StartupNation Blogs

As the “royalty” status of Hollywood stars has risen, so has their effectiveness as key influencers in consumer purchasing behaviors. Celebrity product placement is considered an “influencer-marketing” approach for helping brands increase their competiveness in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Marketers and small business owners can harness that power through strategic product placement opportunities that have [...]

Since many of you commented on my last blog entry, here are three more free tools to help you with your small business PR activities:
1. Help a Reporter Out
PR Pro Peter Shankman set up this great site at http://www.helpareporter.com/. Simply enter your name and e-mail information. And each day, you’ll receive a list of reporters [...]

StartupNation’s 3rd Annual Home-Based 100 competition
This is the quintessential ranking of home businesses and the superstar people behind them. StartupNation selects 10 Top Ten Winners across ten categories including Recession Busters, Greenest, Wackiest, Savviest in Social Media, and more. Winners receive invaluable publicity. Many winners have been featured in national TV, newspaper and magazine articles [...]

Tory Johnson, frequent reporter on ABC’s Good Morning America show and anchor of the ABC NewsNow series focusing on careers asked for a little StartupNation love recently. One of her faithful fans, Natalie, of ChicSweets, asked for ideas about how to move her business forward on a variety of levels, especially in the transition from part-time [...]

Do you really need a newsletter? Well, if you don’t have one, you are missing out on a cost-effective way to attract new business and provide loyal customers with valuable information.
Here’s how it works it three simple points:
1. Think about what your customers want.
How you can provide your customers with new and worthwhile information?
How can you [...]

When you’re on a bootstrap marketing budget, you can never have too many friends in media.  If you don’t have those connections now, there’s still hope.  You just might be able to win a few new media friends with the social media darling, Twitter.  Twitter has been a favorite of the media and public relations [...]

To follow up on a previous post requesting feedback on topics and offering to highlight members of the community, I learned of a company called Crossing Gaps — they help bring creative people (writers, artists, musicians, startups) online. Crossing Gaps helps them with everything from web design to marketing and monetization strategy so they can [...]

If you are using Twitter, you are “following” a number of Twitter feeds as well as being “followed” by a number. The more you use the service, the more you probably start liking certain feeds and paying closer attention to them. In a sense, you start becoming attached to them.
All of this is great, but [...]

Referencing my prior post on Creative Capitalism, here is another business with a 1 for 1 model.
A new project by California eco-urban design firm LJ Urban aims to make giving more concrete—quite literally—by matching its sales of homes domestically with funds to build homes in the impoverished African nation of Burkina Faso.

Urban has designed a [...]

To follow up on a previous post requesting feedback on topics and offering to highlight members of the community, I learned of Outspoken Media, Inc.—an internet marketing startup that was founded in January by three women who wanted more for their clients. Partner Rae Hoffman just finished 20th in the recent Startup Mom competition, an [...]