Marketing Guides

Shoestring Marketing

Novice guide to inexpensive small business marketing ideas.
Marketing can be simple and fun!

Marketing Foundations

The ABC's of marketing. Applicable to any business.

Bad Marketing Ideas

If you want to market smart, you have to know how to avoid the scams, and how to spot the people who are ignorantly telling you to do things that will waste your time. Point by point, you can look up all the negative strategies here, and find out just why they will hurt, or what it is that makes them risky.

Bad marketing advice is everywhere.

Sometimes it is given out of ignorance and lack of experience, sometimes it is given because someone fails to interpret the statistics correctly, and it often happens because someone else has something to gain if you listen to them!

Bad marketing is any strategy that either outright hurts you, or which does not benefit your business in a positive way in the long term.

You are in business to make money. Marketing that does not justify itself by making it more efficient for you to make money is, in our opinion, Bad Marketing.

Some strategies are just dumb if you use them wrong.

Some of them merely waste your time while giving a good impression that they are working, while they do not, in fact, help you at all. Others will cost you resources with no return (or inefficient return), or at worst, harm your business. Some tactics can, in fact, derail your business and turn your dreams to dust.

Small Business Marketing Ideas

As a small business owner you have a lot of choices to make. So we pulled out marketing ideas that are relevant to small businesses and put them in the context of small business with a focus on offline and local marketing.