Yard Salin' for Beginners or Yard Salers with Bad Luck

Having a yard sale is a great way to rid your home of unwanted items, as well to make some extra money. Anyone can have a yard sale, but there are some key points that set apart the successful yard sales, from the unsuccessful. Coming from someone who has has both, I have some tips on making yours a success.

1. Advertise physically. At least a week in advance of your yard sale, call or go to your local news paper office, and pay to place an ad for it. If your local paper is daily, and you have the money, run it for a week. If you can only afford to run it once, pick a Wednesday or Thursday for your ad to appear. It's close to your sale, if it's on the weekend. If your local paper is weekly, you should be fine on budgeting in an ad for a yard sale. Also, closer to your sale, buy poster board or find sturdy cardboard to make signs to put in front of your sale location. Use bold, vibrant, noticeable colors, to ensure people will see the signs from the road. Put these signs up two, maybe three days in advance. Make sure your tape is super-adhesive, or use nails, tacks, etc. to put up these signs.

2. Advertise virtually. If you have Facebook and/or Myspace, make events on them. In my personal experience, Facebook is so simple for this. Invite all of your local friends on these event pages. Of course, make it open invitation, and allow friends to bring friends. If you like to use e-mail to keep in touch, send out an e-mail, advertising your yard sale.

3. Prepare your items. If you have items laying around that you want to sell, chances are you'll need to clean them up a bit. If you're selling clothing, put them through the washer and dryer. Make sure all the lint is off. The neater and cleaner your clothes, the better chance you have at selling them. For dishes, if they're dishwasher safe, run them through. Otherwise, hand wash your dishes, as well as other odds and ends. Make sure everything is dry. You don't want to present dishes with water spots, for sale. If you have things that aren't washable, but need a fresh scent, spray them lightly with Febreeze. As for things like CDs and DVDs, make sure they are in their cases, and have all booklets present. If there are scratches on any of the discs, try using a cheap scratch repair kit on them.

4. Pricing. If you want to price your items, make sure that the price you set is reasonable. Sure, you want to make some money, but you don't want to rip anyone off either. Most people who go to yard sales, spend 25 cents to a dollar per item. If you do price your items, if you can help it, don't not budge. Haggling can produce good results for both you and your buyers. As for physically pricing your things, use a Sharpie on masking tape and/or neon pricing stickers, unless you happen to have a pricing gun. If you do not want to price your items, get into your head, a general price you'd like for each item. If you're totally flexible, do your pricing on the fly. I've had good experiences with all these ways, but honestly, on the fly works best.

5. Displaying your items is key. I've had bad experiences with displaying in the past, due to lack of ways to display items properly. However, I have come up with some ideas. Ideally, putting clothes on hangers, and hanging them some way, is ideal. If your sale location has two trees, tie a sturdy line (probably rope) between them (make sure it's secure,) to hang your clothing. If you have, or can borrow, a clothing rack, that's even better. As for other items, use clean tables to display them. Group like items together, to ensure people can find what they're looking for.

6. Be prepared! One of the main things you don't want forget is change. You need to break at least a $20 bill. You need mostly ones, but also ensure you have plenty of coins. To keep up with how much you're making. Keep your change money and your yard sale money separate, if you can. Either that or know how much change you had to begin with. Have some kind of container to put your money in. Something else you'll need to have handy, is plastic bags. Sometimes, people will buy multiple items, and don't bring their own bags, so have them to supply.

7. There are other things to provide to make your yard sale stand out. A lot of yard sale-goers start early and go to multiple yard sales, without stopping for food or drink. You can sell snacks and drinks, as well, to make a profit, and fuel your shoppers. Just be warned-- sometimes, not a lot of people will buy these things. However, if you think you can sell snacks successfully, try your hand at selling brownies and lemonade and/or iced tea. If that goes well, try your hand at selling hotdogs and mini bags of chips. Just realize that you need to buy things that won't cost a lot. Otherwise, what's the point of having a yard sale to try and raise money?

8. Start early! We all know it's a pain in the butt to get up that early. However, veteran yard sale-goers like to start early. In the spring, in the Eastern time zone, the sun likes to come out at around 6:30 or 6:45. You should have your items out and ready to be sold at that time.

9. Don't give up! If not a lot of people come, stay outside anyway. Some yard sales produce many people who stop by, and others do not. However, chances are if you stay outside, people will see that, and are more likely to stop by. Six to eight hours outside is ample time to sell a maximum amount of items.

10. For those things that don't sell, pack them safely and neatly for the next yard sale. The more neatly you pack things away, the easier they will be to pull out next time. If you don't plan on having another yard sale, then donate your leftover items to Goodwill or Salvation Army.

Good luck and happy yard sale day!