I was watching this video today about how to stand out in your market place.  It gives some good examples of companies (like VooDoo Donut and ZipCar) who created a strong following by:

1. Doing something different
2. Having fun
3. Not being afraid to be a little weird

It reminded me of Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” button or Facebook’s Pirate language setting.

It also reminded me of some of the ideas I wrote about in word of mouth marketing.

Then I started looking at the BuyersVote.com homepage and I got sort of sad.  It looked really boring.

It looked like every other review site out there.  If I saw it for the first time, I’d probably be sort of confused, do a few clicks, and then leave.

So I started wondering, what is this website actually ABOUT damnit.  It’s got to convey it instantly.  And I blurted out “it just so you can find out if something sucks or not before you buy it!”

So I decided to change the tag-line of the site from “Online product reviews made easy” to “Find out if it sucks, before you buy!”

Irreverent?  Yes.  Junevile?  Probably.  Fun and engaging?  I think so.  At least it would cause me to give it a second look, and maybe even participate in this community – it’s sounds fun.

What do you think?  Worst idea ever or good marketing?  I think I’ll test it out for a bit.

BuyersVote.com

BuyersVote.com New Tagline

P.S. Because it worked out so well last time, I’ve started a new category on BuyersVote for “Best Christmas Gift Ideas 2009“.  Hopefully you’ll find it useful as you do your last minute Christmas shopping.  Please take a moment to go check it out now – and don’t forget to vote or add your own idea if you have a good one.  Thanks!

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

How To Bring In New Customers With Free Work

In: Business Ideas By: Brian Armstrong

28 Nov 2009

Here is a question from a Breaking Free reader….

Dear Brian,

Your book inspired me to start up my own business based on your Start Breaking Free model.

I was a lawyer working 80 hour weeks at an international firm, doomed to spending the best years of my life behind a desk. I was depressed and my confidence was taking a battering from my unhappy, over critical, negative, unhealthy and institutionalized colleagues.

After reading your book I started to ponder how, if at all, I could escape the rat race.

My answer came a few short weeks after reading your book. If I was working 80 hours a week and making less than a third of my billing target, where was the rest of the money going? After weeks of research I found out that it was going to a combination of a) the under worked over paid partners b) the lazy and inefficient staff and c) the office, stationary, IT and other such expenses.

I decided to setup a service that has none of these expenses and that offers lawyers a better life and businesses a cheaper more efficient service. I set up Matrix Law Group which places lawyers with businesses on a temporary employee basis and which allows those lawyers to work either remotely or from the business’ office (so no office).

I advertise in a few small business publications over here and then hire someone, including myself out (like a temp agency) and charge businesses a low hourly rate (we have no overheads so can undercut traditional law firms). I now work about about 7 to 10 hours a week at £100 an hour and because of more favourable tax treatments, I make a decent wage but a less than I did when I was working 80 hours a week. But guess what? I am much much happier and healthier.

I won’t lie, getting business is not easy, specially since I have to do all my marketing myself.

My question to you is whether you can offer me any advice on marketing myself and my business? My website is www.matrixlawgroup.com, other than that, and a few adverts, I have no other marketing tools. Law is one of those industries that works on a word of mouth basis. I am therefore trying to approach people, such as yourself, to get advice.

Thank you for inspiring me to change my life.

Keep breaking free.
Patrick

Free Work

Hey Patrick,

Wow I love it!  I think it’s a great idea and will save people lots of money (the perfect sales pitch at this time).

I’m not sure if you designed the site like this intentionally, but it came across somewhat web 2.0 ish or futuristic.  At least for me I’d prefer to see something more professional and old fashioned looking for a legal site, that instills a sense of quality.  Up to you of course, just thought I’d mention it.  Did you think about listing the available lawyers on the site as well with some sort of profile?

Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew Warner and I put together a little entrepreneur meetup last night which turned out really well.

Well actually, I emailed Andrew when I saw on his blog that he was in Buenos Aires, and he had the great idea to post the meeting to Hacker News.  It ended up being a pretty good turnout.

Buenos Aires is turning into quite the little tech entrepreneur scene.  As I wrote on Hacker News…

It does seem like something is brewing here. I think it got popular with Tim Ferriss’ The Four Hour Work Week where he talks about Buenos Aires…lots of founders came down here. It’s easier to bootstrap a web business because:

1. costs are much lower here

2. earning in dollars and spending in pesos means your money goes a long way (geo-arbitrage)

It’s by no means huge yet, but there is a band of renegade expat coder/entrepreneurs I’ve met up with here that are doing some impressive stuff.

Entrepreneur Meetup BA Read the rest of this entry »

I met up with a few entrepreneurs from Dublin, Ireland this week in Buenos Aires.  They have a web business based around the voiceover industry.  If you don’t know, the voiceover industry is a bit like acting or modeling in that people typically have agents – except they get hired to record their voice for commercials and things like this.

You can see a sample of one of their pages here.

Voiceover

By the way, their logo looks a bit strange, but apparently that is the tonsils on the back of someone’s mouth (their piehole).

Really, it’s a similar business model to UniversityTutor.com or Haystack.com which I’ve talked about recently.  Simply put, you get a bunch of listings from some sort of service provider, try to get traffic from people who need to find them, and then you charge the service provider a subscription to get work through your site.

The challenge is establishing your site as the dominant one in that niche by getting lots of traffic and good search engine rankings, but once you do it’s difficult for a new comer to overtake you.  There are high barriers to entry in that sense.

These types of sites aren’t very complex technologically, but I think they do serve an important purpose: they are making markets more efficient by eliminating agents.

Read the rest of this entry »

Check out this page Ramit Sethi put together about getting your finances under control.  It’s generally great advice and I do quite a lot of it already, like setting up automatic deposits to my ING Direct savings accounts.

Here is an email he got from a reader…

“I want to earn more (I know, who doesn’t)

I keep reading all these finance books and like any other lazy American, I haven’t done shit. I’m 30 and a little behind on saving for the future, plus my boyfriend is a post-doc and not making a ton, so I’m kinda saving for both of us… yadda yadda) Essentially, I love the automation idea, I am just not sure how to start automating my life…

I have the (Roth) 401K, I also have a Roth IRA, but haven’t set up an automatic deposit into that – I know I should, I’ve just been sending in the lump sum every year… bad Leah, bad! Other than those two, I have no idea what to invest in. I like the idea of keeping a close tab on the 401K but let’s face it, I just put it in a lifecycle fund and haven’t touched it since. What else do I invest in? Basically, I just want out of the rat race.”

If it sounds familiar then check out what his response was.  Financial education is too important to be left to chance.  Speaking of which, have you done your financial statements for October?

Investing

Read the rest of this entry »

Just wanted to give an update on how my SEO experiment went from this post a month ago.

For those who didn’t read it I setup a category on BuyersVote.com for the best halloween costume ideas of 2009. I did this because I knew it would be a popular keyword in October, especially toward the end of the month. And if I could make a good page targeted specifically for that niche keyword, it might get some traffic.

Well, it worked. I just BARELY got on the first page of Google in time for Halloween and managed to get the 9th or 10th place listing (which is still on the first page) for some costume related keywords. It was enough to triple the traffic to BuyersVote.com for a month (which isn’t saying much given how little it was before, but still, you have to start somewhere ;).

Here is the graph from Google Analytics.

SEO Halloween Costumes

Check out the keywords which drove all the traffic.

It’s also interesting to note that I think my page actually had the best content of any of the top 10 listings. Most of the other pages were made-for-adsense sites or crappy articles without many good costume ideas. It shows you that crowd-sourced content works, even on a small scale.

Read the rest of this entry »

Students in this entrepreneurship class at Stanford were given $5 and two hours to see how much money they could earn.

Some of the ideas will surprise you.  Great example of thinking outside the box (especially the last one)!  The video can be viewed here or click the image below.

Stanford Entrepreneurship Video

If you’re interested in starting an online business from home, and you’d like to learn about the top businesses that are working right now, then check this out:

http://www.startbreakingfree.com/go/ignition/

Or here is the video link:

Ignition

You can get a free ticket to a 90-minute webinar called: ”10 REAL Online Businesses You Can Start From Home RIGHT NOW.”

Eben has started several multi-million dollar businesses – ALL from his home. So he’s the real deal.  You’ll want to see this (it’s free).

Register while they still have free seats available!

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

Passive Income Case Study: Haystack.com

In: Business Ideas By: Brian Armstrong

24 Oct 2009

The 37Signals guys launched a new site this week called Haystack.com.  Here is their post explaining the launch.

It’s a simple idea: create a directory of website design companies so clients can quickly find a good one to work with.

The idea is not particularly brilliant and original, but they absolutely nailed the execution on this project.  Let’s look at a few reasons why this is going to be (and already is) a big success.

At the end I’ll show you exactly how much money they’re making from this just a few days after launch (it’s a lot).

Haystack.com

1. It’s Passive

The first reason this business makes sense is that you build it once and it runs on it’s own.  You aren’t trading hours for dollars working with individual clients.  What time you do spent on it after launch is spent ON the business, not IN the business.  This is an important distinction and one of the keys to building wealth.

2. Freemium

They also used my favorite business model on the web: freemium.  People can try it free, but if you want some additional benefits they ask you to upgrade for $99 per month.

This might be worth it to any web design company who gets at least that much new business from it each month.  It’s basically a marketing tool for them. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve noticed a trend of sites coming out recently that are built around the idea of taking short, funny, user generated content.  Often users can submit them as text messages or emails.  Sort of like Twitter but on a particular topic.

It might sound stupid, but some of these sites are getting over 1 million unique visitors a month, and probably doing about $1 million a year in advertising revenue from it.

For example, fmylife.com let’s people submit funny one liners about how much their life sucks.  Users rate them or bury them based on how funny they are.

Picture 7 Read the rest of this entry »

About this blog

Breaking Free is a blog for people who'd like to quit their 9-to-5, start their own business, and achieve financial freedom. It's written by web-entrepreneur Brian Armstrong. You can read more here »

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