By Hasan Luongo, Chief Promoter

For a small business, there are numerous options for generating new leads; you can create a TV or Radio ad, you can take out a listing in the Yellow Pages, you can buy Keywords, or Direct Mail lists, basically there are a ton of choices.

Before you decide which type of advertising you want to buy, you should think about how you grew your business when you had no money for advertising. What worked then still works today.

The Shoe String Approach
When most business get started they don’t have much money for advertising; so they make a concerted effort to reach out to the people they know in the community to inform them about the business, and ask them to refer them if they know of anyone that might need their service. From the first few referrals comes the first customers, and from those early customers come a few more referrals, and if you do great job of satisfying those customers, pretty soon you have a business.

Word of Mouth is how most businesses get going, whether you’re talking about a high-flying internet company like Skype, or a luxury spa.

Customers Over Exposures
I think that many businesses owners and marketers lose site of the value of referral marketing after they grow past the startup / bootstrapping phase. Buying advertising can be exciting and it takes less personal effort than referral marketing, but what about the results? Referral marketing is far more targeted and trusted than advertising, resulting in more actual customers that require considerably less selling. Just because you can afford to buy advertising does not make it the best choice.

If you want great customers, not just random clicks and calls, think about your best customers and focus your efforts on getting more people just like them. With word of mouth driven referral marketing, your marketing dollars are focused on that unique group of “high value customers” that you love to serve. Your satisfied customers have the relationships with people who share the same demographic and psychographic characteristics, and their satisfaction with your business is all that those prospective customers need to know to initiate a relationship with your business. Referral marketing is all about relationships and satisfaction, everything else is merely an advertisement.

Technorati Tags: referral marketing, relationship marketing, advertising, small business, marketing on a budget, word of mouth

Flickr Photo Credit

By Hasan Luongo

Engineering and web development have traditionally been male dominated fields, which is likely the primary reason that most web/software companies in these spaces are lead by all male founding teams. But times are changing, because of open source its now much less expensive and complex to develop web based applications and services
With are so many compelling reasons why right now is the best time ever to start a startup, why is it still mostly guys going out and doing it?

Here are my top five reasons why more women should lead Web 2.0 companies:

5) More Meg Whitman less Jeff Skilling
I recently had the pleasure of attending Ms. Whitman’s Keynote address at TieCon 2007, besides being totally enamored with her remarkable track record and strategic skills, Ms. Whitman stuck me as an amazingly real and likable person. You get the feeling that in any so called grey situation she would do right over doing evil 99.99999% of the time. While most CEO’s are no where near as awful as Jeff Skilling, many would greatly benefit by becoming more like Ms. Whitman.

4) An opportunity to stand out
A startup should take advantage of every opportunity to distinguish itself from the crowded field of competitors. Whether you’re meeting with VC’s, calling on potential customers, or meeting with the media, if you have a point of differentiation, you should leverage it to your advantage.

3) Lead the charge
It’s widely noted that young woman are outperforming their male counterparts in the fields of science and math, engineering a little less so, but the trends are changing fast. As your startup grows, attracting top young talent will be a major strategic challenge, why not position yourself at the forefront of the hiring trends from day one? If you’re a woman founder reading this, get yourself out their in the media and become a beacon for other highly talented woman.

2) Women are a massively important demo online
According to a recent report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project : The percentage of women using the Internet only lags slightly behind that of men, and women under 30 and black women now outpace their male peers online.

1) The basic tenants of Web 2.0: sharing, collaboration, ease of use, and community are intrinsically female traits.
With this in mind, it only makes sense to embody these natural traits of woman within the leadership team of your organization. Men may be the early adopters, and the harder core techies, but undoubtedly women are the connectors, and customers. If the startup is going to grow up to be a major mainstream phenomenon the fastest way forward is tapping the very traits that make Web 2.0 so exciting through the product features, team, and market.

Important Side Note: PF is an equal opportunity employer and is currently seeking to add 1-2 superstars to our founding team.

Technorati Tags: woman ceo, web 2.0, startups, woman leaders, founders, meg whitman