What if you could earn $3,000 a year from a whiteboard you give away for free?

John Sherman of MegansDailyDish.com places free chalkboards and whiteboards in restaurants and other busy venues. The venue uses the board for daily specials. John sells small ad spots along the bottom to local businesses.

He’s placed more than 200 of these boards so far. Each one brings in around $3,000 a year.

(Check out John’s Community Boards program! New students get a free 15-minute coaching call with John and a free board!)

What if the hardest part of your business isn’t building the thing, but finding someone to buy it?

Ten years ago, I wrote a book called Buy Buttons. The premise: instead of building a store or website and hoping somebody finds it, go set up shop where the traffic already is, where buyers are already buying.

The book covered over 300 platforms and marketplaces across niches. A decade later, I wanted to revisit the idea.

Are those platforms tapped out? What new ones have shown up? And does the same principle work offline?

This episode is a tour through the legacy platforms that are still thriving, the newer marketplaces that could be the next big wave, and a few examples of entrepreneurs applying the same strategy in the physical world.