Local Marketing Idea

A restaurant client wanted me to take care of getting her menus printed. She paid me $200 to make some changes and to handle the printing. I convinced her to put 2 pages of ads on the front and back of the last sheet. I would handle everything, she would get free menus paid for from ad revenue and I would keep what was leftover.

I went door to door to small businesses within a few blocks of her restaurant selling ads for about $15/sq in.

In about 5 hours, I sold out. I got my last payment today for a total of $2000 in ad revenue. The cost for printing the menus is just over $600 ($10/ea). My net profit just under $1400 + the initial $200. I layed out the ads myself using Photoshop but I could have easily paid someone $100 to do that. All in all the whole project should take about 3 working days.

I really think the keys that made the sales so easy are the fact that I went door to door and its a fairly popular restaurant that everyone knows and likes. Also, its a town of 20k so everyone knows everyone. Plus I got to talk to the owner EVERY time he or she was there. Today I visited 6 businesses and sold the last 4 ads.

I'll be contacting all of the local restaurants in the very near future. Obviously most of them are not going to be ready to print menus right away but even if you could find one a month, it could be a nice little cottage business on its own.

You might even be able to sell the idea as a WSO lol I've seen others charging as much as $47 for 25 page e-book simple business ideas like this.