How to start a profitable magazine with less than $25 (Part 1)

This series will be a step-by-step guide on starting a shopper magazine with less than $25. It is based on a first hand experience and not an article about how someone else did it. It’s about a profitable business that was started with less than $25, where it normally would cost from $20,000 to $200,000, depending on the format.

What is a shopper? A shopper is either a free or paid tabloid similar to Pennysaver, Recycler or Little Nickel that may be running in your community. Most of these shoppers are owned by national or even multinational newspaper syndications and franchises. However, independently owned operations have done just as well, if not better. A good example would be the Recycler Magazine, which is an astonishing growth story worth reading. It should be noted that this type of magazine described here is not to be mistaken for any glossy print, which requires thousands if not hundreds of thousands to start. As a general rule, shoppers do not gross as much as glossy magazines, however, the required capital investment is incomparable. Many shoppers expand to glossy magazines, radio and television stations after gaining experience in the advertising, media and publishing.

There is no experience required and you can learn as you go. It is highly recommended however, that you follow this guide step by step. The guide is broken down to numerous parts and will be posted in sequence. The procedure is designed to enable owners to operate alone as well as employing other staff members. The business obviously grows much faster, if the owner has the ability to manage employees.

Short term objectives should be reasonable such as ability to quit your job and pay all your expenses through the business. In your first year, anything more than that may not be that easy.The long term objectives would be anywhere from a local circular to a state wide chain of magazines.

It is important to ask questions and in fact, posts will stop if there is not enough participation. Please feel free to leave comments also.

Are you posting your resume?

You might be familiar with Posting a Resume and if so, please forward this link to a friend who might not know about this technology. It's possible to be savvy in the area on-line employment and not know about Posting a Resume. This service is offered by most of the on-line employment services.

You can create a profile and upload your resume for employers to view publicly. It's possible to get responses immediately, but in general it takes a while before it starts to work. If multi-talented, you'd probably want to create different resumes based on your skills.

The other nice features is that you can hide your name, phone and email address. Employers will then send you an unspecified recipient email based on your profile. The only emails you want to avoid are the scams that post work from home, stuffing envelopes and other non-sense. Not all work from home jobs are scams though. Similar to other scam checks, just paste the name of the employer, the wording or email address in your search box and add the word "scam" and you can see if others have spotted this scam. What you don't want to avoid is your spam folder as many employer offers end up in there. So check the spam folder daily and delete the unwanted emails regularly. At the same time make sure that your email service doesn't automatically discard the spam folder as it could contain job offers.

The posts in this blog are kept relatively short. Feel free to ask questions or leave comments below.