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well today i discovered a new way to advertise my business. All weekend were having our town wide rummage. So i been visiting each rummage and pretending to have a interest in a item and then suggesting we trade services for the item. A discounted computer repair for a discount on the item for sell. honestly I have no real use for 50 blanks or the tons of other crap Ive piled up from the rummages but I do need business lol

It costs on average 20 to 50 cents per item I bought at the rummages. in return 50% off it will still cost them $50.00 or more U.S. for a basic repair lol All i did was offer a service exchange and bam I made a deal. Plus I got my business cards handed out and new clients. So just wanted to share the idea with those out there with a small business. rummage is a good way to sell your business to people.

I have a few tips though to help you make the deal. You will need some cash on hand to purchase the rummage items. You will also need a good size stack of business cards. Brig you repair tools with you as well. I did a repair for a old genetalmen on the spot. Have a good opening line to sell your product. Mine was "Hello, I see you have "X" amount on this item. I'll make you a deal on it, I own a computer and software repair business. If your willing to take "X" amount for this item, I'll give you 50% off a computer repair at my shop. What do you say?". then next question that follows is typically what do you charge. So I say well its typically $100.00 or more per repair but Ill repair your machine for $50.00 or less if you make me a deal today.

Allways ask for the sale. In sales you must allways ask the customer for the sale. If you do not ask for the sale, it will walk away and you will not make the deal. Also when presenting your product in your sales speech, sound like your confident in your self and your product/service. you could be going out of business tommarow but today you need to sound like your on top of the world.

I hope the sales tip helps you make your next sale. Enjoy

Interesting approach. What were the types of jobs people had you do? How many did you land vs how many you asked? What is the population of your city?

City pop of around 10k. Fairly small town. The jobs asked were typically advice or general repair questions. I'd say I had about a 75% to 85% ratio to getting work. I handed out roughly 150 cards total for the entire weekend. Out of the 150 cards given out, Ive had about 120 calls. About 90 of those calls were repair questions and requests for a tech visit. The others were general advice, which I'm hopeful will lead to a tech call sometime in the future.

I was very surprised how well people wanted to speak to a real tech and preffered to speak in person vs. speaking to the computer MFG. tech over the phone. Typicaly people buy those plans and speak to the tech over the phone to save money. But I think with the poor custoemr service given over the phone, people are starting to revert back to tradtional tech support. Anyway, the concpt worked well for me. It cost roughly 30 dollars including business card expenses and I will make a couple grand from service calls once I complete all the service calls. So very profitable idea. Plus these calls will likely end up being repeat customers in the future.

this will proboly not be too helpful and not exactly advertising business, more like advertising for small freelancers who are good at what they do.

my friend got drunk one night and somehow an idea popped into his heat to create a social networking site based around common professional interests, hobbies and advertising of small freelancers.
http://tog.ether.su
The twist is this site aims to help people find real people with common interests and hobbies who live in your area who you can meet up with. Or find a specialist in your area who can consult you and help you with whatever you need help with for a fee.

for example, your parennts bought you a honda civic for your 17th birthday and you want to turn it into a street racer (talk about stereotypes about teenagers and honda civics lol) but you are new to cars, With the social networking site which my friend designed and gave me to mantain it, you can find a person who is into cars and for a fee or manybe even free if he/she is nice will help you with your honda racer project, they will teach you a thing or to about cars and show you some tricks on how to do things and share secrets of the trade. THe thing is, i want this site unlike FB to focus more on peoples hobbies jobs and professional interests. For example, if on facebook people upload any stupid picture they take, for my Website, i hope to see people upload more hobby /job related pictures. like i am a computer dude, i would upload pics of my computer project, maybe if i am trying to mod a PC case id upload a pic of that, while someone else who is into custom RC models might upload pics of their RC cars and a video of their RC helicopter doing stunts or something.

this website was whipped up in pretty much 1 day by my drunk friend (we used a web engine for creating soc net sites) it dosent have any annoying things FB has, you can upload music (unlike FB) and videos.

so in the future our site might be a good way to advertize yourself in your local area. but so farwe need to actually make this site popular. I am spreading it among my friends right now, but if you wanna check it out, make an account or port your FB account into it (via facebook connect)- the easy way feel free. tell your friends abour it and while its small it can be used as your own private facebook with your group of friends (and some other people who joined so far)

over time, we might be able to pay more and get features like file hosting, videochat, games and more.

i didnt mean to advertise, i just thought that the idea of this site i am trying to develop is relevant to the post, so if you guys want to support a small ambitios project which i was given to develop, feel free to join and tell people about it, give us feedback, join the logo design contest for our site (btw our site has FORUMS!) make groups. It might not be popular right now, but if i do my job right it should start to grow.
http://tog.ether.su

That seems like a great idea Pagan, I had a similar idea, but it's clearly already been done. xD It's a shame about the small userbase.

this thing is like 3 days old, give me a break! it will grow. And people told me that they like the site layout a lot better than facebook.

I like the idea pegan, ill have to check it out as well