Guerrilla Marketing

by Charles Rubin

Armies that go into battle without their weapons at the ready invariably lose. Don't go into online battles without preparing and organizing your weapons in advance. For example:

• Prepare boilerplate e-mail messages about you, your business, or your products so they're ready to send out when people ask for them. If you use a full-featured mail program like Eudora, you can create a separate email box in which to store canned messages so they're easy to find. Save your outgoing mail messages, too: many of these can be reworked for additional replies so you don't have to completely rewrite a response each time.
• Prepare two or more signatures to append to different types of messages. I use a personal and a business signature, but you might even have several different business signs that highlight different aspects of your business or expertise.
• Getting information from a tour of the Net has been compared with getting a drink from a fire hose. Every trip online yields dozens of URLs you'll want to check out or e-mail addresses of people you may want to contact, but they fly by so quickly it's hard to remember them.I open a blank e-mail message whenever I read my mail, and I use it to store URLs and addresses that I glean from incoming mail or mailing list discussions, Web pages, discussion group messages, or classified ads. Later, I'll I set up a time to go online and do nothing but explore these new leads and resources.
• If you're aggressive about your marketing program you'll be trying to post useful information in as many appropriate places as possible, but it's hard to remember where and when you posted everything, which makes it difficult to go back and find things when they need to be updated or removed. If you post messages or articles to discussions, FTP sites, or Web pages, keep a log of each posting so you'll know what you posted where and when.
• Use hot lists and (on online services) favorite places menus or windows to store frequently-visited locations so you don't have to remember how to navigate to them every time.
• Once every couple of weeks, go through your mailboxes, resource files,and hot lists and delete entries you've already reviewed or that you no longer need. Otherwise, your disk, mailboxes, and menus will become so cluttered that it will be hard to find anything in them.