How to Start Your Own Profitable
Restaurant Publication in 10 Easy Steps.

1. Personality and Computer Knowledge. You need to have some experience with marketing, advertising, outside sales, computers, media, retail and need to have an outgoing and positive personality.

2. Research your market. Find out if people in your town or city go out to eat. If they do, do they like to wait and read the sugar packets? Of course the answer is NO. While eating people always like to read something that is stimulating, positive and in a condensed format.(single page!)

3. Gather all competitive media. You need to become a marketing consultant and expert. In order to be an expert, you need to act like an expert. That is finding out how much it costs for all other forms of media in your marketplace. Call and get their distribution numbers, demographics, physcographics and rate cards.

4. Research your market again. Find out how many 'sub communities' are within the town/city that you live. This will allow you to determine what this opportunity is really worth to you. It will show you how many zones and how many ads you are able to sell each week. Obviously the more issues that you have, the more money you will make.

5. Once you have these zones broken down, go around and write down all of the restaurants and their exact locations in the first TWO zones you would like to start in. This will give you an idea of what the distribution is like in each zone. You should have approximately 40 places that end up being your primary locations.

6. Talk to your warm market about being in this new publication. Tell them you are looking for 7 pioneering advertisers to help you get your project off the ground. These first 7 advertisers will pay for all of your expenses, so that you do not have any out of pocket expenses to start your own Flying Cow. My favourite three letters of the alphabet. OPM.

7. Organize your content, creative, layout and printing services if you are doing this part on your own. Otherwise contact someone like CoffeeNews, JiveWeekly or Flying Cow to arrange some of these things. This piece is quite critical to your success. If you spend all of your time on this piece, you will not be able to leverage your time accordingly and ultimately not be able to maximize your income. Your content needs to be light, fun, positive and family oriented. Your creative provider needs to have graphics knowledge and customer care skills. You need to have a layout and PDF production person who is familiar with printing these types of products.

8. Are you going to run a turnkey business? Our suggestion is that you concentrate on selling and servicing your customer base and hire a good distribution manager. Someone you can trust to deliver your paper on time and in a courteous manner. Flying Cow always introduces themselves at the restaurant level. Owners know that we have permission to be in their restaurant with prime placement. In many places Flying Cow is displayed exclusively as the only single sheet restaurant publication. Our distribution managers are required to wear Flying Cow merchandise to show they are on delivery. This is another critical difference with the Flying Cow system.

9. Go set up your first two zones. You should have a good script written(we have this) to tell the restauranteur about what benefits they can expect by allowing your restaurant publication in their place of business each week. Spend time in each restaurant getting the staff and management to 'read' your publication. Merchandising within the restaurant is also critical. Because if you are not being seen, your are not being picked up and therefore your advertisers are not being sold. Explain to them how it will work for them and what you will expect from them as you build your relationship with them and your advertisers.

10. FILL UP YOUR PAPER WITH PAYING ADVERTISEMENTS. Finally, this is what this opportunity is all about. The success or failure of your new enterprise is completely dependant on your ability to introduce this opportunity to new advertisers each and every week. Your goal is to sell out the paper so there is a waiting list. You could offer 'exclusive' categories until you get sold out. At the point of sell out, then you are in the drivers seat. You need to continuously service your customers by asking them to update their ad copy and provide them with copies of the paper that they are advertising in. It will soon (within 9 months or so) become a part of the landscape within each restaurant. In other words it will become a habit to 'pick it up' each week.

At Flying Cow we will show you how to do proper Ad Evaluations and Business Evaluations to allow you to set up prequalified prospects. Prospects who are ready to buy from you instead of you having to 'sell something' to them. (This is why we can offer the money back guarantee* and the reason we don't have any competition!)

Good Luck starting a restaurant advertising newsletter from Flying Cow Publications !