $4000 a month on Half.com. Not all books and products sell well on Half.com, but she knows the ones that do and tells you where and how to find them.

I recommended ScanLister in my monthly newsletter at www.SkipMcGrath.com. Within a few days I Started getting email from my readers thanking me for the recommendation. One, who is a fairly experienced book seller said she was thrilled and thinks that ScanLister will save her hours a day and allow her to make money from a lot of otherwise slow-moving books and tons of DVDs she has sitting around the house.  Another person wrote that ScanLister paid for itself within 5 days.

So if you know nothing about books and would like to learn about this great low-cost, low-risk business, check out my training manual, How To Make Money Selling Used Books Online and once you are set up and running, check out ScanLister.

I am pretty new to Twitter. I have known about it for a while but didn’t really understand how it could help me. In just a few short weeks though I have built my Twitter list on my main eBay site at www.skipmcgrath.com to over 1400. And I just started a Twitter link for the Official Geezer Guide yesterday. I already have over 150 followers in just one day. (Here is the link to follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/HeadGeezer)

Twitter is a great social networking took, but you can also use it to make money. You can tweet links to your eBay and Craigslist listings, you can tweet affiliate links, you can use it to build traffic to your blog or your website where you sell products, information or have Google Ads and affiliate banners.  The possibilities are really endless.

There are a lot of schemes and tools people are selling that will help you build a Twitter list quickly –but most of them are pure junk.  The key to building a Twitter list that can make money is to have it focused on a topic, or a product or a niche of some kind. For example, if you sell diet or weight loss supplements, then you don’t want a list with lots of young kids on it, or a list of video gamers –you want middle aged to older people who are health conscious.  If you have a website that sells quilting supplies, then you want to build a list of hundreds or thousands of quilters –you don’t want real estate investors and Puff Daddy fans.

Last week I found the perfect tool. It’s called The Twitter Traffic Machine.  This is a series of 6 short videos that walks you through an automated system to build your list of hundreds of  HIGHLY TARGETED followers a day with just a few minutes of work.  The program only costs $27 and comes with a money-back guarantee.  I have only been using it for a few days and it works great.  I did one post right after setting it up, and that post made $56 on an affiliate link within about 30 minutes. I checked again today and it made another $11 –all from that one post.

I also started using Twitter to drive traffic to my eBay listings.  The two listings I featured in a Twitter post got double the amount of hits they normally did each day and resulted in one Buy-it-now sale for $229. so my $27 investment paid off pretty quickly.

Earlier this week I also told you about a new selling tool called netSpray.  The neat thing is that you can set up a netSpray account and use Twitter to drive traffic to your netSpray listings.  When you look at netSpray, you will get a free 27 page eBook I wrote for the netSpray folks as part of their launch promotion.  And if you sign up for netSpray for one month, you will get another book I wrote that shows you how to use Twitter to generate profits from eBay and netSpray.