Cashcampus Memory Lane (part 3)
Ahhh… now comes the fun part, marketing my business. After my site finally launched, over a year since development began (Jan. 2004), in February of 2005, I immediately started thinking of how I was going to spread the word. The first thing that came to my mind was flyers…lots and lots of flyers.
My reasoning behind getting flyers was that I knew college students responded quite well to club and food flyers, so I figured why not give it a chance.
Here’s the first flyer that I made:
In this flyer I’m simply trying to convince students to study on their computers instead of only through their books. I guess that I was trying to change the whole process of studying, from the tangible to the intangible.
Flyer # 2:
With this flyer I was trying to create a sense of rebellion. I figured that if students thought they were possibly doing something wrong, then it may entice them to do it even more. Crazy way of thinking, I know.
Flyer # 3:
In this flyer I am trying to connect to the students who always busted their asses to take really good class notes. I wanted them to feel that they could get more than good grades out of taking class notes — they could makes some cash from their hard efforts. I was thinking what college student would turn up a way to make some extra cash, right?
Flyer # 4:
This last flyer appeals to the college student who has a ton of notes and papers sitting around in their computer and not doing anything with them. I figured that I could persuade them to upload their information and sell it to other students.
I was living in New York City at the time and going to Pace University. I was on a mission to hit all the major colleges in the city with these flyers. You should’ve have seen me, it was like a war.
I would take out my map (which was basically the exact locations of all the dorms I wanted to hit) and start planning out which campuses were best to hit first. I had detailed coordinates of train lines, bus schedules, and spots were students hung around in the city. I was like a commando ready for the attack!
For weeks I would single-handedly go from NYU dorms to Pace dorms, and to Columbia dorms with stacks and stacks of flyers. You should’ve seen me, I was like a sweaty rat scurrying from door to door sliding flyers into each room at the speed of light. Occasionally students would come out of their rooms to talk with me about my company.
Most people were happy to hear about my company and I gave them a quick elevator (30 second) pitch of my company. Every now and then I would get that really pissed-off-at-life college student come running out of his dorm threatening to kill me if I ever put another flyer into his room (Geezz it’s just a flyer dude, relax!).
There were times when campus security would give me the boot and tell me if I continued to hand out flyers then I’d be banded from the campus (I always came back, so that never stopped me, haha).
I always felt relieved on the days when a few of my friends gave me a hand and helped me hand out the flyers. Since each mission took around 3 hours to complete, I was super happy to get all the help I could.
To be honest, what I came to realize was that flyers weren’t really that effective. I did some math and concluded that I got around 10 new subscribers for every 1000 flyers. It was a huge effort and expense to actually make and handout the flyers. It just didn’t add up in the end. Looking back, it probably wasn’t worth going the flyer route.
I think that flyers are good for promoting food spots, clubs, and things like that. But I don’t think it’s worth spending nearly $1000 on them like I did for a website.
You really want to know the most effective form of advertising that I starting using to get the buzz going about my site?
In my next post I’ll tell you all about it….
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