Guerrilla marketing is one of the most effective methods available to small businesses and nonprofit organizations for increasing sales or expanding the reach of your cause. These unconventional techniques are designed to produce maximum results using minimal resources.
Today, the Internet provides the best medium to use guerrilla marketing in fast and easy ways. The most effective strategies are:
1. Email Marketing
You must give visitors to your website a reason to leave their email address and give you permission to continue communicating with them. Offer a free subscription to a newsletter about your niche within the Fair Trade movement or provide another type of bonus.
Use an autoresponder service to capture visitor sign-ups and send out follow-up messages and newsletters to your list. For my company that sells Fair Trade soccer balls online, I route our emails through the free tools available at Gmail (look at their Vacation Settings for the autoresponder functionality). Be sure to provide valuable information, not just blatant advertising. By developing a rapport with your readers, you’ll build a larger and larger list of responsive subscribers.
2. Blogging
Blogging has taken the online world by storm. Blogs (short for “web logs”) are dynamically editable websites people use to talk about topics important to them.
Post to your blog as often as you want and include links pointing to your website. This frequently changing, unique content and the numerous incoming links are extremely favorable to the search engines.
You can use Blogger.com to set up an attractive template for your blog and post messages right away. The best part, it’s free. I personally use WordPress – an open-source platform with lots of community support – on our blog at www.fairtradesports.com, as well as FeedBurner to make subscribing to our blog fast and easy for our website visitors.
3. Forum Marketing
Forums give people a place online to congregate and talk about what interests them. To find forums in your niche, just Google “[keyword] forum” and see what you get.
Once you sign up for a forum, post messages regularly. This is a great way to build relationships. Post questions. Answer questions. Tell people where to find good information. Putting blatant advertising in your posts is against the rules. But you are allowed to put a link to your website in your forum signature. Consider changing your signature based on the forum to which you are contributing. For example, this is my standard signature for any forum related to Fair Trade:
- Scott James
Fair Trade Sports
Blog: www.fairtradesports.com
Fair Trade soccer balls!
I use a different signature for forums related to the eco-aspects of our sports balls, my work with the abolitionist Not For Sale Campaign, or my work with the sustainable MBA school, Bainbridge Graduate Institute.
4. Direct Link Building
Search engines – Google, in particular – favor pages with lots of incoming links, both one-way and two-way links, because it increases your website’s “popularity” across the Internet.
A simple example of one-way linking is the kind of link you get when you submit an comment on someone else’s blog. Your comment can have a link to your site in it, and the comment can be picked up by related websites and ezines if the topic is interesting.
For two-way links, you can contact other website owners within the Fair Trade movement and ask to trade links. Or, just Google “[keyword] trade links,” and you’ll get back a bunch of sites that are offering to do a link exchange with you. Then, you can add them to a section on your site titled “Related Links,” “Resource Center,” or something similar. It’s that simple.
Go through the list and start asking if you can trade links. Slow and steady wins the race. Do a little every day and pretty soon, you’ll grow your links a lot. The key is to reach out to others with authentic sites doing work to further the Fair Trade movement.
5. Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking sites are wildly popular with people under 25, and several (like MySpace, Facebook, and Ning) have become some of the most visited sites on the web.
Squidoo.com is different from other sites because you can sell blatantly without worrying about being shut down.
Squidoo lets you create what’s called a lens, which is an information portal about your topic. The secret is to provide helpful information for people in your niche. Along the way, you can point them to your website, getting you laser-targeted traffic. We made one to alert Squidoo readers of Fair Trade products available on the web (http://www.squidoo.com/shopfairtrade).
By implementing these guerrilla marketing strategies, you will be spreading the word about your product, your organization and your cause across the Internet in ways that will have both an immediate impact and a long-term effect for years to come.
by Scott James
Founder, Fair Trade Sports
Bringing you eco-certified Fair Trade soccer balls and more!
