Where do you start? First, don’t concern yourself with thinking outside the box, forget the box altogether. Because by trying to come up with ways to think outside the box, you naturally start to align yourself with thought patters similar to other businesses trying to think differently. So, the key then is to think differently without thinking differently. Ha! How do you like that notion?

The point is, you’re all creative beings and hold an infinite amount of potential—you simply need to take a few minutes to relax and tap into your inner thoughts. You’ll be surprised at what you allow your brain to come up with when you give it a chance to plug into the subconscious and recall your past experiences and pair it with your expansive knowledge base. After you’ve given yourself some time to meditate and think deeply on how to make your business stand out, grab a pen and paper (or keyboard) and just start writing down all the different ideas that pop out of that beautiful brain of yours.

The key here is to allow for a stream of consciousness. As soon as you begin to question the legitimacy or plausibility of the ideas you come up with, you’re going to start suffocating the creative process—similar to waving your finger at your brain and punishing it for expressing itself. This is one of the leading reasons businesses have so much trouble being different, they don’t allow themselves creative license. Open yourself up and you’re going to love what you come up with. And you’ll be able to multiply your mental results by getting your team together and brainstorming together. If you’re truly a small business and don’t have any employees or teammates, then buy your friends a couple of beers and ask if they’ll come over and help you brainstorm. (Don’t have too many or they’ll have you convinced that standing on the corner naked screaming your site’s URL is a good idea.)

Here are a couple of quick ideas:

Fundraisers: There’s no shame in setting up a charitable event or fundraiser to garner lucrative exposure for your business. You will create the chance to help out a good cause and to get your name out in the public.

Chamber of Commerce: Many businesses seem to have forgotten about the good ol’ Chamber of Commerce. Joining this organization provides you with the opportunity to help your community while creating great business contacts.

Contests: Think of some contests that you can offer up to your business prospects and local community. Whenever you get people actively involved in something, you significantly increase the likelihood of lucrative conversions. Besides, they’re fun!

• Happy Bonza Bottler Day, oh and Happy New Year.
• Guerrilla Marketing Fun for a Friday
• More Kick A$$ Guerrilla Marketing Promotions Part 2
• If You Hit Your Hand with a Hammer Every Day
• More Kick A$$ Guerrilla Marketing Promotions Part 1

First, the following is not supposed to be considered a popularity contest, and by no means am I claiming to be the coolest guy out there-well, my five-month-old son may think I’m pretty cool! But what I’d like to ask you is: Who do you know? I don’t want to know if you’ve ever seen James Woods in a Starbucks or if you’re the type of person who gets the thumbs up from everyone you pass. I just want to see if you can develop a list of people you know. Why develop a list? Because, whether you’re a first-year small-business greenhorn or a veteran badass, creating a contact list is one of the best ways to get your marketing wheels rolling. And…uh huh, you know what’s coming here…it’s free!

Instead of buying the first shiny marketing package that catches your eye, set aside a significant period of time and develop a list of all the people you know. By first creating a list of contacts that you can solicit and present your business to, you’ll be taking advantage of verified, warm leads; leads you didn’t have to spend a single marketing dollar on. The first phase of creating your list should be done through a stream of consciousness, writing down every single name that comes to mind. Subsequently, you’ll use a filter and qualify each of the name’s you’ve written down. Try categorizing them into Direct Purchase, Referral Prospects, Barter Candidates and Sleepers.

• Direct Purchase: Who on your list is ready to buy? Which names did you write down that fall under your classifications for your ideal client?
• Referral Prospects: Want to double or triple your new contact list? Then ask yourself “Who do they know?” For example, let’s say you’re a used-car salesman. Okay, so you’ve got your brother on the list, but he’s always been a new-or-nothing kind of guy and though he loves you, refuses to buy from you. Instead of testing this familial tie’s strength, simply think of who he knows or ask him if he thinks any of his friends might be interested. No matter what industry they’re in, business owners would do well to view their company as a network marketing company or an MLM. Look beyond the surface; there are many levels to a solid business.
• Barter Candidates: Who on your list could you trade services/products with? Perhaps your neighbor doesn’t need a car at this time, but you can still ask him if he’d be willing to trade you a few hours of his skills for some car repair discounts you get through your vendors.
• Sleepers: These are the people you just can’t seem to categorize. Perhaps you only briefly met them on the street once and don’t have an actual relationship with them. Either way, you should never assume a contact is worthless until you’ve made the effort to market to them.

Just as we encourage equality in society, so shall it be with your business. Never assume anything about your prospects or contacts until you’ve dealt with them directly-after that, you can judge them as much as you’d like.

Look for our future feature article on follow-up to help you capitalize on your contact list.

• Word of Mouth Marketing: Thank your referrers
• Find Your Comfort Zone & Get Your Message Out!
• Email Marketing, It’s like adding an Army of Employees
• 10 Ways to Improve Workflow
• Submission Doesn’t Always Mean Obedience

Guerrilla Teeth

What a great idea this one is, it really hits the message home in my opinion. After being a bit disgusted you can’t help but smile at this one. I am going to look to see if I can find some statistics on how the response was for the company.

Playful Playboy

This one feeds most boy’s imagination, some girl’s ego and for the rest it will generate conversation. This is a guerrilla campaign that could be used for both traditional and viral marketing for many years to come. You can get a lot of traction out of this one.

Virgin Virgin Virgin

I have had a lifelong fascination with everything Virgin. Richard Branson’s marketing and PR stunts are the best in the world. I bow down to “The Master of Branding”.

This one gave me a bit of trouble when I first saw it. I see it for it’s brilliance but have a problem with using historical monuments for commercial advertisements. I would like to hear your thoughts on this?

Maybe I am just being sensitive with this one!

Pothole Application. Does it cross the line.

As you all know I am big fan of pushing the limits of creativity and how to get your message out to the masses but when we get to a point when we endanger public safety that is where the line has to be drawn. With the adhesives and quality of the graphics we can create now something like this could cause accidents, injury and possibly death. I am pretty sure that is not the legacy that the company wants for there marketing.

That is it for this time, if you have any campaigns that you would like to see me feature in this series of posts,  let me know.

• Happy Bonza Bottler Day, oh and Happy New Year.
• Marketing Campaigns for Under $100
• Guerrilla Marketing Fun for a Friday
• More Kick A$$ Guerrilla Marketing Promotions Part 2
• Guerrilla Bah-Bah LED Sheep

How to ensure your business will succeed – This is a great, short article that gives a solid piece of advice to grow your business with minimal risk. Well worth the read, and the main reason it’s #1 on the list this week.

What produces great companies? – Trizle offers an awesome article and a great writing style that gets you involved in their writing. Going from Passion to profit is something I’ve wrote about before and this article over at Trizle does a great job of beating it into your head. Definitely worth the read.

Word of mouth marketing: Don’t piss people off – Well, the title speaks for itself, and Naomi does an awesome job of getting the point across. She’s a writer who I could read all day. Yes, she swears a LOT, but the message is still the same, so why should it even matter? Kudo’s to Naomi as well for all of her success and recent e-book success.

Old school marketing for old school clients – For all of us who are technology driven, this is a nice wake up call; not all of your clients will know what “web 2.0″ – “twitter” or “rss” is and they also won’t respond to marketing that doesn’t seem “normal” to them. You’ve got to cater to your clients thoughts, and this article does a great breakdown of this topic.

Marketing essentials part 5: Behold the business card – Keeping up with the idea that old school marketing does work and should be applied, Small Fuel Marketing writes up the fifth part in their marketing essentials series which you should definitely take the time to read.

How to weather the storm by making your money work for you – ok, I thought I was the only one who used rediculously long article titles; I was wrong. Regardless of that, you will find some great advice here to help you properly manage your money. I’m slowly learning how to do this and it feels great to start seeing myself as “ahead” instead of “always catching up”.

Moving beyond freelancing: 4 insights to growing your design firm – Now this article from the Go Media team might be geared towards a design firm, but each of the 4 insights can be applied to any other business model.

• Find Your Comfort Zone & Get Your Message Out!
• 5 Stellar Sales Tips To Push You To the Top of Your Field
• Email Marketing, It’s like adding an Army of Employees
• 10 Ways to Improve Workflow
• Submission Doesn’t Always Mean Obedience

Below you will find two real life examples of emails that were recently sent to me while I was searching for some potential employees for a business venture I am starting. After looking them over, we’ll discuss why the longer, more in detail email is better and in the long run, faster for business. I also am going to link you to an add-on for firefox that will help keep things long, but speedy at the same time.

Email One: The short version

My name is **** and I have created many websites over the past 2 years. My portfolio can be seen here www.********.com I hope to be chosen for the job. Thank you.

Email Two: The extended version

Hello Mike,

My name is ***** and I have recently come across your Blog Design and would like to talk to you about becoming a part of your coding team.

My portfolio of work can be found at www.*******.com I have been designing websites for almost 10 years and make sure the websites you hire me for are up to web standards and usability. This means that your website will function and display properly on various web browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari and others. All of my coding is valid xhtml/css tableless.

I would love to discuss this in more detail with you and work with you on any projects you have lined up. If possible, could you let me know of a time that I can call to discuss this in more detail with you, or if it would be ok to send a copy of my resume and business card directly to you?

Any questions you might have, feel free to let me know. I look forward to hearing back from you.

Thank you,
******

Now there are a lot of you who might be looking at this and going “why would I sit and write up the long email when all I am doing is sending a quick note to someone about a potential job when it’s not a guarantee that I’ll even get the job?” Trust me, I’ve been there before and thought the exact same way. But look at it from a business standpoint. Who would you rather hand your money over to in this situation? The short email does not tell me much about the persons skills or what they can provide me with and also seems very hit & run. Alternately, if you look at the longer email, the candidate makes sure to explain why they would be the right person for the job, they give me an in depth detail of what they’ve done and what they can provide me with as well as make me feel comfortable by telling me that any questions I have, they’d love to answer them. Again I ask you; who would get your money in this situation?

Your answer is the same as any business or potential client you contact. They want to feel comfortable, they want to know that you understand their needs and know what you are doing and they want to make sure you’re not there just to rip them off.

With many bloggers and large names in the blogging industry recently pointing out how to keep emails short, I was sucked in at first too. Not anymore. Here are two reasons why longer emails are better, and overall quicker then a short email.

1. More personal – keeps your potential client or the person hiring you comfortable with you and helps them to not look at you as a ‘quick, fly by night’ company. If you write a small 100 word email to a potential client, it keeps you distant and feeling unattached to the person behind the other side of the screen.
2. Overall Faster – In the long run when dealing with clients, if you’re writing a 1,000 word email instead of a 100 word email, the odds are in your favor of answering most, if not ALL of the client’s questions in the one email. If you’re writing the quick 100 email, then this brings forth 5-10 extra questions from the client and thus keeps you in your inbox, keeps a large amount of separate emails attached to the one specific job that you have to sift through, and keeps the resolution period farther away due to 5-10 emails needing to be sent back and forth. I’ve made it a point to write longer, more detailed emails to my clients recently and the payback has been tremendous. The work process goes so much quicker because I answer all of their questions right up front and left only a small amount left to be discussed.

Here is an add-on that I use with the Firefox browser that will definitely speed up your writing time when talking to potential clients.

Signature – This add-on gives you the option to create pre-written bodies of text that you right click and select the name of the message you’re sending. I have three that I currently use. 1 for responses to potential clients that I find on job boards, 1 that I use when I write to bloggers and one that I write to various other companies. I leave little sections that have “PERSONAL NOTES ABOUT THE JOB HERE” inside the email that I edit, but for those repetitive tasks like writing out what experience you have, what your prices are for jobs, what websites you own, ect. this tool comes in handy. What used to take me 15-20 minutes to type up (5 or six times a day!) now only takes me 10-15 minutes TOTAL throughout the day to write.

• There’s no Shame in Being a Guerrilla
• Word of Mouth Marketing: Thank your referrers
• 5 Stellar Sales Tips To Push You To the Top of Your Field
• Submission Doesn’t Always Mean Obedience
• Who Do You Know?

Blog Theme Machine

We may be a bit impartial to Blog Theme Machine because this is the company that designed this blog, but there are real reasons behind why we like Blog Theme Machine. Not only are their blog designs great and high quality, their prices are very competitive compared to other designers on the market. This is our #1 choice for anyone looking to have their blog taken to the next level. Feel free to check out their portfolio and see why we recommend them as our number one choice.

Garry Conn

We’ve recently had the opportunity to discuss some blogging tips and resources with Garry and feel that he is a genuine blogger who loves to design. When we asked Garry to write up a small blurb for this article, his reply was this: “My name is Garry Conn. I help and teach people how to make money online with a blog. There is a lot to learn in this line of business. First impressions are important. Does your blog look professional? It is optimized for not only search engines but also users? Visit www.GarryConn.com to learn more.”

Unique Blog Designs

Viewed by many as the heavy-hitters in the blog design realm, Unique Blog Designs stepped onto the scene making big waves when they redesigned two of the webs top “make money online” blogs: John Chow and Shoemoney. Since then, they have grown their business to huge standings. We give major kudos to the entire UBD team because they’ve done something revolutionary on the internet and chose a niche that was wide open and ran with it. Plus, their designs are great!

Brian Gardner

Brian Gardner of Brian Gardner Media is the sole reason (in our opinions) behind the latest craze in WordPress Blog Designs: “Premium Themes”. What Brian has done with his Revolution Theme was definitely a changing point in how people design their blogs. If you’re looking for a magazine style wordpress theme, Revolution is the top notch deal when it comes to Premium Themes. Brian also designs custom wordpress themes if you’d like something custom

Adii “WordPress Rockstar”

When you think of a Rockstar, you think of a flashy, in your face type of person. Adii is a WordPress Rockstar but is a more laid back version of what you perceive a rockstar to be. With a great skill-set and design ability, Adii is responsible for some of the webs best blog themes to date. Working with companies like Unique Blog Designs and various others, there’s no reason Adii is a wordpress rockstar. Check out his personal blog which documents his journey to becoming a full time freelance designer and showcases some of his work.

Did we miss you?

If you are a blog design company or freelancer and would like to be featured in an upcoming list of Blog Designers, please feel free to contact us and let us know about yourself.

• How to Write a Business Proposal
• Abracadabra
• Well, I Would Hope So!
• Site Flipping: New business avenue or fly by night profession?

1. Garage Sales – A lot of times, you’ll find great office furniture or old computer parts for dirt cheap. Also, you might find shelving units or office bins that you can use for storage of folders, books, ect.
2. Flea Market – Everyone at a flea market is trying to make money, so the prices are generally really low. If not, haggle with the salesperson to try and get a better deal. I’ve picked up cameras, keyboards, a mouse (for the computer, not a real one. haha) and other various office supplies for way lower amounts then the local office supply stores.
3. Going out of business Sales – OH MAN! You can get high end office supplies, computer and virtually anything else business related at these things. You’ll regret not going to these if theres one in your area.
4. Pawn Shops – Sometimes you’ll catch some great equipment that’s like brand new but someone needed the cash at the time and let it go cheap. I’ve seen everything from video games to snow mobiles at pawn shops.
5. Chamber of Commerce – Connecting and networking with other local businesses is a great thing and you can find great contacts right here.
6. Library – free internet and free book rentals. Why wouldn’t you like this place? Rent a book and study for school or learn something new about your business. You can even rent a scary book or romantic novel to get your mind off work for a while. Whatever you do here, it’s all free, so help yourself!
7. City Hall - Similar to Chamber of Commerce. Read above at #5.
8. Craig’s List local resources – Find someone in your area to work for a great price, or find jobs yourself. Great for the service industry. You can also find great deals on all sorts of things people are selling and you run less risk shopping here since it’s local and you can meet the person, unlike ebay.
9. Yellow Pages – Anything you need right at your fingertips. I’ve generated a few design jobs just from picking out a random target market and calling every number in the book for that particular industry.
10. Coffee Shops with Wi-Fi connection – Internet get shut off at home or are you needing to meet with a client to show off your design you created for them? Coffee shops offer free internet for your computer, so why not use it?
11. Estate Sales – Finding anything from home furniture to rare jewelry and paintings comes easy when you deal with estate sales. Everything is priced to sell, so you get great deals.
12. Small/Medium businesses – Networking with other small businesses (as stated in #5) is great for your business. Work out a service/product trade and feed each other cross-sells. You won’t regret the 1-2 minutes it takes to call a company and talk with them.
13. College Campuses – This is the perfect spot to find someone who is eager to learn more in their trade and will work for next to nothing. We all know that when you’re bootstrapping your business, you don’t have a million dollars for a kick-butt sales team or a programmer for your website, so hiring at a college campus is ideal for saving cash while getting someone who WANTS the job.
14. High School/Middle Schools – The same as above applies here, but also for market research. If you’re designing a clothing company, who better then a teenager to tell you if it’s cool or not. Are you building the next myspace? This would be the place to go and promote, pass out flyers, ect.
15. Churches – Sponsor a bake sale or some other event and give some of the proceds to the church or a charity the church likes. Most churches will let you promote anything or network with other people there and are generally friendly.
16. Homeless Shelters – A homeless shelter? Yes, a homeless shelter. Think about how many people are in this shelter with sales experience or some type of labor work like construction and have no means of generating money. Don’t you think you’d get an eager worker? I think so too.
17. Unemployment Offices – The same goes as above. Hang out in the parking lot and talk to people as they walk up, or leave your business cards and flyers inside the unemployment office. Talk to a worker there and find out if they can give your information directly to those who are interested in your industry. It never hurts to ask.
18. Music Stores – Place your business cards inbetween cd’s, leave flyers on the counter, or see if the owner of the store would let you ‘sponsor’ their store for a day by running an ad for your business over their PA system ever 10-20 minutes.
19. Clothing Stores – The same as #18 but here, you can target an upscale clothing store and promote your products or business because the people in these stores tend to spend a lot more money than a teenager at a music store.
20. The Mall – I’ve seen musicians walk up to random people in the mall and ask if they’d take a minute to listen to their music and end up making cd sales. I’ve also went into the mall to talk to the local business owners in the mall and find out if they have a website, and if not, if they’d like one. Trade your service for gift cards or for cash. I’ve made more money getting gift cards from the owners then cash though because with the gift card option, I bumped my price up a bit. It works.
21. Business Conferences - Networking. plain and simple. Network with other business owners and try to find those who could benefit from your product/service and network hardest with them. You’ll be amazed at home many sales you can get here.
22. High-End Hotels – Rich people spend money. Point blank. Get business cards or flyers and put them in the swimming pool area, inside the hot tub, on the counter at the front desk; anything to get your name out in front of these people.
23. Newspapers – Ads are fairly cheap and could wind up getting you noticed by the right editorial writer for the paper and you could wind up as their next featured article. Local news loves local businesses, especially if your local area is suffering with a lack of jobs.
24. Local Radio – The same with the above. Get your ads on the radio in your targeted market and you’ll generate a bit of buzz, especially if you mention you’re a LOCAL OWNED company. I’m telling you, people eat this up and your boostraps will thank you for it.
25. Television News - Does your local news have a segment where they feature local businesses? Yes? Great; now get featured. No? Tell them they should, and why they should. Again, LOCAL OWNED businesses is the hot thing with the economy going to hell in a handbasket and noone being able to find good jobs. People love the local business owners.
26. Thrift Stores – I know a guy who has his whole office setup elegantly, and got it all from a thrift store over time. Sand down that old desk or bookcase, scrub the desk lap, or find a nice radio to listen to music on and you can turn your office into a great place to be, for barely anything at all.
27. Laundry Mat - Does your target market involve single moms? Try promoting your business at the laundry mat with flyers or business cards. You could even offer to pay for someones laundry to be cleaned once a week, and then just hand them your card and leave. This will definitely get the person talking and that’s great for business.
28. Restaurants – Pick a random table that has people from your target market at it and tell the waiter/waitress that you’d like to pay for their bill and ask that all they do is give them your business card. Even offer to give the cashier a tip (the persons bill is $40.00, so hand them a $50.00 bill and tell them to keep the change). Viral marketing or word-of-mouth, whatever you want to call it, is GREAT for business.
29. Dollar Store – Pens, pencils, receipt books, folders, ect. All of these things can be picked up from the dollar store. You can even feed your need for sweets and other foods at the dollar store. I pick up Mountain Dew, Little Debbie snack cakes, Doritos and other food from the dollar store all the time. As you know from a previous article, I love my sweets.
30. Sporting Events – All these people in one area and you DON’T see the good in it? Get out there, mingle with people, offer someone a free beer, place your business cards in the bathrooms; whatever you can think of, get it done. There are tons of people here to promote and connect with.

Have a story about how you’ve used one of these resources for the good of your business? Leave a comment and let everyone know about it.

Can you think of more local resources?

1. Message Boards – Finding a few message boards with a good amount of traffic can be great a great promotional resource. Adding your website links into the signature will leave a link in every post you make, and if you make quality posts on the message board, you are guaranteed to have people clicking your websites because they like what you said.
2. Bookmarking Sites – This is pertaining to websites like Digg, StumbleUpon and other websites similar to these. The power of having your website hit the front page of digg or get stumbled numerous times is priceless when trying to promote your new website. Link bait (we’ll talk about this more later on) is a powerful way of getting your website to the front page of Digg. This will instantly get you thousands of visitors and could even have a snowball effect with the visitors talking about you to their friends and website visitors.
3. Directories – Now, we haven’t really tried much with directory submissions but they are being used daily by thousands of businesses and websites so we’re positive that this method will work. It helps you out with back links to your website which will help you rank in the search engines better. Google loves to show websites with tons of back links, so this method is positive to help you out.
4. Your Own Blog – Creating a website for your business is the first step to showcasing why people should buy your product or hire you. The next step, in our opinion, is setting up a blog on your website. Now, you can set the blog up on your website in a sub directory (ie: yourwebsite.com/blog/) or you can create a totally unique .com website for your blog and have links to your company on it. The choice is yours. Obviously, this is another method similar to the message board method because when people read your blog and realize that you know your field, then you are considered an expert and people will want to buy your product / hire you.
5. Blog Comments – Every blog you leave a comment on allows you to put your name and website in so you have a link to your website with the comment. This is a useful tool because not only does the owner of the website you are commenting on see your comment, but the other viewers will see it as well. If your blog comment has some useful information in it, you are sure to get visitors from this and also gain some respect from other website/business owners in your field.

Tomorrow, we’ve got a great article together for some awesome bootstrapping tips.

As always, remember to subscribe to our rss feed and leave a comment to open up a discussion. Thanks.

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