The UC Berkeley Entreprenuership Blog
Anytime sales are low, it is the entrepreneur’s natural instinct to find creative ways to boost sales. When all else fails, small business owners are often faced with the choice of bearing the cost of decreased sales until consumer shopping picks up again, or cut prices to incentivize sales.
An increasing number of social media websites are finding that the only real way to structure advertisements so that they have any significant ROI for sponsors is to integrate them into the social nature of the website itself. StumbleUpon did this through the use of “paid stumbles” where they charged $.05 a visitor from the StumbleUpon toolbar and Digg rolled out a similar program soon after showcasing “sponsored stories” amongst the other submissions on the home page.
My number one rule of networking: don’t sell. Or at least, don’t blatantly sell. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen someone approach a well known figure in the industry they have never met and the first thing they try to do is sell the established individual on a product or idea
I just have one question for every entrepreneur or freelancer who deals with corporate or repeat clients, does your client see you as cost of doing business, just another line on their expense reports, or as a long-term investment? Based on your answer to this question for every client you are currently working with and any client who approaches you in the future, who should you be focusing on?
Dodge ran an advertisement during the Super Bowl this year which I have to say is one of the worst advertisements I have seen in a while. The advertisement makes fun of the man’s role in the marriage showing a series of miserable looking men and listing all the tedious things their wives force them to do. The advertisement ends by saying that because the husband has to do everything his wife tells him and is miserable, he gets to drive a Charger as his “last stand”.
The allure of working for yourself and working from home are two of the main upsides to being an entrepreneur and especially a web/tech entrepreneur. However, despite the glowing praise for the flexibility and convenience of working from home, one topic that often gets disregarded is the disconnection many “at home entrepreneurs” feel.
The most important aspect of any advertising campaign is whether or not it builds trust. Consumers are naturally skeptical about any form of advertising as it is paid for and thus biased. Hence, even if you go on about your product’s features and how great of a deal consumers are getting, these claims are often counteracted by the fact that consumers know the commercial is biased and thus have no trust in the information presented. This is especially true for small businesses that have no well-known brand name to back them up.
I was fortunate enough to be interviewed on NBC Bay Area a couple of days and thought I’d share the video interview here. The video is about an entrepreneurship scholarship I received from Andrew Mckelvey, the founder of Monster.com, which was recently retracted due to economic hardship and the passing of Mr. McKelvey. All the scholars started an effort to regain some of the lost scholarship money and the video reports on our efforts.
I wrote a guest post over at JohnChow.com on how you can double your chances of reaching your goals by simply writing them down. The post talks about a research study by Dominican University which compared how successful individuals who wrote down their goals were compared to those who did not
The way auctions are set up in the United States, the buyer of the product benefits. The price goes low to high, meaning whoever wins the auction and buys the product often does not pay the full amount they were willing to pay. Instead, they pay a little more than the full amount anyone else at the auction was willing to pay.
AM Beat is a blog written by Aditya Mahesh, a young entrepreneur and freshman at UC Berkeley who runs ZapPrep, a college admissions consulting business. This blog covers marketing, technology, and finance.
