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Student Life: How to make some easy money and go clubbing for free!

Making money as a student


An article on how students can make money for very little effort by building networks and how these skills transfer over to the on-line blogging world.

Before I came to University I had a pretty good idea about which company ran the student nights. My brother who also went to the same University some years previously kindly informed of the company that were the biggest organisers of student club nights at my University. That summer, I Facebooked the owner of the brand to ask if there were any jobs available. I explained that my assets were that I could network and reach I wide range of people, particularly since I was in 1st year and the majority of sellers would be in older years and thus, would not be living with and would not get to know many of the first years.

In Freshers' Week (first week of University for new students) I arrived on campus as an official ticket seller, earning 50p for every £4 ticket that I sold to the 5 different club nights the company put on each week. As an added bonus to the job, all entrances to each of the club night would be free and I would be a permanent member of the VIP list, allowing me access to special rooms and free alcohol. Furthermore, if I could sell more than 50 tickets for any one single event then the company would provide me with a bottle of vodka to take home.

Obviously these sorts of perks don't come without a price. I was expected to be selling tickets each week. If my numbers slipped I could be fired. I picked up the tickets (25 for each night - more was only possible if all 25 had been sold) every Friday and would return the money owed to the company.
The question was: how do I get my name out there and establish myself as 'the ticket man'?

Steps to make extra money as a student


Firstly, I went on-line to order free business cards. There are plenty of sites which offer this sort of service. Just type into Google: "free business cards". I ordered 500 free business cards with the names of each of the club nights with my name, address, bbm pin and phone number. In Freshers' Week I made ever effort to attend all sorts of events such as BBQ, bar crawls, dinners and handed out my business cards.
Secondly, I lived in a house in the heart of 'Student Land' and had the front window. So I put up a big sign "we sell tickets" for all students to see as they left their homes for lectures each day.
Thirdly, each of the club nights had its own Facebook page which the company itself uses to promote their nights to students. Each week I would put a message on each event wall with my phone number telling people to call if they needed tickets. Each time a person would call I would save their number in a special group and message that contact group once a week about upcoming deals and ticket availability.
Fourthly, I sold to my housemates, course mates, my friends and all their respective friends.
After a year of consistently promoting and selling myself, I increased my average ticket sales per week from 25 per week to over 100 per week. A mark of this success is demonstrated by the fact that I started getting messages and phone calls from various other clubbing companies asking me to come work for them for more commission. I chose to stay loyal and not take up any of these offers. You may be wondering why I didn't take up these more lucrative offers. I knew it would take me a while to re-establish these 'new' competing nights and I may have even lost clients since the nights I already sold for were quite established.

Blogging is a fairly new experience for me. There are a lot of similarities between ticket selling blogging. They're all about establishing a network and building those relationships even if they don't result in making any money straight away. In both scenarios it is quite possible that a non-profitable (purely in the money sense) relationship will remember you and recommend you to a friend who will do the same. As the word spreads and your network builds you can begin to see more opportunities to actually making more and more acquaintances and friends and eventually a little money.

What do you think? Do you agree with me? Are my skills at building networks in the physical world transferable to the on-line world? What more do you think I could do to raise the profile of my blog?

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