Free Web Sites Free Email Free e-Business
|
Free Web Sites Free Email Free e-Business
|
HOW TO START YOUR OWN HIGHLY PROFITABLE SHOPPING CENTER PAPERSOne of the easiest of all businesses to establish is the publication of shopping center papers. It can make you very rich, but it takes determination, dedication, and good planning. Your revenue and profits will come from two main sources: businesses in the shopping center your paper serves, and readers who will place advertisements. It doesn't matter if there's already a shoppers' paper in your area or that you know nothing about the publishing business and don't own a printing press. You can begin a shopping center paper today. You must first understand the specific needs of your market. The stores, shops, and businesses in the large shopping malls are generally chain stores and already advertise city- and nationwide to reach all the people of your community. They seek to draw the shoppers living across the entire city, thus subtracting from the number of shoppers available to the smaller neighborhood stores that are closer to where the people actually live. Because small shopping center businesses directly serve the smaller population living within a five mile radius of their stores, they must do everything possible to keep the neighborhood people shopping close to home rather than allowing them to drive across town to the big name stores in the mall. It is at this point that you can be of service and make your profit. You must organize carefully, working diligently to bring your plan to reality. Contact the store owners or managers in each shopping center in your area. You can include businesses not in the shopping center itself, but clustered within the same immediate area. However, it's important that your emphasis be placed on the individuality of each shopping center. Explain to each of these business people that you're starting a shoppers' paper that will carry advertising only for businesses in that particular shopping center. With this kind of local advertising media the neighborhood stores need not worry about competition, nor have to bear the advertising costs of city-wide circulation. The second selling point is your distribution and circulation system. Take a section of your city street map. Draw a 5-mile circle around each shopping center. Take it to your local quick print shop and have them give you several printed copies blown up to twice the original size. Then as you're selling each business owner, show him the shopping center location on your map with the 5-mile circle around it. Explain that your door-to-door distributors will leave a copy at each home or apartment within that circle only. This means you'll have to estimate how many homes or apartments there are within each shopping center's customer circle. Your local post office should be able to help you with this estimate. Getting your papers out to all of these homes and apartments needn't be that big a problem. Simply talk with the Boy Scout and Girl Scout troop leaders in your area. Offer to pay $20 or $30 per thousand newspapers delivered by the group to the homes within the service area. You might even contact the youth organizations at nearby churches within the service circle, and propose your delivery operation as a fund-raising project. Even groups like band or choir boosters clubs at the local high school are looking for such projects to help fund the activities of the group. If all else fails, simply hire several teenagers in your neighborhood to do the delivering for you, paying minimum wage for their efforts. At the bottom line, the businesses gathered in or near each shopping center will buy advertising space in your paper because your rates will be cheaper. You'll be carrying advertising for a specific location only, and your distribution will be direct to their customers. You can begin the business and handle all its phases single-handedly, but after the first couple of editions you'll make much more money by hiring others to do the selling for you. Simply run an ad in your weekend newspapers, promising big incomes to commission advertising sales people. Word your ad so that those interested call you on the phone. When prospective sales people contact you, get their name, address, and phone number. Ask them to tell you a little bit about themselves, and then invite them to a get-acquainted meeting in the banquet or meeting room you've reserved in a local restaurant or motel. Give them the time, and date, then tell them you'll see them at the meeting. Then briefly explain that you're looking for just a few top-notch go-getters who can handle several thousand dollars a week in advertising commissions from individual merchants located in neighborhood shopping centers. At the meeting, show the sales prospects a prototype or dummy of one of your papers. Tell them they'll each be assigned a territory that includes three shopping centers. You then explain to them the reasons why there's big money in shopping center papers. Detail your advertising rates: $50 per column inch for a press run with a circulation of 5,000; $80 for 10,000; and $100 for 15,000 distributed copies. Emphasize that you pay 50% for each sale. Explain that each paper has room for $3,600 worth of advertising as a single 8 by 11 sheet printed on both sides, double that for an 11 by 17 sheet folded in half, or four times that much as two 11 by 17 sheets. Multiply the salesman's commission of $1,800 per paper times three shopping centers, and you're talking about an opportunity for total commissions of $5,200 per week with only a single 8 by 11 ad sheet! Remember, your basic idea is to create an individual shoppers paper for as many different shopping centers as possible. Because of the closeness of prospective advertisers in a shopping center, a good salesman will be able to sign most of the stores in at least three different shopping centers in a week. Once you've explained the marketing philosophy behind your papers and the money potential available, you should have all the eager salesmen you care to sign on. Remember, each sales person is assigned three different shopping centers. Give him a dummy of your paper for each of his shopping centers with the space availabilities marked, and send him out to fill those spaces with paid advertisers. You'll both be home free! Whenever possible, get your money up-front or at the time of the sale. In many instances this won't be possible, so you'll need some sort of standard contract. A short visit to your local public library, print shop, or community college advertising instruction department for a look at a few instruction books on how to draw up a space advertising contract will give you a form to copy and use as your own. Billing your advertise at the end of thirty days will bring in lots of sales, but it will also require a bookkeeper and the monthly mailing of statements. If you allow your advertisers to buy now and pay later, you will need to allow your salesmen to draw against the commission they have coming. This too will present some special problems, primarily a need for operating capital. Most of the time you'll be able to sell (factor) your accounts receivable for about 80% of the total due. When you do this, you'll be giving up another 20% of your gross income, but you will have immediate cash available. You must weigh your operating costs against the overall benefits and make your decision based upon these factors. Personal computer systems have made the design, layout, and production of your paper easier than it has ever been in the past. Although you may need to do a limited amount of final paste up by hand, most of your work can be completed on your computer system. The majority of small newsletters, shoppers' papers, and ad sheets use an Apple Macintosh with one of the commercially available publishing software programs such as QuarkXPress, Pagemaker, or Publish It! Easy. Similar software is available for IBM computers and compatibles. If you are doing the layout by hand, visit a stationary or printing supply store for the items you'll need. Pick up a blue printers pencil, some larger transfer (rub-on) letters in either 60-point or 72-point size, a pad of "fade out" graph paper, and a roll or two of border tape. Use the rub-on letters to print or write the masthead or title of each of your shopping center's papers at the top of the graph paper. With your border tape and a razor blade, make a U-shaped frame around the page, a half inch in from the outside edge. If you're getting started from your "kitchen table" and using a typewriter, make sure you use an "elite" typestyle. Now, measure the inside of your frame from the bottom of your masthead to the top of your border tape at the bottom of your frame, and from side to side by measuring from the inside edges of your border tape along the sides. You should end up with a space 9 inches deep by 7 inches wide - three columns 2 1/8 inches wide with two gutters 5/16 of an inch separating the columns - room for eighteen one-inch ads per page. Take these measurements to your local print shop and ask them for the dimensions of a space 30% larger. This should amount to a space 10 3/4 by 13 1/2 inches. Ask for some 11 by 14 inch paper. Scrap paper that has a clean backside will do quite nicely. With your blue printers pencil, lay out a frame 10 3/4 by 13 1/2 inches, and divide the 10 3/4 width into seven equal columns. Run the paper into your typewriter and type out the classified type ads you have to set. If you have a camera ready ad that's too large for your regular column dimensions, paste it into position on this sheet. When you have this page all prepared, take it to your printer and have him reduce it to 70% of its current size and run off a couple of copies for you. Cut out this reduced copy and paste it inside your master frame, add any proper sized camera ready ads, and you're ready to take your paper to press. Almost all shopping center papers start out as one page circulars printed on both sides, and put together on the "kitchen table" as described here. Working alone and trying to start from scratch, you probably won't have all your available space sold when you go to press. If this is the way it works out for you, simply fill in the empty spaces with ads of your own or promotional ads inviting people to call you for ad rate information or to place their ads. Also include some of your better mail order offers. In order to give the impression of lots of ads from lots of different people, enlist the help of your relatives and friends, allowing them to advertise a For Sale or Trade item free. It's important that you have ads from many different people with lots of different phone numbers and addresses. For classified ads you should charge $1 per line. Don't forget, your second source of income will be people who've seen or read your paper, and place ads of their own as a result. Once you've got separate pages - a front and a back - for your first paper ready, simply take it to your quick-print shop and have the number of copies you've promised to circulate for your advertisers run off. Have it printed on yellow or orange 20 pound bond, or even a heavyweight recycled paper. Until you really get rolling, you can hire a couple of teenagers to hand out your papers to everyone as they drive into the shopping center parking lot, drop off a stack for check-out stand giveaways at each store or shop in the shopping center, or persuade several newspaper carriers to include one with each newspaper they deliver. Another method is to hire a student to give one to each bus rider as he gets off the bus at busy "park and ride" locations. As your shopping center papers become known, you will need to take on sales people to do the selling for you. When more ad space is needed to handle the requests for advertising, contact a larger printer who works with web presses and newsprint paper. Look around and you'll find one who'll handle all your typesetting, layout, printing, and even bulk delivery to your distribution pickup points. Expanding to tabloid production will lower your production costs, give you greater efficiency, and result in more profits for your business. Where there is really tough competition, many publishers of shopping center papers include special interest stories about the shopping center and its employees --- what the land was used for before it was developed as a shopping center; profiles on the different store owners such as where they're from and what they did before opening their shop; and news of community interest within the customer circle. Many papers increase their incomes by running mail order opportunity ads from dealers in all parts of the country. Basically, a shopping center paper is the same as a mail order ad sheet. The big difference is that it serves as an advertising showcase for a small circle of merchants in a specific area and is circulated among the people most likely to do their shopping in that specific location. Your success depends upon how well you serve that small circle of merchants. Each individual shopping center has a need for an advertising showcase of its own, and it will be smart to turn away advertising requests from merchants outside that circle. The only advertising you'll have to do is via the quality and image you project with each issue or edition of your papers. There are a number of popularity-building promotions you can and should run: Free ads for baby-sitting and/or child care services; $100 worth of free groceries if the shopper spots his picture or name in your paper; and free merchandise or service for solving picture puzzles, etc. Don't look for much free publicity or help from newspapers, radio, or TV stations in your area because you are in direct competition with them. As mentioned earlier, this is an easy business to organize, requires no specialized education or training, and will pretty much perpetuate itself once you progress beyond the start-up stage. The greatest potential lies in the need for at least one such paper in even the smallest of communities. The profit potential in even small to medium-sized cities is fantastic. Here is a fabulous idea, and this report has provided the organizational details to
make it work for you just as profitably as it's working for a lot of entrepreneurs in a
number of locations around the country. The only missing ingredient now is action on your
part. Get with it, and start enjoying the fruits of your success! |
