Guerrilla Marketing Online Weapons, sub-titled 100 Low-Cost, High-Impact Weapons for Online Profits and Prosperity, offers a number of time-tested and proven methods of drawing attention to one's self and to one's products and services online. While there is certainly nothing new about these marketing strategies at all, they are conveniently published in this one book and re-tooled for online use. Levinson and Rubin have mastered them. Readers can as well!
The authors present readers with a number of options in areas of advertising, publicity, community involvement, special events, and business associations. Consider offering free advice, sponsorships, press kits, books, articles, reprints, conferences, demonstrations, seminars, workshops, giveaways, and various forms of public service. All of the ideas in the book are common everyday ideas anyone can put to easy use. They are absolutely free and require little explanation beyond the treatment found in this insightful book. Furthermore, the authors encourage their readers to take advantage of every opportunity to put these weapons to use. Good advice!
Levinson and Rubin contend that successful marketing with the use of these online marketing weapons is contingent upon having and putting to use the right "guerrilla" attitudes, namely, competitiveness, confidence, imagination, and enthusiasm, on a regular basis. They point out that people can show a high level of enthusiasm after psyching themselves up or by attending a motivational training session, but that this enthusiasm can easily fade away. Therefore, according to the authors, the above-mentioned attitudes should become a consistent part of one's personality.
The authors provide abundant assistance to help readers present a polished image of themselves before the online community. They will help readers set up shop with a mission statement, business planning, marketing strategies, and much more. This book is extremely easy to read and easily within the budget of anyone. Although this book is several years old it still packs a powerful punch! Start putting its timeless advice and wisdom to use today. This is must reading for every business owner!
Finally, in chapter 12, Mr Allens says, "Referrals are the easiest and least expensive way to market your business. Its much simpler and cheaper to develop repeat sales to a group of satisified customers you've developed over the years than to find new customers." I think Mr Allen should have changed his book to a 100 ideas to retent a customer. Amazingly, Mr Allen states, "The best guerrila marketers spend 60 percent of their time and energy selling to existing customers." I'll bet that percent is higher today. Customer expect top notch performance. One is left to wonder why did Mr Allen did not change his first ten chapters focus to "Building Happy Customers using Online tools". There I've given him a great idea.
I found a number of websites links in the book broken or of no value. Disappointly, Mr Allen hit all the buzz words: email, bulletin board, storefront, service, feedback, classified ads, media campaigns, and free advice or articles.
The bottom line building a presence in cyberspace is expensive and positioning is king. The current of media attention getter does not trade with the consumer using pennies, instead hugh promotional campaigns dump billions to compete for the minds of the consumers. So, Mr Allen correctly accesses the situation intelligently in the last portion of his book when he tells the reader to focus on build the business by word of mouth from satisfied customers. Now that makes sense!