Online resources to improve your marketing activities

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There are two online market places that are worth exploring if you would like to improve the effectiveness of some of your marketing activities.

These two market places are

Fiverr
And Elance

Fiverr is an online market place where you can purchase a huge amount of interesting services for a starting fee of only US$5.

That's right only five dollars!

You just go to the Fiverr site and find the service you want.

Let's look a closer look at how you might use a service like Fiverr in your own business.

I am hired to present to large groups and I occasionally offer webinars where I share interesting marketing strategies.

In the past I have used Power Point slides as part of my live presentations and webinars.

And these slides were very average in terms of how they looked.

(In other words they didn't look very good!)

So I checked out Fiverr and came across a person who would redo all my PowerPoint slides (up to 15 in number) for only $5. I paid an extra $5 for each additional block of 15 slides that I had done on top of this.

Suddenly for an investment of a tiny amount of money ($10 for up to 30 slides) I now have a really professional looking presentation that I can use a lot of different ways.

So my first recommendation here is pretty simple...

If you ever have to give a live presentation, or present a webinar then hire someone good on Fiverr to make sure all your Power Point slides look great.

Now Fiverr can be used for a lot of different services:

You might have a short booklet that you would like converted into Kindle format so it can be made available on Amazon. For $5 someone will do that for you.

You might want to have a professional voice over that promotes your business at the start of an audio message or video. For $5 that can be done.

In fact there are thousands of different services being offered on Fiverr and some of them could be quite helpful for your marketing activities.

Fiverr is useful as a resource however there are a couple of limitations.

Limitation 1: Only some of the people on Fiverr are very good at what they offer.

And the rest are either average or not very good.

Limitation 2: There are a number of things that you might want done that are not available through Fiverr.

For instance:

I wanted to get the names of the key contacts and full contacts details for the owners of around 75 businesses in a particular industry. These businesses were in four different countries and I needed this information quickly.

Fiverr could not help with this.

So my solution was Elance

With Elance you post the job you want done and give a budget that you are prepared to spend. E.g. Under $500.

You'll quickly get a good number of suppliers who will quote on your job.

You can see samples of the work these Elance suppliers have done in the past. And you can also see feedback from all their Elance customers at the same time.

Once you find the right supplier you pay your agreed fee which sets safely with Elance. And only when you are happy with the job are the funds released to the person you hired.

My research assignment was done in 24 hours through Elance for a fee of US$120 and all the info I needed was provided to me in very easy to use format.

This saved me a huge amount of time and it also helped me test a brand new marketing campaign to these businesses.

Fiverr and Elance are online resources that are definitely resource worth checking out.

They make it possible to try a lot of new marketing activities that you may not have thought about doing.

And you can test these marketing activities without it having to cost you a fortune.

'The important thing is not being afraid to take a chance. Remember, the greatest failure is to not try. Once you find something you love to do, be the best at doing it.'
Debbi Fields

Action Step:

You might like to check out online market places like Fiverr and Elance to see what services are available. I've personally found some good suppliers from both sites that have been very helpful in my own business.

Graham McGregor is a consultant specialising in memorable marketing. You can download his 396 page 'Unfair Business Advantage' Ebook at no charge from www.theunfairbusinessadvantage.com