If you walk to lose weight, here is a way you can earn a extra $100-500 a week for taking your daily walk. How about starting a flyer advertising service?

This is an idea that has tremendous potential to be customized to match your time needs and earnings wishes. I'll get into ways to tweak the idea in a moment, but here's the basic idea.

The Gist

First, choose a walking route with a lot of close-together residences. Figure out how many homes you pass during your walk, and use that number to figure out how many different areas of the neighborhood you'll have to walk to cover 500 homes.

That might be a little confusing, so...

• Let's say you walk five days a week, for 1.5 hours a day in a large subdivision
• And say, for simplicity's sake, you pass 125 homes on your daily 1.5-hour walk.
• If you choose a different area of the subdivision to walk each day, in 4 days you'll pass 500 different homes, right?

Why 500? Because now you'll offer to print and deliver 500 ads for local businesses for a ridiculously inexpensive price -- say, $30. Businesses will jump at 500 highly- targeted ad impressions for only $30.

"Thirty bucks? For four days' work? Mike, you've GOT to be kidding," you say.

Stay with me. Here's where it gets fun.

First, you're taking the walk anyway for no pay, right? So anything your earn is more than you make now.

Second, you're "working" 1.5 hours a day, which is $5 an hour.

And third, you'll make quite a bit more than five bucks and hour!

Here's how...

• Each business creates a 3" tall by 8.5" wide ad
• Group up to six ads (3 per side of an 8.5"x11" sheet) for non-competing businesses
• Print a master copy of the ad sheet on you computer printer and bring it to a copy shop and have 500 copies made

Six ads at $30 each is $180. Less $15 for printing (at $0.03 each for 500) nets you $165... which is $27.50 an hour! (Better than $5 an hour, huh?)

A small ad in your local paper will get the ball rolling as far as bringing in clients. Better yet, since you run a flyer advertising service, why not get up early a few mornings simply hang some flyers on the doors of local businesses?

Variations On The Theme

Work More
Obvious, I know, but if you hustle, you can deliver 1000-1200 flyers in a day. At $165 per batch of 500, "working" only two days a week (say, the weekend) delivers 2000-2400 flyers -- and brings you an extra $660 to $792. Not bad for one weekend!

Double Your Fun
You can pick up some plastic bags with doorknob holes online for about $0.02 each, or $10 for 500. Simply put two ad sheets in a bag. Guess what? You've just nearly doubled your receipts.

Plug Yourself
If you have another business, especially a homeowner- related service -- lawn mowing, window or car washing, dog poop scooper service, whatever -- use one of the available ad slots for advertising your own service. You'll more than make up for the lost $30 in ad revenue in increased business.

Less Space Could Mean Mo' Money
No matter how small the ad, most business owners will be suspicious of an ad service that is TOO inexpensive. Why not arrange the ad sheet into two columns of four ads (instead of one column of three ads) and charge $15 bucks per ad? That boosts your gross receipts from $180 to $240 per page but leaves your printing costs and delivery time unchanged.

Bulletin Board Poster
Offer to post flyers for other home and small businesses to your researched list of local bulletin boards. Charge $1 per location with a 20-location minimum.

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This page was last modified on 3/2/2006 7:41:34 AM.
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