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!

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.