Sara Blakely became the worlds youngest billionaire at 41 when she turned $5,000 savings into the fortune making Spanx hosiery business. She offers the following advice to anyone looking for fresh ideas to supercharge the performance of their business of enterprise:

“I stop what I’m doing, close my eyes, and ask myself, ‘if nobody showed me how to do my job, how would I be doing it?’ And then I see what surfaces. We’re all on auto-pilot, and we’re doing things because somebody else showed us  – or told us –  how to do them.”

Blakely says that creative ideas come when you think differently, not necessarily complexly.

I think the key is to look to do things that are unorthodox or different. Do what everyone else does and you get what everyone else gets.

The fact that B&Q announced the closure of 60 stores recently may not be unconnected with the results of a survey I read recently – Briton’s are falling out of love with DIY and young folk in particular are reluctant to take on simple jobs like shelf hanging and minor household repairs themselves. It seems like the coming years will see an increased need for ‘handymen’ (and women of course) who can complete the simple jobs which the new generation can’t, or won’t, do for themselves.

If you have some basic DIY skills, making an independent living may be no more difficult than offering these skills to householders. For the more ambitious, I think there’s an opportunity to build a network of handymen under a national brand and identity.

There are hundreds of ways to make money online but  for most you need your own product or service to promote. Here are three methods you could start making money with tomorrow which need neither:

1. Become An Online Re-seller

An online reseller purchases items and resells them on sites like eBay to make a profit. Sellers determine the price and the value of items they sell, so it’s important that you have a good idea of what the product is worth. Depending on the volume of your business, reselling on eBay and other sites could become a lucrative full-time job.

2. Become An Affiliate Marketer

Affiliate marketing is one of the fastest-growing ways to earn money online. As an affiliate marketer, your job is ‘middle-man’ linking up a buyer and a seller, and taking a commission on the sale. Clickbank is a good place to look for affiliate partners.

3. Take Online Surveys

You don’t get rich taking surveys online, but it’s an easy way to earn a little cash on the side. A Google  search will throw up plenty of companies offering cash and other incentives  for taking online surveys.

Lingerie models tend to be conventionally slim, but some recent research by New York company ‘Adore Me’, suggests this may be a mistake. The company have undertaken some testing of customer reactions to various models, and amongst the findings was that Plus Size models outsell their slimmer counterparts. They also found that brunette models outsold blonde ones, with plus sized brunettes being the most effective of all, selling four times the amount of their slimmer blonde counterparts.

Now I could hazard a guess why this is, but I don’t know and it really doesn’t matter. The key point to take away from this is that whatever you’re selling, it’s always worth testing all elements of the sales process. Conventional wisdom is often wrong, and results are frequently counterintuitive. You’ll never know for sure unless you test.