Incredible Little Niche: Making Money From Low-Cost Recipes

During a recession, such as we have now, many people search for ways to save money on living expenses. This is an ideal time to assemble and sell a set of low-cost recipes. These recipes would show how to prepare delicious, wholesome meals using inexpensive ingredients.

Finding low-cost recipes — There are various sources for low-cost recipes. These could be recipes that had been passed down from earlier generations of your family. They could be recipes from friends and relatives. They could be recipes you found on the Internet or in old time books. Perhaps you could experiment while preparing meals for your family — then you could develop your own recipes.

Testing the recipes — It would be a good idea to review and test the recipes before selling them. You want to verify that the ingredients are inexpensive and wholesome. In addition, the result should be appealing and delicious. In some cases, you may want to change the recipe slightly so that it meets all of the above tests.

Abiding by copyright restrictions — When selling recipes developed by other people, you must be careful not to infringe on any copyrights still in force. If a copyright applies, you may try getting written permission from the copyright holder to use that recipe. The copyright rules are described in Circular 15a, Duration of Copyright: Provisions of the Law Dealing with the Length of Copyright Protection. (See below for a link to the Cornell University website that shows these provisions.)

Assembling a set of recipes — Normally you want to assemble a set of recipes that are as useful as possible. If you have a large number recipes in a particular category, that would be one way to organize a set. Thus, you could focus on appetizers, barbecues, cakes, desserts, drinks, fish, meat, pastries, salads, sandwiches, soups, stews, specialty dishes, or vegetables. You could focus on low calorie meals, low cholesterol meals, high-protein meals, or well-balanced meals.

Publishing and delivering these recipes — there are various ways to publish and deliver these recipes sets. I assume you would use a word processing program to record these recipes. Then you could print booklets and send them through the mail. You could have your customers download the word processing file from the Internet. Alternatively, you could convert the word processing file into a PDF file and have your customers download the PDF file from the Internet.

Advertising these recipes — You could sell your sets of recipes using classified advertisements in your local newspaper or craigslist, a website on the Internet, an online newsletter, or eBay®. I would start with one or two inexpensive methods of advertising at first. Then you could gradually test other methods to see if they return a profit. If you live in a large city, try using http://www.craigslist.org first.

Copyright provisions — Go to the http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm website of Cornell University.