"Sales job" for students/pupils.....where to advertise?

We have a new product, which is targeted at wearers of eyeglasses. We sell quite nicely via our website, but we figured it was much more efficient to approach wearers of eyeglasses directly....by people handing out flyers to people wearing eyeglasses (in front of shopping malls for example). Where is the best place to advertise jobs like this?

Very simple: do it yourself for a day. Spend a day at the mall handing out these flyers with coupons. See what happens. You'll be able to track the results thanks to the codes.

Then do the math: if it brought you 0 customers, you know that it's not worth paying someone to do this. If it worked really well, then taking a small discount into account (because the owner handing out flyers will probably do a better job than a minimum wage dude), you can decide if it's worth it. Then scale.

This approach by the way, is similar to the minimum viable product. Just do the minimum to find out the answer, rather than trying to guess from the comfort of your couch.

There are a couple of different ways to drive business other than what you are thinking about. You say your web site gets pretty good traffic, have you tried using a "refer a friend" code there? This might be something like an offer where you give the referring party and the new customer a discount. Articles,. Blogs, Tweets. They can all generate some business as well.

There is a very good article on sales generation at the MSBC Business Center:

How to Maximize Productivity Today and Opportunities Tomorrow.

I think it is worth a try -- too often start-ups get caught in one mode of marketing and you need to try them all. In my start-up, we do a little bit of all kinds of marketing. I'm sure people will tell you that direct mail does not work and is not worth the time, but I have found that it is a worthy investment in the niche we work in.

No disrespect, but Zuly does not know your market, what you are selling, and etc. Why not try this direct approach and see if it is economical? Either way you will get an interesting story to tell and you will get good feedback from potential customer.

I'd really advise you to try this on your own first. If you haven't done it yourself, you will not know how it goes, what to say, etc and you won't be able to instruct your workers. Maybe take a small team out to trial it and see if it is viable alternative to standard Google AdWords etc.

Running a start-up is about being different and gutsy. Don't follow the crowd. Try it and let us know how it goes!

Honestly, I would stay away from this type of marketing for three reasons:

1. You will get very little return on your investment. Marketing like this can get very expensive. Have you budgeted how much you think it will cost you?
2. The people you hire will have no interest in doing a good job. These people will be outsiders who won't care if a single one of those flyers gets you a customer. They'll hand out flyers to people because that's what you're paying them to do, but they won't go out of their way to be friendly or to try and talk to people about your product. And what's to stop them from handing out flyers to people who don't wear glasses? Or taking the flyers and dumping them somewhere? This leads me to point #3.
3. It'll be hard for you to track the success rate of this. As a business owner, it's important to be able to track how much you spend and what your return is on that investment. That way you can get rid of the things that aren't helping your business and increase the things that are. It's going to be hard to track how many of those that got a flyer actually went to your website and purchased your product. Unless you offer a discount for using a particular coupon code and track that code.

My advice, try something like Google Adwords and place ads on websites that people who wear eyeglasses would go to, such as Pearl Vision and Lenscrafters.

Why not target eyeglasses stores? I don't know what your product is or if it competes with those stores. If it doesn't compete, offer the store a share of the revenue for displaying your ads or flyers.