Diversify Your Income – How to Repair iPods

Lets face it, the computer repair business can be an unsteady source of income for many of us. Although I keep busy most of the year, my peak times are at the start of long holidays, at them end of them (back to school) and in summer because computer parts are overheating and failing. For some reason, June and July are my slowest months.

So what do I do during the slow times? Diversify my income.

I have written about diversifying your income a few times with our articles becoming a web host and other tidbits of income. Here is another suggestion, why not try your hand at fixing iPods?

iPods are plentiful in supply and although there arent as many iPods as there are computers, they are portable devices so they are more likely to fall out of pockets, get dropped and get sat on. Additionally, every family has a cousin who can fix computers (or at least thinks he can), not many people know how to fix iPods. There is definitely money in it, some places have even made it their core business.

Obviously, you will have to teach yourself how to fix a iPod before you can start charging for your services. There are some great sites with some great tutorials that can teach you how to do just that. Here are a few of the best:

iFixIt.com – iFix it has some great guides for fixing iPods with pictures for almost every step of the process. You can also download their guides as .PDF’s so you can reference them later (such as onsite). I highly recommend this site for basic repairs.

Of course, once you diagnose the problem you will probably need to buy some parts. You can purchase iPod parts from the following sites:

Worldwide – eBay is one of the cheapest places to buy replacement parts.

United States – WeLoveMacs.com, iPodMechanic.com, RadTech.us

United Kingdom – CHSInteractive.co.uk

To get an iPod to practice on, you can obtain both working and damaged iPods on eBay cheaply.