Bookshops and stores are full of travel information. There are maps and guides - some drawing out the routes and others recommending the places to visit. However, they all have a critical piece of information missing. This information is especially important for people visiting a busy city and its unavailability can ruin their trip altogether. This business is about making this information available. It's a business that is really easy to start and run.

This idea would work in a large city where parking is a problem. You would be selling a guidebook to all the parking lots and parking garages, along with their rates and locations. This is a unique business idea since it offers 2 money making avenues - You can sell these books for a small amount (under $10.00) or you can sell advertising space in the books to parking places, car repairers, insurers, etc.

Your first task is to gather information on parking lots and parking garages. Yellow pages and the Internet are where you can expect to find most of the information you need. To get more information, you can visit the busiest spots in the city and look for parking spaces in and around them.

Note: It is very important that you choose a big and very busy city, which has a huge parking space problem; since this is the basic premise, on which this business runs.

Use your computer and publishing software (e.g. Microsoft publisher), to compile all the gathered information in the form of a book. Add an attractive cover page to it, print it, bind it using a paper binder (e.g. spiral binding) and you are ready to sell. The publishing software, printer, and binder are very user-friendly tools that are easy to learn. Moreover, getting this done from the market will be pretty expensive. As your business gathers momentum, you can order bulk printing of these guides at a publishing service.

Use effective advertising techniques to announce your business to the world. Leave pamphlets/flyers at bookshops that sell travel guides and accessories. Or, consign your parking guide to the owners of locations visited by people in need of parking and when they sell one, they collect the money for you. Spread the word around to parking space providers, car insurers/repairers/renters/sellers etc. Send your ad rate card to them and check if they would be interested in advertising in your parking guide. Since the majority of your customers will belong to the suburbs of the busy city, it makes sense to advertise in the local newspapers of the suburbs.

Tip: The Internet offers a major opportunity in terms of the number of prospective customers you can reach out to, and that too at a very low cost. You could also offer the guide in the form of an e-book that people can pay for, and download, from your website. Initially, you can use paypal (see www.paypal.com) for receiving payments. Later, as the business grows, you can start accepting credit card payments too (which may be a bit expensive to integrate on a website).

Travel guide publishers are another group of prospective customers. They might want to include your parking guide as an addendum to their travel guides. So just, check with them and get going.

Tip: As a bonus to your customers, you can provide free updates to your guide through a newsletter (over email). You can also include affiliate links in your newsletters, thus making them another revenue-earning machine.

Resources:

Example of sites having info on parking lots and parking garages:

http://www.sfgov.org/site/dpt_index.asp?id=13451
http://newyork.citysearch.com/yellowpages/directory/New_York_NY/10/104/page1.html

Using Microsoft publisher:

http://www.bcschools.net/staff/PublisherHelp.htm
http://desktoppub.about.com/library/howto/bl_htpubl.htm

Binders:

http://www.machinerunner.com/Binding/PlasticBinders.html