Guerilla Marketing: Doing more for less!

Here are some of the things we have been doing lately with the on campus Overtime Sports Center:

This is the "Chair Booth" as we like to call it.  What it is: a recliner on wheels with a side table built in.  The sign is a white board on one side, but soon it will look like a TV on the other.  Also coming soon, soda cans.

How we us it:  We "park" this bad boy in the middle of high traffic areas on campus and someone just sits and chills, drinks a soda, eats chips, and talks to people who laugh or look interested.  They are, of course, armed with flyers at all times.


Total cost of this bad boy?  Less than $20.00.  (Chair - $5 DI, wood and sign - free from friends, wheels - free from old shopping cart, brackets - $10.00, etc.)

And this is our sports anchor station.  the most expensive thing on this sucka was the laminated sign.  The actual table is built out of a simple wood frame, cardboard, a piece of plywood and cloth.  Total cost - $50, of which $25 was the sign.








Here are some other great examples of guerilla marketing:

Hopefully it is clear the value of guerilla marketing.  Essentially it is just using advertisements in different ways to attract attention.  I love the creativity and EFFECTIVENESS of this method of advertising.  Try your own, its fun!

My Current Venture: Overtime Sports Center

We have a fun commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uAWm-ETGK4
We have a website:
http://www.overtimesportscenter.com



We have a facebook group:
Search for Overtime sports center . com.

I will talk about some cool gorilla marketing techniques later on.

Beginner Internet Marketing tools 101 - Part 3

Parts ONE and TWO have already been covered.  If you missed them, click the links in the text.  At this point, we can create a decent amateur internet business.  That is, you understand internet business, you can build a simple site, you can optimize that site, you can determine keywords and use them to structure your site, you can analyze the competition, and you can choose a reliable host for that site.  So your set right?  Wrong.  Well, partly wrong.  You could move forward, but you would be lacking some powerful tools.  Part 3 is going to serve you up those tools on a silver platter.

The Other Tools
Beginner Internet Tools 1-3 (development)
Beginner Internet Tools 4-6 (refinement)

Internet Tool Set # 7 (Marketing)
Pay per click AdWords Learning
Pay per click AdWords Help
Yahoo Search Marketing

Pay per click advertising for a website can be a great way to drive traffic to your site for cheap.  A lot depends on the keywords your site focuses on (read the guides in the links), but pay per click can be an inexpensive boost for site popularity.  As a website business owner, your initial main goal should be to get people to the site!

Internet Tool Set #8 (Search Engine Optimization)
SEOmoz Beginner's Guide to SEO
Simple BNET list
Finding Backlinks

Search engine optimization is the key to your website's long term success.  SEO is the art of optimizing your site for search engines, so they can easily read, report, and show your site.  After all, when people "google" your keywords you want them to see your site!  If you want to understand, I highly recommend the SEOmoz link.

Internet Tool Set #9 (Suppliers)
Alibaba - global trade.  Be CAREFUL
Small Volume
Global Sources

Your business will really take off as you cut costs by getting great suppliers.  You may have read my sad supplier story, and needless to say, BE CAREFUL!  That being said, a good supplier will make or break the business.

That concludes my Beginner Internet Marketing tools 101 course.  Ask yourself questions as you go through these tools, ask me those questions, and I will not know the answer (but I will find it).

Beginner Internet Marketing tools 101 - Part 2

Dum dum dee dum dee dum, DUUUM!!  PART 2.... HAS ARRIVED... ETC.!

Now that you have thoroughly studied up on part 1 of the Internet Marketing Beginner's Guide, you are ready for double barrels (or just some more information).  From part 1, we know about the inner workings of internet business, we can actually build a website, and we understand the principles of building a physical site both for appearance and code integrity.  Now lets dig a little deeper.  We'll get muddy n' stuff.

Internet Tool Set #4 (Determining Keywords):
SEObook's Tool
Google's Keyword Tool
Trellian Keyword Tool
Google Insights

It is important to understand the importance of important keywords.  That may sound redundant, but mostly I just said the same thing more than once.  Anyway, the fact remains that structuring your site with good keywords, understanding what keywords are valuable, and using those keywords to understand niche and competition are essential skills in internet business.

Internet Tool Set #5 (Finding Out the Competition):
Compete.com
Niche Watch
Google Traffic Estimator
SpyFu

Analyzing competition can give you valuable insights on how to optimize your own internet business.  These sights provide valuable resources, like determining who gets traffic for what keywords, how sites measure up to each other, and who has the top spots for your keywords.

Internet Tool Set #6 (Getting a Host for your Site):
Terms You Oughta Know
How to Choose a Host
Top 10 Web Hosts

You can't really build a successful web business without hosting your site "for real" (i.e., independent of other sites, getting that .blogspot out of your URL *cough cough*).  Hosting is generally pretty cheap and very valuable to your business.

If you have studied this guide, and the first guide, with your powers combined you are... Captain Internet!  But wait, don't celebrate yet.  There is still much to learn.  Part 3 is coming soon.

Go to Beginning Internet Marketing Tools Part 3 Now!

Beginner Internet Marketing tools 101 - Part 1

Okay, so you are young, poor, ambitious (but not too ambitious) and tech-savvy (but not too savvy).  Does this describe you?  Well even if it doesn't keep reading.

Ambitious (want to start a business), but not too ambitious (don't want to leave your home).  Solution:  Internet business!  Assuming you understand some internet and some business, I will provide 3 tried, tested, amazing, FREE internet business tools (or tool sets) and their breakdowns each day for the next week or so in this multi-part blog post.  But lets cut all the blah blah blah and get into the good stuff.  This week's tools are all related to getting started:

Internet Tool Set #1 (Internet Business Starting Info):
Start An Internet Biz in 10 Days
Dozens of Articles for Starting
How Creating an Online Biz Works
Entrepreneur.com's Online Biz Articles

If you read every article in these links (or that these links lead to), you would be busy for a week, and you would also be well versed in the language and methods of online business.  These are (for the most part) well written, well geared towards beginners, and up to date.

Internet Tool Set #2 (Easy Site Building):
Learn HTML
Weebly Drag and Drop
Wix Drag and Drop (flash)
Drupal Drag and Drop (Downloadable)

There are several tools here because each has its value and may appeal to different users.  For instance, if you are more interested in learning code, go to the "Learn HTML" link.  If you would like to slap up a website quickly but you want to maintain decent code, try Weebly.  If you want a lot more design freedom and don't care about code, try Wix.  If you want a downloadable editor, try Drupal.  They are all superb programs.

Internet Tool Set # 3 (Making a Quality Site):
Web Wiz Guide
8 Tips
Taming The Beast
17 Rules

This is a well rounded list of guides to making an appealing website, both with design and with appearance.  I found particularly helpful the "17 Rules" guide.  Reading up on these articles would definitely give you a well rounded feel for how to design a website.

Thanks for checking out this guide.  There will be more to follow including selected links hosting sites, international supplier sites, or competition information sites.

GO TO Beginner Internet Marketing Tools Part 2

GO TO Beginner Internet Marketing Tools Part 3

An Internet Business Gone Wrong

My internet business went terribly wrong. Shall I tell you the story? Yes. Shall I speak to you in old English? No. Sorry about the "shalls".

It was an unfortunate mix of Alibaba.com, a scam artist in India, some flash drives, and China. But I think I am getting a bit ahead of myself. Let me back up.

I had a business class where we had the great opportunity to learn how to and actually start up an internet business. I was so excited! I went into hyper-business-obsession mode (much to my wife's dismay) and researched all sorts of stuff. Wedding rings, photography, blogs, i-pods, services, flash drives... wait, stop right there. Flash drives. That was it.

I had seen flash drives for super cheap on alibaba, and decided to look into buying them. Let me make a short story long by telling you that I found a great supplier from India who had connections with a factory in China to sell me some fantastic 32GB Kingston flash drives for only $15 a drive! Too good to be true, right? Right.

I bought them. 100 of them. If you struggle with math that's $1500. Now that I made the short part of my story long, I will make the long part of my story short. They were fake. The guy in India with great connections in China was a scam. I never saw my money again. The flash drives were faulty. China was still China. To sum it up, it stunk.

Lesson Learned: Dudes (especially outside the country dudes) that claim to be selling something or doing something that just seems too good to be true are. There is a reason they call it "too good to be true", it is.

The good news is I bought a few real flash drives just to get the business really running, and the business failed for real. At least this time it was legitimate failure.