I know there are groups who have turned scanning into a full time job. Any tips or tricks on how to turn scanning into a job and make money from it. I would like to start a scanner twitter feed for my town tweeting the relevant scanner traffic and getting involved in other social media sharing relevant information. I also want to create a text alert system where citizens can be sent text alerts when I hear about major events. Any advice?
Successfully starting a business usually involves a lot of research, analysis of the market, analysis of self, and preparation way beyond tips and tricks.
If you haven't already, you might consider studying the existing businesses that already provide these incident-transcription services. Identify their strengths and weaknesses, how well they are (or are not) doing, what services they offer reliably, what services they claim to offer but do not deliver well, what business-model they had to use to become successful, etc. (There are two listed in the RR Wiki:
AlertPage and
Incident Page Network.)
You might also do some research on other businesses that unsuccessfully attempted the same thing, but failed, so that you learn why they failed, what factors led to the failure, what business-model was attempted, what services were attempted, etc.
All of these things would simply be a starting point to learn what factors you should consider in your own business-plan, what things you need to consider while measuring your own strengths and weaknesses, your own available resources, etc. so that you do not repeat the mistakes of others and instead learn from them.
Before you establish a competing business, you might consider becoming a transcriber who supports an existing business, so that you get some experience in the field, get a personal perspective on what is involved at the transcription level and have time to measure or assess what is involved at the business-level beyond the transcriptions.
As you develop your business-plan and choose the list of services to provide, your potential-customers will want to know "Why should I (the potential-customer) pay you for this service/product, when I can get the same service/product from company XYZ? What makes your company better than XYZ?" If you can't answer those basic questions completely (with specifics), confidently (with truth), and convincingly (with emotion), then the lack-of-answer is a sign that your business-plan is not strong enough to be reliably successful.
90%+ of small businesses fail in their first year. Be a realist more than an idealist. Do your homework and maybe you will find your way to success where others haven't.
Hope this helps,
