Home Business Wannabe

1 John Chow and 1234 pens show how to advertise

March 14, 2007 Marketing Steve

John Chow, otherwise known as the root of all evil, today posted a competition to win a Nintendo Wii. He’s running the competition with 1234pens.com, the promotional pens maker. In order to enter the competition you have to write a blog post featuring two specific links.

So, that’ll be this post, then.

What’s all this got to do with your home business? There’s some great marketing going on here. Both 1234pens and John are getting free links. 123pens will be getting exposure and potential business from all those blog readers.

They are getting other people to promote their business for very little outlay on their part - it’s only costing them the price of a Wii and the postage - how much time and money would all have those links cost using more traditional methods? Much more.

Some possibilities for getting other people to market your business for you:

• Recommend a friend - Offer people an incentive to recommened your busines to others. This could be a straight cash reward or money off another purchase from you.
• Flyer spot competition - Print some flyers or window stickers and give them out. To give people the incentive to display them run a competition in which weekly or monthly a flyer or sticker will be ’spotted’ and the owner of the spotted advert wins a prize. This could work well if your business targets a relatively small area. Local radio stations in the UK tend to run this kind of competion - they get listeners to put their stickers in their car windows and someone from the station will spot a winning car every month or so.