Seth Godin has advice for underemployed real-estate agents: Start a newspaper. That's right.
His formula: Assuming six people are in your office, have them each do two interviews a day. Get 20 households to subscribe to your free paper (which is actually an online newsletter). Twice a week send it to them. Within a week it ought to have two dozen articles and 500 subscribers and very soon, if it's any good, it'll have the entire area subscribing. It'll own its zip (postal) code, which Godin asserts is an important achievement.
Godin doesn't take it any further. I presume there's the capacity to sustain it, to fetch some advertising to pay for the effort, and no one else able to do it. Otherwise the "gift" he suggests is yours to give is exactly that.
