One of the first rules of get­ting and stay­ing orga­nized is to get rid of the things you do not need any more. That home ab cruncher you bought six years ago and swore you would use every day? Since you only used it twice, you might as well get it out of the closet and into the hands of some­one who might actu­ally use it. That vin­tage rock con­cert T-shirt that you love so much? If your wife will never let you wear it (even just to do house­hold projects on occa­sion) it is bet­ter off in the hands of some­one who will really make use of it.

If you are in a posi­tion to be able to do so, you could con­sider donat­ing them to char­ity. If you are not in that posi­tion given that these are chal­leng­ing eco­nomic times, you should be able to get some cash for the things you don’t need any more by sell­ing them on Ebay.

If you are an expe­ri­enced eBayer, you already know all the tips and tricks to max­i­mize your sell­ing effec­tive­ness. Maybe you have even read one of the count­less books on the sub­ject  But if you are new to the eBay game and your seller feed­back score num­bers in the tens or hun­dreds, not the thou­sands, then you should ben­e­fit from these 4 tips:

1) pick what you sell: there are many fac­tors that go into what you should spend your time try­ing to sell on eBay. Start by using com­mon sense. If you have, for exam­ple, a hun­dred pound ket­tle­bell that is only worth $5, then it is doubt­ful that any­one will want to buy that from you and pay the high cost to ship it. If you are not sure what some­thing is worth or what peo­ple will pay for it, try doing a search for the item in eBay and look at the com­pleted auc­tions — chances are some­one else sold an item like yours, or some­thing close enough to it to give you an idea of what it will fetch. Avoid con­vinc­ing your­self that “no one will buy this”. Jay Leno has done a seg­ment for years titled “Stuff We Found On Ebay” where they show things that most peo­ple would have thought would never sell, but they did sell.

2) put the item’s best foot for­ward: one of the biggest con­cerns of an eBay buyer is get­ting some­thing dif­fer­ent from what they thought they were get­ting. You can help pre­vent a poten­tial buyer of your item from think­ing this if you take good pho­tos and write a com­pre­hen­sive descrip­tion of the item, includ­ing all its fea­tures, spec­i­fi­ca­tions, mea­sure­ments, and (espe­cially) con­di­tion. And make sure you choose words for your listing’s title and con­tent that are mean­ing­ful and will attract users. Remem­ber that peo­ple look­ing for some­thing like what you are sell­ing who are using search engines will come across your list­ing if you word things right.

3) deter­mine if your list­ing should have a reserve price: eBay lets you put a reserve price on a list­ing — if no bid goes above that price, the item is not sold. If you are the kind of per­son that will really regret let­ting some­thing go for less than you thought it was worth, then you should set a rea­son­able reserve price for the item. Beware that eBay does not dis­play this reserve price to poten­tial bid­ders; they only see that it has a reserve price. This can scare some bid­ders away, so you should not take the deci­sion to set a reserve price lightly.

4) choose the day your list­ing ends care­fully: the end of an auc­tion is where the real action hap­pens. It is where the most bids start get­ting entered as the bat­tle between inter­ested buy­ers heats up. There­fore, you want this time to be when the most peo­ple can participate. eBay lets you spec­ify how long your auc­tion will run. If the length of auc­tion you choose ends at 8am east­ern time, for exam­ple, that is 5am pacific time. Such an auc­tion will likely miss out on a lot of west coast bid­ders. Most eBay­ers will tell you that the best time to end an auc­tion is mid-afternoon to evening on a Sunday.

Given those tips a try and see if you can make some money from all that stuff col­lect­ing duct in your closet.