Are you looking for a way to use your skills as a salesperson or desktop publisher to start a new business? You might have an idea here that is worth a closer look.
Somehow, about every six weeks, a neat and tidy brochure with coupons for the local auto shop, pizza place, vet, nail salon, local florist, and a local cleaning service shows up on my doorstep. home. I use the $5 pizza coupons and maybe the $5 off an oil and lube change without even thinking about how this brochure came to be. So I figured it out!
Well someone in my town is an entrepreneur, sells the ads, creates graphic designs for the ads, gets the local print shop involved, and uses retired seniors to walk the neighborhood and hand out the 20-30 coupon booklet.
What this person does is sell advertising space in the brochure for literally pennies per coupon, making sure that two types of businesses are never printed at the same time. I see a lot of these coupons over and over again which tells me they must be working!
This lady guarantees that a certain number of brochures will be distributed and charges her customers for the 1,000 coupons. Some of the distribution is door to door, but I also see a few of them on a small shelf at the local grocery store.
I did some research and found that there is a lot of information on the internet about getting into the coupon business. Most of what I read was positive. There are tips on color combinations for coupons that are cheaper than other color combinations (I didn’t know that) and that printers are very competitive when bidding on this type of work.
Now the question remains can you sell the ads? Most business owners will be receptive to your sales call. Give them a color sample of a coupon. It is likely that they have purchased a similar coupon ad in the past. The business owner will want a written guarantee that he will distribute the amount he promised, so make that guarantee a strong selling point.
Your advertising fees are collected upfront, so very little business capitalization is required. Make sure the printer is paid for and set aside some funds for those door-to-door seniors.
You can even buy a mailing list or addresses by zip code and get into the bulk mailing business. The business owners you approach, if you ask them, will likely say that you are doing them a favor, since they don’t have the time or experience to do it on their own.
Online experts agree that the hardest part is selling space for the first issue. Be sure to include in your advertising contract the specific number of hand-delivered or mailed brochures, that no two similar businesses will be in the same brochure, and that each coupon will be in a fancy two-color publication. When the coupons start to drive business (the pizza delivery guy knows it works), he’ll have no problem selling ads for the second issue.
Your homework: You should do a Google search using the key phrase local coupon posting business where I just got 262,000 results. Grab and take notes and put the best ideas to work!
One last piece of advice: be sure to read the information on digital coupons. What a profitable additional addition to your new business this could be!