Re: Marketing without spending a dime

This is probably covererd in the Guerilla marketing book somewhere, but one common strategy is to have other people do the work for you as much as possible, and by that I mean to leverage the reactions and chatter of third parties to your message or product. Which is some of what viral marketing is all about anyway, using others to flog your product or idea and using their influence and credentials with the target market instead of your own.

Without spending a dime, literally? Tough to do, but on a low budget? Yes, doable. I think classically, you would try to get favorable press coverage thru cleverly-positioned releases and promotional events. I would define that as free or nearly free marketing. Of course, the more you rely on that kind of thing, the more control you give away as to where the focus goes and what the specific call to action will be, or evolve into. If you start a stampede, you can't expect to drive it with much if any precision, so once started, get the most you can out of it immediately before it swerves off course or decides to dissipate on its own. And be careful you don't make things worse for yourself instead of better...

A marketing story I got out of a Mel Bay guitar playing how-to book:

A violin maker was upset that a small fad for the novel new instrument called the guitar was hurting his market for violins. He decided to flood the market with cheap guitars with the premise that people would then burn out on their look and sound, get over the novelty, and come back to the classic violin in short order. Instead, the guitar's popularity exploded and went from a local fad to a regional phenomenon, and expanded from there.