Guerrilla Marketing Online means working smarter than the rest. To make your online marketing successful you need front-line intelligence and some common sense. Guerrillas don't have massive budgets and unlimited resources, when they go into battle they just focus on what works and what doesn't work.

Here then is your intelligence briefing for online marketing battles. The top ten reasons most online marketing fails, and four rules for a winning web site:

The Top 10 Reasons Why Online Marketing Fails

10. Everyone is reading Letterman's Top 10.
People want to be entertained, and if your site isn't entertaining, customers won't linger long. Clicking links and skipping from page to page loses its charm pretty quickly. Try to inject some humor and surprise into your site. Most marketing pitches are far too official-sounding and boring.

9. The official Net language is Esperanto.
The most effective "language" on the Net isn't necessarily the same language you use in print. Netizens have less patience with flowery, hyperbolic language that takes up precious screen space, or with giant color graphics that take forever to download. Your messages must be tailored to the realities of the Net, which today means a 13" monitor and a 14.4 kbps dial-up connection.

8. Cyberspace is so crowded, nobody goes there anymore.
With hundreds of new Web sites and thousands of new netizens every week, it gets more crowded all the time. Work for visibility by posting in newsgroups and becoming a member of the electronic community where your target audience spends its time.

7. Hackers have secretly rerouted all marketing messages to other marketers.
Fear of hackers means fear of commerce. Most newbies are terrified of viruses and hackers that could steal their financial information or blow up their computers. Significant commerce won't take place on the Net until these fears are allayed, and secure Web server software isn't the whole answer. It's every net-seller's duty to speak out against overhyped security issues, and to make online shopping as reliable and convenient as possible.

6. Marketing lessons are shipping with Windows 95.
Marketing is still marketing, and most businesses have very little understanding of it. The Net doesn't handle marketing for you, it's just a different way to pursue your marketing goals. Read "The 21 Immutable Laws of Marketing" by Ries and Trout for a good, fast dose of marketing savvy.

5. Marketers aren't finding their customers.
You have to seek out your customers; they won't seek you out. Having a Web site by itself is like winking at someone in the dark: you're the only one who knows you're winking. Webcentricity is the biggest flaw in most marketer's online plans.

4. Marketers don't have a unique advantage.
Ideally, your Net presence should be so compelling and value-oriented that a non-customer would sign up for a Net account just to have access to it. Most companies don't meet this test, but some do. Federal Express lets you track shipments online; Computer Literacy Books lets you search its catalog and tells you whether or not a book is in stock. These are compelling benefits of an online presence. Being on the Net, in and of itself, isn't reason enough for people to want to do business with you anymore than is having a phone or fax number.

3. Marketers don't have specific goals.
It's hard to achieve anything if you don't know what you want to achieve. See the Tip of the Week for May 1,1995.

2. Marketers don't have budgets.
It's easy to get discouraged about online marketing when you keep throwing money and time at it without any expectation of a return. Set a time and money budget for your online efforts before you ever start, commit to that budget and the timeframe in which it will be spent, and then attack with everything you've got.

1. Marketers don't have marketing plans.
Most people are in such a hurry to get on the Net that they don't stop to think much about why they want to be there or what they hope to accomplish. Failure to plan equals failure to profit.

The best way to come up with an effective web site design on your own is to look for a good model and copy it. Spending some time poring over fast, attractive, easy-to-use web sites will teach you a lot about how your site should look, and about what you'll need to make it look that way. Here are four of the things you'll notice about well-designed sites:

4 Rules of Great Web Sites

1. They're clear.
A site's purpose should be immediately obvious from a glance at the top of the home page. After viewing no more than two screens, visitors should know what they'll find on a site, and they should be provided with a very good reason to venture further into it.

2. They're easy to navigate.
Good sites have quick, simple navigation systems. You'll often find a button bar at the top or bottom of each page that quickly takes you to any of the site's major features, back to the home page, or to e-mail or order forms. Individual pages on a site are never more than a couple of screens long--it's better to break up information into screen-sized chunks and ask visitors to click links to move through a site than it is to put everything on one page that must be endlessly scrolled. Longer pages are slower to load, and it can be hard to remember the location of a specific section on a long page. Visitors should never be lost or confused.

3. They're easy to shop.
Not everyone has access to full-featured catalog and "shopping cart" ordering systems, but if you're selling more than a handful of products, you should consider making the investment. With a shopping cart system, visitors can simply click a checkbox to add an item they like to their order. Without a shopping cart system, customers must browse through dozens of product descriptions, then remember the exact name, product code, or price of each item they want to order, and then type that information into an order form. Shopping cart systems like the one at Book Stacks Unlimited bookstore make shopping easy. You can find ads for shopping cart software in the backs of magazines like Internet World and NetGuide.

4. They're fast.
"Fast" is a relative term on the Net, but customers should never feel as if they're twiddling their thumbs. If the graphics on a page are large and will take a long time to transmit, make sure the text on the page is interesting enough by itself to occupy the time a visitor would otherwise spend staring into space. And make sure your site is hosted on a speedy server with a speedy connection to the Net. Service providers promise the moon when it comes to server performance, but they often oversell the space or performance they have at their disposal. The proof is in the using. Before signing a service agreement with any provider to host your web site, check out other sites the provider is hosting, several times, at several different times on several different days, and make sure the basic access to pages is acceptable.

Attracting attention to a web site is getting harder and harder every day, and it would be a real shame if you worked hard to gain attention, only to have a site that's a turn-off when visitors arrive. Spend some time looking at successful sites and learn from them.