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 recently wrote a guest post for Small Business Opportunities about the importance of focusing on one aspect of your business instead of trying to do everything for everyone all at once. The full post can be read here but I have pasted a short excerpt below.
“I think one problem area that a lot of [...]
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 recently speaking with my friend Andrew Warner of Mixergy, a site with dozens of great interviews with a number of entrepreneurs, many of which have been featured both here in the blog and in the entrepreneurship course I teach at UC Berkeley. We are talking about how to build a community and he pointed me to an interview he did with two of the top users of Hacker News, a tech related social bookmarking site funded by Y Combinator, about how a successful community was built.
The devastation from the magnitude 7.0 Earthquake that hit Haiti has been enormous and companies and individuals from across the world have been starting campaigns to help aid releif efforts in the area. One of the more unique ways a tech company is doing its part comes from Zynga, the maker of popular online social games such as Farmville and MafiaWars, both of which have millions of users on Facebook.
Last week I wrote about The Blind Side, a movie currently in theatres telling the story of Michael Oher a homeless teen who was taken in by a well-to-do family and offered a second chance at life. He grew to become the star athlete, playing Division I football at Ole Miss and being selected by the Baltimore Ravens in the first round of the 2009 NFL Draft. The story was quite inspirational, but I was surprised to see that it was rated PG-13.
A complete guide for small business owners and start-ups on how they can recruit the top interns from universities across the globe when these students have offers from larger more well-known companies.
This week’s video is a collection of short tips and tricks on marketing provided by various CEOs and entrepreneurs at the Inc 5000 conference. The video is pretty short at just over two minutes long but contains a lot of valuable tidbits of marketing insight.
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.
