Guerilla Marketing 101

If you are a marketer of any kind, online or offline, you will find that guerrilla marketing is a powerful tool you can easily utilize in any environment and with zero to very little financial investment.

I used to work on the television series, Touched By An Angel. Every Friday was "dollar day." Each one of us would put our name on a dollar bill and put the bills into a big pot. A crew member would then be invited to pull out one of the dollar bills and whom evers name was pulled would win the whole bucket full of money and sometimes it could be as much as $500.

Once that dollar was given to the winner, obviously at one time or another a transaction will happen and that one dollar will change hands. Now, if you are a guerrilla marketer you can easily see the potential here for applying this to your advertising efforts. Instead of writing your name on a dollar bill, what if you wrote your business name or website URL on the money and then simply purchased something you needed to buy anyway? That one dollar will eventually change many hands and many eyes will see your business name or URL.

Guerrilla marketing lives on the edge of unethical, possibly illegal, definitely unconventional, but extremely viral. Often this form of marketing is free, just like you writing your URL on a dollar bill and passing it on. And yes, this fits guerrilla marketing to the tee. It isn't very ethical, in fact it is illegal to write on United States currency because you are defacing it, however the law is rarely enforced. You have to decide how far you want to push the envelope, but obviously this is so easy and so viral that this simple act of spending three to four seconds writing on a dollar bill can bring you free traffic for years to come.

Often, this form of marketing happens before our eyes in the guise of something else and completely unrelated. Last year, there was a bunch of hoopla about Paris Hilton and her Sidekick mobile phone. Her Sidekick had been "hacked" and all of the news was about her private list of phone contacts and who was on her contact list. But, the side effect was the Sidekick phone sales shot through the roof.

T-mobile and and their Sidekick phone had nothing to do with this, we can believe, but this free and insanely viral free marketing, meant huge profits for them. One can question if this stunt was innocent or was it completely planned by T-mobile? We will never really know, but what we do know is this is an example of guerrilla marketing at it's best.

Another example is Kashi cookies. You may have seen their advertisement on television giving away free cookies on their website. This gives people an excellent reason to visit their website when one can safely guess that 90% of that traffic would never have visited their site otherwise.

If you can get your message out there without anyone feeling advertised to than you have nailed guerrilla marketing. To learn more about free and viral ways to be a guerrilla marketer, click here.