Cheap Marketing...

Hi All,

Thanks to those who have filled in the survey. So far the results have been positive. If you are looking on this blog for details of entry to win the iPhone go to my earlier blog in March (or scroll below for the link).

This entry is more about cheap (or free) marketing for those who are looking to set up a business. The internet has become one of the best portals to research products, do a market survey, and MARKET your business/product.

Most of you have found out about this project through facebook. Other's have found out through friends - friends who if you delve deeper found out about this idea through facebook! All of this has been achieved at no additional cost. For facebook, what you have to do is create a "group" within facebook to become a "ligitimate" company and send people invites to events OR mass messages. Of course to create a group, you first need to create a profile. REMEMBER, you cannot create a business as a profile - I kind of did, but that was more to get the name out there. There is a "group" in facebook called Malaysia Ski and Snow for people to join.

Enough about facebook - I could devote a whole blog entry about it (from what I have learnt from others and personally). It is important to note that there are other internet sites that can perform the same task as what facebook has done for me eg. twitter (very new), friendster, bebo, myspace etc. All of which can potentially do the same job.

SO, then I created this blog. Blogs are great if you have more information to tell people like how to enter a survey competition. OR to tell people how you went about creating your business. OR to advertise your company/product in a different way. Blogging has become one of the most influential "things" in our modern life. There are people famous just for blogging!!! Who would have thought?!? Obviously, I am using www.blogger.com as my service provider. Again, this is a free service. There are other's out there but, I'm not tech savvy enough to know them. This provider gives me more than enough functions to perform what I set out to do.

Finally, I found (by luck at a work survey - yes, I too have to work) www.surveymonkey.com, which is an internet survey site. This costs US$200 per annum to join onto the premium survey option. It is actually very cheap when compared to what you would have to pay via a market research company. BUT, market survey companies do still perform an excellent task! They would have prepared a better survey with more drop down answers (especially for the country question). So do not discard the use of market survey companies.

So there you have it. Minimal or ZERO cost advertising right at your fingertips. A lot of work - make sure you spend time in doing this. If you don't have the time then the costs go up. Hope that this is of some help to some of you potential entrepreneurs out there.

Regards,
Eric

PS Fill out the survey!!! Here's the link if you are too lazy to go to the early March entry
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=5MoRZceUBlkJPRduBjz7Fg_3d_3d