Rating:  Summary: Must Reading For Every Online Business Owner! Review:      The Internet has developed into one large entity, a community of online users, for the expressed purposes of finding, sharing, and providing information. While many desire to participate in this medium for fun and pleasure, others are intent on seriously marketing their products and services. Unfortunately, many of these people lack the time, effort, and skill to effectively promote themselves online. Additionally, some lack the drive from within to succeed. Jay Conrad Levinson and Charles Rubin have written Guerrilla Marketing Online Weapons to offer powerful, high-impact marketing solutions and encouragement.     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!
Rating:  Summary: Sorry to disagree with Paul Allen, but.... Review: I hate to disagree with someone who obviously had enough business sense to co-found Microsoft, but this book is terribly outdated. The minute it was put to print, it became terribly outdated. Perhaps when the book was written, in the Mid-90s, it offered help in the new frontier of ecommerce. Now, it will just confuse anybody who doesn't know better. Why? Simply put, it doesn't speak of many new methods of marketing online. Banner Advertising, Search Engines, Site Design, and Opt In Email are no where to be found in this book. The book definitely has a very outdated feel to it, and I do not see how this book could be useful to anyone interested in online promotion.
Rating:  Summary: Low Cost Internet Marketing Ideas are never out of date Review: I have purchased more than 30 copies of this book to give to employees of an internet company that I founded in 1997. For me, it is required reading. Our company has 3 web sites in the Media Metrix top 500 and is ranked in the top 15 of all internet properties for page views. This is my favorite single treatise on low-cost guerillia marketing on the internet. Perhaps during the internet bubble many companies backed by millions of dollars of venture capital overlooked all the excellent suggestions in this book, these 100 weapons, and instead spending it all on traditional media campaigns to "build their brand." What a joke! I have seen more than one instance where a single determined employee with no marketing budget, a trench-worker, as it were, has applied the techniques described in this book over a long period of time and has literally generated millions of dollars of value (in terms of both traffic to our sites AND revenue) by doing so. People say this book is out of date. But I have never seen a book published since this one that captures the online guerilla spirit that is needed in the post-bubble internet economy and covers such a broad range of tactics. Certainly there are excellent new books on search engine techniques, affiliate marketing, and other strategies, but in my opinion every employee of every internet company should read this book (it's a quick read) and apply several of the "weapons" described in it and watch the results. If you aren't sophisticated enough to track the results of every weapon you use in your internet marketing strategy, you'll never know that this book is packed with great ideas. Some of the verbage is out of date, and the book feels out of date, but look past that to find some excellent ideas that most people are too "sophisticated" to try, and you'll find many keys to success. I continue to recommend this book and buy copies for my associates.
Rating:  Summary: This book gets you excited about promoting your Web site. Review: If I could only use one book as a reference to help me build my online marketing plan, Guerilla Marketing Online Weapons would be it. Levinson and Rubin lay out a list of 100 ways to promote your Web site, create it to attract visitors and help you organize your daily, weekly and monthly online marketing attack. By following the steps laid out in this book, you will be able to define specifically the purpose of your Web venture, organize your promotion attack, and communicate your message on the Internet without flaming, spamming or otherwise offending potentially weary Internet users. Levinson and Rubin have a style that gets you excited about trying out some of their strategies. Your enthusiasm will skyrocket and so will your Web site's reach, if you apply the concepts in this book
Rating:  Summary: It's already outdated Review: Maybe it was exciting when first released, but so much has happend since the book was put together that it is now falls short of the mark
Rating:  Summary: Outdated but the odd useful piece of info Review: Nothing dates faster than a book on the internet and this one is no exception. I would imaging that 3-4 years ago this book would have been extremely useful. However, without the benefit of a revision the most useful points tend to be the ones that aren't specifically related to the internet. If you are looking for a book to differentiate your website from the masses - this one probably isn't it - at least it's cheap!
Rating:  Summary: Handier 4 years ago Review: Nothing dates faster than a book on the internet and this one is no exception. Like other reviews pointed out, it was out of date three years ago. While there are a few good points in it but these tend to be ones that are general and not internet focused. If you have no knowledge on the internet then you might find the odd bit of useful information otberwise look elsewhere.
Rating:  Summary: Ch 12 made sense Review: The first ten chapters represented a firestorm of ideas. Ug, as the book states a 100 ideas to pursue. Let say the value of each idea is debatable. Some ideas will be a waste of time. My advice is to mapout a path of "what you want". Look at what ideas will move you towards your goal. 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!
Rating:  Summary: Ch 12 made sense Review: The first ten chapters represented a firestorm of ideas. Ug, as the book states a 100 ideas to pursue. Let say the value of each idea is debatable. Some ideas will be a waste of time. My advice is to mapout a path of "what you want". Look at what ideas will move you towards your goal. 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!
Rating:  Summary: the way of the dinasour Review: THis thing is so out of date it's ridiculous. I mean, there is no way you can actually succeed with this book. And not to say it's a bad book but it's hoplessly behind the times. For something up to date, read Guerrilla PR Wired. It's cutting edge and hip and it's so much more than just a book of tips. It explains everything behind PR and why it works and other stuff like that. And the book tells you how to publicize your stuff without spending like a fortune. Why would anyone want to read anything else?
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