Generating Holiday Income

The holiday season can be a great time to generate income
with a little imagination and forethought. Anyone who has been in the special event industry for any length of time knows all about Holiday parties and how lucrative they can be, but there are also some surprising ways to generate income using a little bit of initiative, creativity and forethought. Listed below are some of the ways we've heard of to generate some extra holiday cash.
Decorate homes, yards or offices
In this fast paced world most people who have a little extra income are more than happy to pay someone to take care of their holiday decorating. Florist's can offer ready-decorated trees, wreaths, swags and arrangements, lighting companies can offer to put up lights indoors or out, photographers can offer to take pics for holiday cards, musicians can put together a CD of favorite music and party planners can offer services from offering complete decoration services to planning that special party .
Offer a special gift idea
Party planners can pull items out of their bag of favors to offer as corporate gifts, florists can put together their own unique holiday arrangements, bakers/caterers can offer a special holiday cake or cookies and photographers can offer framed art.
Pageants/Plays
Photographers and Videographers can offer to film these events, decorators can offer to do set design, caterers can offer food service and lighting companies are always needed for these events.
The key is to plan in the summer what you'd like to focus on during the holiday season, come up with a flyer or email note and get the word out either to other vendors, directly to specific customers or to one of your best resources - former clients. We love sending out email blasts and blogging on our own and other's website to get the word out. The exciting part of advertising today is it doesn't take a lot of front-end funds if you advertise via email, especially if you contact old customers. They already love you and your services, so you're halfway there to making a sale!

We hope you'll enjoy the film below. One of our favorite customer's asked us to document the awesome decorations at his home. We've never seen anything like this. If this film doesn't get you in the holiday mood all I can say is - Bah Humbug! Happy Holidays to everyone.

Bill Bowen,
Producer
Suburban Video