Make Cool Cash with Hot Sauce

Hot sauces are quite...well...hot right now. Millions of dollars are spent annually on hot sauces that contain jalapeno, habenero, chipotle and even citrus.

And if millions are being spent, then millions are also being made!

You can tap into this lucrative market - and you won't even need to make your hot sauces or even bottle them! Here's how:

Find a hot sauce maker. Hot sauce makers are pretty easy to find when you do a Google search. One of the best is HotSauce.com. Once you locate a few hot sauce maker, poke around their website. Chances are, you'll find a few that will let you put your name and design on bottles of hot sauce for a fee.

Determine fees. On HotSauce.com, for instance, you can have your label printed for a one-time fee of $28. If you decide to sell small bottles of, say, jalapeno hot sauce, the smallest quantity you can order is 48 at $3.65 per unit. That means your up-front cost will be $203.20

Determine profit margin. Dividing 48 into $203.20, your "real" per-unit cost will be $4.23. Since many designer hot sauces sell for around $7.50, you should price yours accordingly. Of course, the amount of profit per bottle of hot sauce is up to you, but you don't want to price it too high (lowering the number of sales), nor too low (not enough profit per sale).

The real profit. At $3 profit per bottle of hot sauce, you'll ring up a profit of $144 for your order. On your next order, however, you won't have to pay the $28 set up fee. That means your up-front expenses will only be $175.20, or just $3.65 per bottle. You'll actually be making more profit without changing your pricing structure!

Marketing. A great way to market your hot sauce is online. You can sell your hot sauce on your own website or on an already-existing website. You can sell them at fairs. You can sell them at the office. Heck, you can even talk to specialty stores and ask for shelf space!

A word to the wise: Hot sauce makers have raised the ante in recent years. The label designs and product names range from the comical to the obscene. Be aware that you'll be competing with existing hot sauces - so your name and design has to stand out.