How To Use Guerrilla Marketing To Create Your Own Blue Oceans

First off let me say that I love guerrilla marketing.

I think it really embodies the essence of what it means to be an entrepreneur and is an essential growth hacking skill if you want to get from bootstrap to mega success on a shoestring budget.

So, What Exactly Is Guerrilla Marketing?

Wikipedia defines guerrilla marketing is an advertisement strategy concept designed for businesses to promote their products or services in an unconventional way with little budget to spend.

In short, it's looking for creative an inexpensive ways to leverage opportunities to get massive exposure for your brand and make a big splash, for usually nothing more than a little bit of effort.

So, in order to get the juices flowing and to help you think outside the box to get exposure for your brand or product, here are a couple of guerrilla marketing examples...

Stamping Dollar Bills

Now, I realize this may not be legal in every country, but at least in the US you've probably noticed dollar bills that have been torn or have Sharpie marks or writings on them...

So, why not get a custom rubber stamp and place your own message on these miniature billboards?

Currency is something that changes hands every day and usually stays in circulation for several years, unless that bill gets lost or destroyed.

And it's extremely affordable to get a custom rubber stamp made. It's only going to set you back about $20.

I would also recommend investing in a custom, branded domain for about $15, and then including it in your custom stamp message with a short call to action.

An example would be "Need More Money? www.UpTo35k.com".

Now, to make sure you have as many of these little advertising ambassadors out in circulation, I would go to the bank and ask for stacks of small bills, either $1 or $5 bills.

And, as I mentioned, the advantage of this method is that the dollar bills you're stamping will be in circulation and changing hands for months and years to come.

So, once you've put in the initial effort, any sales or money you make moving forward will be completely passive.

Direct Mail

I know in this day and age direct mail or physical "junk mail" may seem a little archaic, but, hey!, people still have physical addresses, and it's actually way cheaper than it used to be to print custom mailers.

Also, you have a HUGE advantage since most advertisers have moved to online marketing.

So, other than the regular credit card offers and weekly circulars from your local grocery store, people's mailboxes are actually a bit of a blue ocean these days, since there's very little competition.

And it's pretty easy to market using direct mail now.

There are targeted lists of addresses that you can buy, or if you're going through the USPS, you can actually tell them exactly which parts of your town or city or the country you want your direct mail pieces to go to.

Here is more information about how to get started advertising with direct mail.

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The main reason I like guerrilla marketing is it's a great exercise to train your brain to think outside the box.

One of the things I look for are ways to repurpose platforms, media or traffic sources for things they weren't originally intended for.

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An example of this is I was recently talking to an online marketing friend the other day about angles for promoting online gambling sites.

I know that there's millions of dollars to be made promoting these types of sites, I just couldn't figure out how to get my foot in the door with this niche to siphon visitors to these kinds of offers.

Then he told me about someone he knows who was using the Google Play store to build "apps", but not your traditional app or game.

They were using one of those sites or services that would basically take a website and create an app of a website.

So, what they were doing was they were creating these online gambling guides and tutorials and uploading them to the Google Play store that people could download for free.

As a result, hundreds of thousands of people would download them.

And when they did a portion of them would scroll through the guide and at the end there would be a call to action to their recommended online gambling site.

When people signed up, that marketer would receive a revenue share based on all the money each person they referred deposited.

So, my friend said his buddies were making tens of thousands of dollars per month, just off the rev share of all these people that were signing up for these sites using their affiliate link, because they would deposit so much money on these sites to play games.

That's just one example of how one person was using one platform in an unconventional way to create their own blue ocean of opportunity.

So, don't get hung up on this one example.

There's millions of other opportunities and angles out there that are still untapped and haven't been thought of.

Some great resources to help train your brain to become a better guerrilla marketer and growth hacker are these books by Ryan Holiday...

Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator
Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising