Campus Entrepreneurship

Found this via Tim Berry; Small Business Trends blogger Anita Campbell has compiled a list of 100 Marketing Secrets. I appears she called for submissions and this is the output. Its available in a 33 page pdf. Yes, its free. From her site,

A big THANK YOU, dear readers, for the outstanding marketing tips you contributed to the Best Kept Marketing Secrets roundup.

As promised, we took 100 submissions and turned them into a downloadable PDF document.

It’s 33 pages of tips for marketing, including relationship marketing, marketing strategy, selling, messaging, online marketing and social media. 

It’s all been packaged up tidily into a document for you to save, give to clients, print, post on your website — use it however you wish.  It is free of charge, of course.

Looking forward to seeing whats in there, but I am excited by the use of Campbell’s site to aggregate knowledge, edit/clean it a bit, and then distribute it back out. (not to mention picking up sponsorship by HP)

Big prizes in this contest. The Minnesota Cup — a business plan competition in the land of 10K lakes  has doubled its prizes. Winners gets 50K in cash! From the Pioneer Press:

The Minnesota Cup, a statewide contest that promotes innovative business ideas, has doubled the prize money it will award its top three winners this year.

The top three entrants will receive $50,000, $10,000 and $5,000 respectively, cup officials said today. The top student entrepreneur will receive $5,000 in prize money.

The contest will accept business idea submissions starting today through May 23 online at www.minnesotacup.org. The Minnesota Cup, which is sponsored by the University of Minnesota, Wells Fargo Bank, the state of Minnesota, the James J. Hill Reference Library and others, has attracted 1,800 contestants since its inception in 2005.

The public launch of my new startup is in about 4 weeks. While the site will not be fully functional, I do want the ability to capture users and provide information on the full scope of whats to come. (You may not remember but my company is in the consumer internet space).

Moreover, I want to begin to get feedback from users & potential users. I think when it comes to the internet and consumers, you can’t always know how users will interact with your site until it is up and running.

My budget is limited and as this new site is consumer related I have to get as many users as possible as quickly as possible. So I am always looking for inexpensive (preferably free) tactics that can help me find users (when I flip the switch) or help me better hone my message. I think this is guerilla marketing — I don’t know the actual definition. So today I ambled over to GuerillaMarketing.com. (more…)