how to set up a coffee news layout ?

Excuse me if this gets long - I have a fair amount of experience on this one. When I first started my own printing business 15 years ago two of my first clients did this type of thing. I did the graphic design and printing for them and they sold ads and set up restaurants. Both of them had several variations and formats, depending on the restaurant. Aside from a newsletter, they did menus and place mats with ad spaces.

I noticed that someone commented on how the prices were too low. Don't think that just because you have a good idea you can sell it for any price. There is a limit to what the market will bear - a lot of that will depend on where you are selling. Factors like the restaurants popularity and amount of competition will be huge factors. My clients typically sold out the ads, but only after offering major discounts to some clients to get them in. As for profitability - they made an ok living. They weren't driving German luxury sedans, but they paid the bills! Both customers serviced about 8-10 restaurants. They neither did their own design or printing - 100% of their time was in selling and servicing their advertisers and restaurants.

Even if there's no-one offering the same service (restaurant newsletters), your competition is anyone who sells advertising. Businesses typically spend a finite amount of money on advertising, so if their budget is already maxed out on other mediums, you'll have a tough sell no matter how economical - unless you can prove to them that they will get better results from your medium. Not to say it can't be done, just don't expect it to be easy ... plan on talking to a LOT of businesses to fill the space.

As for the format (the original question!), that is going to depend on how many ads you can sell in a given market. I've seen everything from a single 8.5 x 11, 11 x 17 to an 8-page 8.5 x 14 booklet style. For the premier edition, something simple might be a good idea since you don't know how big it will be.

A few thoughts on how to make it a better value ... if you look at CN, it's not very attractive (which is probably in part why they don't sell that well). Another problem is it's a display ad that cannot be removed from the restaurant. That means most people will glance at it and forget about it once the meal arrives. Simple black and white ads, mixed in with black and white text are not going to garner attention and potential advertisers will be less than impressed.

Ok, I should charge for these suggestions! But hey, it's a good cause!
Some ways to make it more compelling...
Consider having some "shells" printed in full color. Shells are pages that are pre-printed in volume and in a format where you can just add the new content each month - or however often you publish. The alternative is to have them printed in color on a digital printer (color copier) each time. Don't underestimate the selling power of color.

Using recycled content will get old fast. Honestly, I don't even look at the Coffee News because I expect the information to be stale. One way to mix it up is to solicit input from the readers. People LOVE to see their work in print! Create a contest with some kind of prize for user submissions. A great prize could be a gift certificate to the restaurant where they are eating - the restaurant might even give you this for free. You will find that the non-portable nature of the newsletter will create some major objections. A way to solve this is to create a web site where each ad is posted online. You'd probably need to talk advertisers into posting some money saving special offers online to compel people to go to the site. But that probably won't be enough - to really make an impact, how about having some cards printed up for each restaurant (you can get those from us!!) These cards could serve multiple purposes .... use it to advertise your ad business (a small line or two of text), it will be a free business card for the restaurant, but most importantly - it will drive people to visit your website where they will see the online ads. The trick here is to make the card double as a discount voucher (like 10% off next meal) but it has to be validated by going to the website and getting the validation code.

Obviously these are just suggestions - the idea being you have to create demand for your advertising service. This can only be done by creating visual appeal and a system that will ensure the ads are seen. Coupons (on the website) would be huge as they can be tracked. As an advertiser sees the coupons coming in, they know where the customer came from, and will advertise again.

Almost forgot ... as for programs to use for layout. First of all I think you're better off paying someone to design them for you - especially if you don't have design experience. Poorly designed ads will kill your business fast, plus if you do this right, you'll want to dedicate more than full time to selling. If you do decide to do the layout and you're doing more than just copying and pasting business cards, you're going to need more than one program. We use the Adobe Suite (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, etc.), but there are less expensive options out there - especially if you're going to run them on a digital copier. Some design elements you would ideally create with a drawing program (Illustrator, Corel Draw, etc.), some with Photoshop - especially if there will be pictures, and a page layout program puts all the pieces in their place (InDesign, Quark, Publisher, etc.) Although if you're going to be serious, I would steer you away from Publisher ... it's not very printer friendly.