What is "Guerilla Marketing"? Guerilla marketing is a way to promote your website without having a large budget. It consist of anything and everything to get the word out about your website, product, or service. When beginning your guerilla marketing campaign it's important to list all the methods and tactics you intend to implement. So, I'm doing it for you. This article will cover mostly off page optimization and I am assuming you already have a website ready to promote.
1. Let's focus on getting your website indexed by the major search engines. One of my favorite places to get a huge list of website directories is at Directory Critic. Just choose their General list and sort it by PR. Higher the PR the better. You only need to do the free submissions and you do not need to participate in the reciprocal link most of these sites offer. Start submitting by the highest PR first. I recommend doing about 100 directory submissions if not more. You should also submit your website directly through bing, Yahoo, and Google. Although it's not mandatory to get indexed it will not hurt. It can be a good idea to verify your site with each search engine using their meta tag verification method.
2. Now we will dive right into some video marketing. Head on over to iStockphoto and sign up if have not already. Here you can get royalty free photos, videos, illustrations, audio, logos, and much more. For video marketing your are going to search through iStockphotos videos and find a relevant video. It's going to be pain with no text, don't worry. Just find one that is relevant to your market, website, product or service. After you find a video go ahead and purchase it, you really only need the lower quality version. This should cost you about twenty dollars. Now you need to download windows movie maker if you do not already have it. It's extremely easy to use. Just add some relevant text or even audio if you like talking about your website, product, or service. The video does not have to be perfect. It just needs to get your point across. The more important part is going to be your meta data. The meta data tells the search engines and the video sites what the video is about. This is also vital in getting this video to the top of the search engines. For clarification meta data is the text you will be submitting with the video, not the text in the video. The title should have the main keywords you want to target and show up in the search engines for. Your description should be somewhat compelling like a mission statement or sales pitch. Last but not least is your tags. Most video sites accept between 10 and 12 tags. The tags should be your main keywords and other important keywords. After are satisfied with your video and taken the time to write some good meta data you are ready to start submitting to all of the video sites. I do mean all of the video sites. Do yourself a favor and do some Google searches to find a large list video sites. You would be surprised that sometimes it's not the big ones like YouTube that rank well.
3. Article marketing is a very good way to promote your site. If you are not a writer this is no problem. Just outsource it. You can find good cheap writers on places like elance. Be sure they supply a free sample for you and that it is not too choppy. The going rate for outsourcing articles at this time is between 5 and 10 dollars per 700 word article. Be sure to write up a solid agreement between you and the writer or outsource company. this agreement should state that you own all rights to the articles and it is not to ever be distributed by them without your permission. After you have chosen a writer or company you will want to collaborate with them on some topics for a list of articles to be written. The articles should be relevant to your website, product or service. Purchase as little or as many articles as your budget can handle. After you receive the articles be sure to proof read them for quality and run them through copyscape to be sure they are original. Now be sure to add in one link within the article with good keywords as the anchor text. Then prepare your a short author credit with a link back to your site for the resource box the article directories use. Now you are ready to submit. You do not need to get too carried away with submitting. I prefer to do the top ten to twenty article directories. You will gauge the top ten to twenty by their current PR. After you have your list be sure you have the time to submit them all at once. The reason for this is that all article directories run your articles through copyscape or any other plagiarism detector before approving it. If you don't do it all at once your article will start to get indexed on other directories and it will look like there are many duplicates out there. This can sometimes turn off the person in charge of approving the articles, making it less likely that your article will get approved.
4. Social networking and social media sites are important to utilize due to their high page rank and search engine visibility. Utilizing the full potential that social media/networking sites have to offer can be a very time consuming and a tedious task. This article is not about gaining traffic through social networking but how to clog the front pages of Google with your content, products, and services to gain reputation and authority.
First, start doing your homework by doing a Google search to find a nice sized list of all the major social media/networking sites. It's up to you how many you want to do, but I usually just do the top twenty.
When picking the social site you want to utilize aim for the one with the highest page rank. After you have picked the top twenty or so social media/networking sites you want to use, you are going to want to start digging through your hard drives. Find as much content, pictures, videos, ad copies, taglines, slogans, articles, and whatever else is related to the website you are going to promote. You are going to want all of this information ready to go. Alright, now we start on our long list. I will try to generalize as much as possible as I really do not want to explain every social media/networking site one by one. Note: You may want to use a throw away e-mail for this job as you will get plenty of spam and junk mail.
A. When registering you have a couple options when supplying information. It really depends on what your off page SEO goals are. If people are looking for your website then you will want to use your website domain name as your name. If you are like most of us struggling to make some money online then you are going to want to use your dream keywords as your name. Let's say you are in the body building products market and you are promoting your whey protein. You would want to make your first name whey and your last name protein. You will also want to be sure that whey protein is your display name. Be sure to take your profile off of private so it can be indexed by search engines.
B. Most social media/networking sites have the option to customize your URL. Be sure to do this as this option can give you a little bump in search engine rankings. Be sure to stuff your main keywords into your URL as well. Try to have them matching your display name as closely as possible. For example your display name is whey protein try to get a URL with the words whey protein. Often times the good URLs are taken. Here are some other options to try to get those keywords into the URL. We will use MySpace as our example.
MySpace.com/wheyprotein
MySpace.com/whey-protein
MySpace.com/whey_protein
That is just a small example of what you can do to get your keywords in the URL. I know places like Twitter will even take an underscore just about anywhere.
C. Upload photos and videos. You should have some pictures related to your website, and you should have some videos you have created and used for video marketing. If not you need to start learning some simple video editing skills. It's easier than you think. Moving forward, you need to upload these videos and photos to your social media/networking account to the proper places. But before you start uploading you need to plan out the tags, descriptions, and titles for these uploads, also known as meta data. Almost all social sites allow for title, descriptions, and tags. These tell the search engines what the photo or video is about. This is a perfect spot to put your dream keywords. Be sure to put your most important keywords in all three of these spots. Tags are a great place for stuffing 5 to 10 important keywords as well. Be sure to write a good description. You can utilize some content you have laying around for this.
D. Many social sites have blogs. This is a perfect spot to write some original content or even paste an article you may have collecting dust on your hard drive. Some of these blogs allow for html code, so be sure to utilize it with a link or two pointing back to your site. Be sure the article or blog entry has some important keywords, and be sure to put keywords in you anchor text of your links.
E. A lot of social sites out there are trying to copy twitter with the short update messages. You might as well utilize it by writing a couple short updates with important keywords. Try doing about 5 to 8 tweet like updates. Be sure to put a couple of links in one or two of the updates pointing back to your site. Be sure not to spam on these.
F. Some of the social sites out there have widgets you can put in your side bars. Many of these widgets consist of text widgets, code widgets, video widgets, and whatever else they come up with. Be sure to really utilize some of these widgets. The code widget is a great one to start with because you can write some keyword rich content and even put a link back to your site in it. The video widget is a great one as well to upload your videos and utilize the meta data. Many of the video widgets allow you to upload videos from popular video sites like YouTube.
G. There are some social media sites like MySpace that basically allow you to create your own little website. Be sure to use the common SEO practices when building this mini site. For example use a keyword rich article and utilize the h1 tag to put some keywords in. Also be sure to put one or two links pointing back to your site with keywords in the anchor text.
H. Be sure to add friends and follow people that are in the same industry or niche. This can help to add relevant and related content to your profile and up the chances of getting indexed and showing up in search engines. Do not get too carried away with adding and following people as this may get you marked as spam and get all of your work deleted. There are some sites like meetup.com that it's good to follow quite a few groups as you will usually show up on their profile as well. This greatly improves your visibility in search engines. You will have to experiment with this one yourself.
5. Pay Per Post is a great way to get some search engine exposure. It's about a 75 dollar minimum to get started. It is what it is. You pay people to write a review about your website, product or service. You can also write the content for them to post as well and ask that they copy and past it. You can usually get your content on up to PR5 blogs for as little as 4 dollars. I recommend having the blogger put one to two links back to your site from the paid post. Though Google does not like paid links I don't see this effecting your website in a negative way. In my opinion there is really no way for Google to know exactly who is participating in pay per post. Even if they did they really cannot make the links hurt you or Google bowling would be rampant. If you are afraid of being penalized by Google you can ask the blogger to included the rel="no follow" tag in the link or just provide the URL as plain text.
6. Social book marking is a great way to get some quick traffic. Though book marking yourself from multiple fake accounts and e-mails is a bit spammy it is still effective. It's up to you if you want to utilize this method. If you choose to utilize it I recommend using and creating multiple accounts through OnlyWire. The same holds true with social book marking. Create strong titles, descriptions, and tags.
7. Posting classified ads on places like Craigslist and usfreeads are also an effective way to show up in the search engines for your desired keywords. Many of the classified ad sites get indexed very well by the major search engines. Again, create a strong title, description, and tags. Some of these classified ad sites accept HTML so be sure to utilize common SEO practices by using h1 tags and keyword rich anchor text.
1. Let's focus on getting your website indexed by the major search engines. One of my favorite places to get a huge list of website directories is at Directory Critic. Just choose their General list and sort it by PR. Higher the PR the better. You only need to do the free submissions and you do not need to participate in the reciprocal link most of these sites offer. Start submitting by the highest PR first. I recommend doing about 100 directory submissions if not more. You should also submit your website directly through bing, Yahoo, and Google. Although it's not mandatory to get indexed it will not hurt. It can be a good idea to verify your site with each search engine using their meta tag verification method.
2. Now we will dive right into some video marketing. Head on over to iStockphoto and sign up if have not already. Here you can get royalty free photos, videos, illustrations, audio, logos, and much more. For video marketing your are going to search through iStockphotos videos and find a relevant video. It's going to be pain with no text, don't worry. Just find one that is relevant to your market, website, product or service. After you find a video go ahead and purchase it, you really only need the lower quality version. This should cost you about twenty dollars. Now you need to download windows movie maker if you do not already have it. It's extremely easy to use. Just add some relevant text or even audio if you like talking about your website, product, or service. The video does not have to be perfect. It just needs to get your point across. The more important part is going to be your meta data. The meta data tells the search engines and the video sites what the video is about. This is also vital in getting this video to the top of the search engines. For clarification meta data is the text you will be submitting with the video, not the text in the video. The title should have the main keywords you want to target and show up in the search engines for. Your description should be somewhat compelling like a mission statement or sales pitch. Last but not least is your tags. Most video sites accept between 10 and 12 tags. The tags should be your main keywords and other important keywords. After are satisfied with your video and taken the time to write some good meta data you are ready to start submitting to all of the video sites. I do mean all of the video sites. Do yourself a favor and do some Google searches to find a large list video sites. You would be surprised that sometimes it's not the big ones like YouTube that rank well.
3. Article marketing is a very good way to promote your site. If you are not a writer this is no problem. Just outsource it. You can find good cheap writers on places like elance. Be sure they supply a free sample for you and that it is not too choppy. The going rate for outsourcing articles at this time is between 5 and 10 dollars per 700 word article. Be sure to write up a solid agreement between you and the writer or outsource company. this agreement should state that you own all rights to the articles and it is not to ever be distributed by them without your permission. After you have chosen a writer or company you will want to collaborate with them on some topics for a list of articles to be written. The articles should be relevant to your website, product or service. Purchase as little or as many articles as your budget can handle. After you receive the articles be sure to proof read them for quality and run them through copyscape to be sure they are original. Now be sure to add in one link within the article with good keywords as the anchor text. Then prepare your a short author credit with a link back to your site for the resource box the article directories use. Now you are ready to submit. You do not need to get too carried away with submitting. I prefer to do the top ten to twenty article directories. You will gauge the top ten to twenty by their current PR. After you have your list be sure you have the time to submit them all at once. The reason for this is that all article directories run your articles through copyscape or any other plagiarism detector before approving it. If you don't do it all at once your article will start to get indexed on other directories and it will look like there are many duplicates out there. This can sometimes turn off the person in charge of approving the articles, making it less likely that your article will get approved.
4. Social networking and social media sites are important to utilize due to their high page rank and search engine visibility. Utilizing the full potential that social media/networking sites have to offer can be a very time consuming and a tedious task. This article is not about gaining traffic through social networking but how to clog the front pages of Google with your content, products, and services to gain reputation and authority.
First, start doing your homework by doing a Google search to find a nice sized list of all the major social media/networking sites. It's up to you how many you want to do, but I usually just do the top twenty.
When picking the social site you want to utilize aim for the one with the highest page rank. After you have picked the top twenty or so social media/networking sites you want to use, you are going to want to start digging through your hard drives. Find as much content, pictures, videos, ad copies, taglines, slogans, articles, and whatever else is related to the website you are going to promote. You are going to want all of this information ready to go. Alright, now we start on our long list. I will try to generalize as much as possible as I really do not want to explain every social media/networking site one by one. Note: You may want to use a throw away e-mail for this job as you will get plenty of spam and junk mail.
A. When registering you have a couple options when supplying information. It really depends on what your off page SEO goals are. If people are looking for your website then you will want to use your website domain name as your name. If you are like most of us struggling to make some money online then you are going to want to use your dream keywords as your name. Let's say you are in the body building products market and you are promoting your whey protein. You would want to make your first name whey and your last name protein. You will also want to be sure that whey protein is your display name. Be sure to take your profile off of private so it can be indexed by search engines.
B. Most social media/networking sites have the option to customize your URL. Be sure to do this as this option can give you a little bump in search engine rankings. Be sure to stuff your main keywords into your URL as well. Try to have them matching your display name as closely as possible. For example your display name is whey protein try to get a URL with the words whey protein. Often times the good URLs are taken. Here are some other options to try to get those keywords into the URL. We will use MySpace as our example.
MySpace.com/wheyprotein
MySpace.com/whey-protein
MySpace.com/whey_protein
That is just a small example of what you can do to get your keywords in the URL. I know places like Twitter will even take an underscore just about anywhere.
C. Upload photos and videos. You should have some pictures related to your website, and you should have some videos you have created and used for video marketing. If not you need to start learning some simple video editing skills. It's easier than you think. Moving forward, you need to upload these videos and photos to your social media/networking account to the proper places. But before you start uploading you need to plan out the tags, descriptions, and titles for these uploads, also known as meta data. Almost all social sites allow for title, descriptions, and tags. These tell the search engines what the photo or video is about. This is a perfect spot to put your dream keywords. Be sure to put your most important keywords in all three of these spots. Tags are a great place for stuffing 5 to 10 important keywords as well. Be sure to write a good description. You can utilize some content you have laying around for this.
D. Many social sites have blogs. This is a perfect spot to write some original content or even paste an article you may have collecting dust on your hard drive. Some of these blogs allow for html code, so be sure to utilize it with a link or two pointing back to your site. Be sure the article or blog entry has some important keywords, and be sure to put keywords in you anchor text of your links.
E. A lot of social sites out there are trying to copy twitter with the short update messages. You might as well utilize it by writing a couple short updates with important keywords. Try doing about 5 to 8 tweet like updates. Be sure to put a couple of links in one or two of the updates pointing back to your site. Be sure not to spam on these.
F. Some of the social sites out there have widgets you can put in your side bars. Many of these widgets consist of text widgets, code widgets, video widgets, and whatever else they come up with. Be sure to really utilize some of these widgets. The code widget is a great one to start with because you can write some keyword rich content and even put a link back to your site in it. The video widget is a great one as well to upload your videos and utilize the meta data. Many of the video widgets allow you to upload videos from popular video sites like YouTube.
G. There are some social media sites like MySpace that basically allow you to create your own little website. Be sure to use the common SEO practices when building this mini site. For example use a keyword rich article and utilize the h1 tag to put some keywords in. Also be sure to put one or two links pointing back to your site with keywords in the anchor text.
H. Be sure to add friends and follow people that are in the same industry or niche. This can help to add relevant and related content to your profile and up the chances of getting indexed and showing up in search engines. Do not get too carried away with adding and following people as this may get you marked as spam and get all of your work deleted. There are some sites like meetup.com that it's good to follow quite a few groups as you will usually show up on their profile as well. This greatly improves your visibility in search engines. You will have to experiment with this one yourself.
5. Pay Per Post is a great way to get some search engine exposure. It's about a 75 dollar minimum to get started. It is what it is. You pay people to write a review about your website, product or service. You can also write the content for them to post as well and ask that they copy and past it. You can usually get your content on up to PR5 blogs for as little as 4 dollars. I recommend having the blogger put one to two links back to your site from the paid post. Though Google does not like paid links I don't see this effecting your website in a negative way. In my opinion there is really no way for Google to know exactly who is participating in pay per post. Even if they did they really cannot make the links hurt you or Google bowling would be rampant. If you are afraid of being penalized by Google you can ask the blogger to included the rel="no follow" tag in the link or just provide the URL as plain text.
6. Social book marking is a great way to get some quick traffic. Though book marking yourself from multiple fake accounts and e-mails is a bit spammy it is still effective. It's up to you if you want to utilize this method. If you choose to utilize it I recommend using and creating multiple accounts through OnlyWire. The same holds true with social book marking. Create strong titles, descriptions, and tags.
7. Posting classified ads on places like Craigslist and usfreeads are also an effective way to show up in the search engines for your desired keywords. Many of the classified ad sites get indexed very well by the major search engines. Again, create a strong title, description, and tags. Some of these classified ad sites accept HTML so be sure to utilize common SEO practices by using h1 tags and keyword rich anchor text.
Be sure to submit your articles to the Article Directory Project
