your thoughts on this business idea please...

Originally Posted by WillyWallace

Thanks again Gordon...I owe you at least a 6 pack for all of your awesome advice/input!

For some reason, every time I get into the "marketing for local business" game...I quickly get out. Then I get back in with another version of the same concept..."marketing for local business". Must be some weird addiction.

I'm going to follow The SumoApp methodology of business ideas...which is to do something manually for free. And if it works- scale it up from there and charge for it.

Something has got to get me out of the corporate world...way too boring!

Nothing wrong with the going after the "marketing for local business" niche.

However the last thing you want to do is be dependent on the local business to be the distributor of the marketing piece. Quite frankly they're too unreliable for it. Most of them aren't of the right mindset (not too mention quite often after they've provided a service for you, their hands & appearance is a mess) and they simply aren't the vehicle of distribution you would want.

The big problem I have with many of the "marketing for local business" ideas, including the whole 9x12 thing is that you're going to be putting in one heck of a lot of work for not a lot of return. And that amount of work is a detriment to scaling the thing up.

The other challenge is the low cost of the ads themselves. On any sort of postcard the ads can only be so big which limits the amount you can ask for in exchange for the space.

That's where the penny-saver folks or the Val-Pak folks have a big edge, they can be offering much larger (and more costly) ad space to folks like car-dealers who worth a mint in larger format marketing pieces but aren't a good target for postcard marketers.