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Learn how to become a ticket broker.

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How to pull tickets on Ticketmaster
Sell tickets on eBay & StubHub
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concertIn light of the recession that shook the country several years ago, many Americans looked to supplement their income through ticket brokering.

Everyone has experience of buying tickets at a premium on the secondhand market, so learning exactly how to sell concert tickets online became one of the most popular at-home businesses in the country. And let’s not forget sports and theatre tickets, too!

This guide will be a brief introduction on learning how to become a ticket broker. For our complete guide, check out our best-selling book, Ticket Broker Blueprint.

Buying the Tickets

This is the most crucial step of all, so you’ll want to pay special attention to this segment. Without the right seats, all the selling and marketing experience in the world won’t net you a profit. You need the seats that everyone wanted to pull the first time, not the seats that everyone else pulled and threw back into the pile.

One of your strongest tools is making use of presales. Presales typically occur 24 hours before the scheduled onsale date, and they allow a small subset of buyers to gain access to tickets before the general public. The trick is gaining access, and with the right tools, this can be a cinch.

What you’ll need to do is sign up for the WiseGuys presale password list and the passwords they supply will gain you access to each and every presale event.

Also, regardless of whether you’re shopping a presale or onsale, the most important thing to know about Ticketmaster is that you must remain persistent, even if they tell you that all tickets have been sold out.

Don’t believe a word of it.

Ticketmaster doesn’t release all their tickets at the same time, and few brokers (and even fewer fans) know this. Remain persistent in the face of the dreaded “sold out” message and oftentimes, the best seats will be released 30-45 minutes later.

Selling the Tickets

If you’re a beginning ticket broker, there are essentially two places you should be selling your tickets: eBay and StubHub (both owned by the same parent company—monopoly, anyone?). But don’t be fooled: selling on these two websites are completely different experiences.

First, seller fees on eBay are about 5% less than on StubHub, so those $500 tickets you just sold will leave you with $25 extra dollars in your pocket if you sold them on eBay. That’s the first thing you should know: assuming an equal sale price, selling tickets on eBay will leave you with more money after fees are deducted.

Second, shipping tickets through StubHub is a simpler process than shipping through eBay. Thanks to their partnership deal with FedEx, StubHub will provide all necessary FedEx shipping labels. All you have to do is print and slide it through their (free) envelopes and drop it in a FedEx mailbox. Done. Shipping eBay tickets is more complicated, but not by much. eBay requires tracking confirmation in order to prevent fraud (on either side). Without tracking information, your buyer can simply claim he did not receive the tickets, and eBay will side with them after a claim is filed. Luckily, USPS Priority Mail is not too expensive, and we outline how to go through the process in our ticket shipping guide.

Summary

Learning how to sell concert tickets online is not very difficult. If you want to make a business out of it, the hard part is truly at the buying stage, not at the selling stage. If you’ve got the tickets everyone wants, you stand to make a huge profit regardless of where or how you sell them.

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Football play

Despite the economic struggles that the entertainment industry has felt over the past 5-10 years, the ticket brokering industry continues to thrive.

While less fans may be filling out the nosebleeds, those coveted first-row and Floor seats continue to get sold out within minutes of going on sale, and ticket brokers continue to make an absolute killing off of them.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably looking to bite off a piece of this pie. In this article, I’ll explain the 3 steps to starting a ticket resale business so you, too, can realize the profits to be made in this industry.

Step 1: Gird Your Loins

No, ticket brokering is not a get rich quick scheme, and no, you won’t become a millionaire in your first year selling tickets. The fact of the matter is that ticket brokering is a saturated industry with thousands of brokers competing for the same tickets at exactly the same hour as you will, and they have years of accumulated experience that you currently don’t have. And that’s not even counting the fans.

Not only will you need confidence in yourself to overcome these odds, but you’ll need a fair amount of startup cash, as well. Exactly how much you’ll need depends on your ticket brokering strategy, but a safe amount for the average broker is about $5000-$10,000. If this seems like a lot of money, consider this: the average ticket for a hot event will run you about $125, and you’ll naturally be buying tickets in pairs, so you’re looking at $250 for your first pull. Pull four pairs of tickets and you’re already at $1000. It adds up quite quickly.

Finally, the ticket resale business for the beginner can be time consuming. You’ll need to catch up on industry trends, hot artists, hot teams, what strategies your competition are employing, and generally getting up to speed on all things ticket brokering. Although you’ll be able to reduce your daily workload to a few hours a day once you’ve gotten your system completely set up, expect to work full time when you first start out (and sometimes even more than full time).

Your first step is preparing yourself mentally, financially, and logistically for your ticket brokering journey.

Step 2: Master the Art of Ticket Pulling

Give anyone off the street a pair of first row tickets to the next One Direction concert, and he’ll know how to turn a profit on them by selling them on eBay or StubHub. Perhaps a seasoned pro will know how to extract an extra $50-$100 out of them through various techniques, but all in all, the selling process is straightforward. The real secret is how to get your hands on those tickets in the first place.

Ticket pulling to a ticket broker is like the secret ingredient to any chef: it’s the heart and soul of your business and it will take you months before you’ve perfected it. Our guide goes over the various techniques I’ve used to pull the best tickets possible, but every broker will have a slightly different system.

Rest assured that over time you’ll also come to figure out how Ticketmaster works and how they release tickets (and no, it’s not quite how you might think). And once you do, that’s when your real profit begin.

Step 3: Master the Art of Ticket Selling

I mentioned above how ticket resale is a piece of cake if you’ve got the hottest tickets in town. Unfortunately, instead of first row One Direction tickets in your hand, you’ll usually be holding third row tickets to a Jimmy Buffett show—still great seats, but not quite the hottest tickets in town. Not everyone will know how to turn these around for a profit, and an inexperienced broker might take a huge loss on them if done incorrectly (here’s a big hint: price low and never sell on eBay Auctions).

Selling tickets for the highest possible price is more of an exact science than pulling tickets (which can be quite random and frustrating, even). Therefore, if you’re paying attention you’ll begin to develop a pricing and listing strategy that works best.

Conclusion

Due to the nature of this profession, the most difficult phase of your ticket brokering career will probably come in the first 1-2 months in the game when you’ll make most of your mistakes and find the most bewilderment at what move to make next.

Take my advice: relax.

No one started out a pro in this industry and neither will you. The ones that eventually do become pros and reach six figure salaries in this game are the ones who kept their eyes open to trends in their record-keeping and were fond of testing out various techniques until they found the one that worked best.

Good luck!

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It’s 10AM, you’re diligently waiting at the Ticketmaster window for those coveted Jay-Z tickets to go on sale. 9:59 slowly ticks to 10:00 and you refresh the page. You select your tickets, blaze through the Captcha window and you start thinking to yourself, “I have to be one of the first people in line! Then […]

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