If you’re looking for a quick and easy home money project then you could do worse than think about a leaflet distribution business. It couldn’t be easier, needs no special skills and no capital to speak of. Yet you could find loads of demand for this service from local businesses in need of more customers.

Here’s some advice and guidance on setting up your own leaflet distribution business:

Finding customers. I’d suggest you spend a little time at the outset to find some customers for your business. This way, you’ll know what demand there is before you even start up.

This is an ideal service for offering to LOCAL businesses that need LOCAL customers. Especially those that need a regular stream of new customers. Here are some businesses to try: Taxi businesses. Food takeaways. Gyms. Garages. Home services, like plumbers. Home improvements companies. Pubs/restaurants. Cleaning services. Local shops. Estate and letting agents.

Sell your service by calling these businesses – or call round to see them and ask to speak to the manager or owner.

Pricing. Pricing for a leaflet distribution service is usually done on a ‘per thousand’ basis. Check with some local competitors to find out what the going rate is in your area.

The secret of making money from leaflet distribution is to drop more than one leaflet at a time. For example, three or four leaflets dropped at the same time makes three or four times the profit for little extra expense and not much more work!

But – don’t overdo it here. The more leaflets you drop together, the lower the response is likely to be – three or four together is the ideal maximum.

Extra profit opportunity. Here’s a very good way of making extra profit from your service. Offer a leaflet design and printing service. But all you need to do is this – find a printer who can design and print for you and add a margin on top.

Organising the distribution. Get a large scale map of the town or suburb area involved. Ask the customer to mark the areas they’d like their leaflets dropped to. Then make a checklist of the actual streets to be dropped.

Doing the distribution. There are two choices here. Either you can do the drop yourself – all it will take is some time and shoe leather. Or you can hire part time staff to do the dropping for you. Try some window cards or small ads to find part time workers. (If you do this make sure the people you hire are conscientious and reliable – and do some spot checks to make sure they drop the leaflets required.)

Important: The more carefully you organise the distribution the better the response will be for your customer – and the more likely they are to use your service again and again.

Tip: Make sure every letterbox within a given area is dropped to – even those with long drives, not just easy-to-do ones like flats and terraced properties. Also drop to business premises and so on.

And here’s a very simple and easy way of getting great results: encourage your customer to include an offer voucher in their leaflet. For example, a money-off discount or a BOGOF (buy one get one free) type offer. This way, they’ll be able to see the response that your leaflet drop gets for them and are more likely to want to use your service again!

You could even turn your leaflet distribution business into a bigger full time business if you wanted to!