No own promotion - no money

It is a frequent error to believe that the registration of a project would result in finding investors or donors.

It is far more realistic to consider sites like fin7.com and the many sites for crowdfunding as an organized coordinator for your own event of collecting contributions. Normally it only works under the condition of your own marketing with the link of your projects. You should communicate this to your friends, within forums and all other communication forms on the Internet.

The first 20 to 25 % of the required funds for a project are typically not offered by unknown persons but typically from persons which you already know. It is helpful to place your project for this on a regular site for projects. This way your project gets credibility and proves how it is competitive with many other projects. fin7.com would be a good plaform choice if you need 50 000 US$ or a bit less or more for innovation projects, Internet projects, software projects. This is the typical project type on fin7.com .

Will such projects risk to be misinterpreted when in competition with hundreds of 2 000 US$ or Euro projects looking for donors giving definitely their money for culture or charity? We do not know. Sites for such forms of crowdfunding are much appreciated here. So we de not want to compare.

Why it is better to place a project on a project site before asking your friends to participate?

Your first contributors of the 20 or 25 % of the needed funds will typically be friends or family members. They would mostly not have been willing to do so when just asking them for money. Or you would even not have dared to ask them in a direct manner for money.

Now they can decide their contribution without the feeling that they have some obligation for doing so. And they can compare on fin7.com your project with others and state that your project and your financing approach is a very normal matter in this world. It leaves the feeling: "Should I make a gift for some strange personal private hobby goal?" - It switches to the feeling: "This is business, is investment, is professional".

In addition, there is the specific advantage that fin7.com helps that well-balanced agreements will be conceived with equal rights for all investors.

And: Whenever problems will be communicated for projects financed during the last years with fees paid to fin7.com , it will be tried to show possible solutions. Small businesses do not have the financial resources to pay high quality consultants for the many possible problems. So the typical procedure might be that helpful information will be added on the public Internet. The link to it will be communicated. There is already a huge library of helpful information on prof7.com .

As soon as 20 or 25 % of the required funds have been registered for a project, other private investors tend to follow.

People who did not know from you and from your project until now, will typically only consider a contribution when your project has got credibility by the coverage of 20 or 25 %. This is the current prevailing analysis result of current behavior habits on crowdfunding sites.

But these additional contributors are also typically not just site visitors. These, too, typically have been invited by the coordinator of the specific project. So this part of the procedure, too, does normally only work if communication the project link on social networks.

Be prepared that only between 0,1 and 1 % of invited persons will consider to take part in financing your project. This means that you have to invite between 100 and 1000 persons before getting an amount of for example 300 US$.

Financial platforms for project registration like fin7.com and many others give credibility to your project. But they do not contribute much for bringing investors or lenders or donors. You will have to do the marketing for your project.

We are sorry to destroy the frequent illusion that project registration an financial platforms is sufficient to get perhaps the money. This easy success might be possible in theory but it rarely occurs in reality. Hence be prepared to do the marketing.

How to get short versions of the project link?

Sites to convert the project link to a short version.

If you create a true link on the Internet for your project, the complete address should be used. This is because it is faster and it enables the visitor to deal with addressing problems if any. Tiny links should therefore only be used if there is some valid reason for this.

You can list a lot of services for tiny URLs when entering in the search field on top of this page:
             how to shorten links

How to choose among the many services for shorter links?

(1) The service should exist since many years.
(2) The links should never expire.
(3) It should not be correlated to major services (like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo, Microsoft ot any other majore player.

Example: tinyurl.com is active since 2002 and probably also conforms to (2) and (3).

A good comparison about 10 variants:    http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-9898698-2.html

This comparison is from 2008. Hence all listed services exist now at least several years as far as they are still alive.

The very special links of fin7.com

The links include the coding of the environment: The user language and the screen size. On the screen top you can click on the corresponding options. The recipient can change them there.

The main importance of this is for the screen size. You can create the links of your project for various devices. Display is then properly adapted. Typically you would create link variants for screen sizes like:

19'' (normal standard PC)
15'' (notebooks, netbooks)
10'' (mobile devices like netbooks and tablet computers)
5'' (smartphones)

Typically you would only use and distribute the first of these variants. Statistics show that most transactions on the Internet by experienced users and consumers are made on true and efficient desktop computers. Down-sized and down-graded tiny mobile devices are rarely used for serious transaction tasks.

But depending from the form of link communication the other variants might be helpful, too. The software automatically adapts many display functions to the preselected screen size. The user can then adapt the size option on the page top to any other screen size of his choice.