Book Review: Guerrilla Marketing On the Internet

Hello!  It’s Max West here from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  I’m attending Anthrocon 2011 as this goes live.  While I’m out there networking and promoting myself, I thought I’d share with you a neat book that I found by accident.

As you all know, I create comics.  But I also want to sell them as well.  How do I go about doing that?  That involves the process of marketing.  By marketing, you are pitching your comics and/or graphic novels to the general public to get them to buy them.  Without marketing, you will have absolutely no sales whatsoever.

You can quote me on this next statement.  You can have the biggest, baddest comic on the block…but if nobody knows about your work, you can’t sell them any copies.

I wanted to learn all about marketing your comics as well as marketing in general to get my name out there and promote my work.  After checking out many books, I found an interesting title.  The book in question is titled Guerrilla Marketing on the Internet: The Definitive Guide from the Father of Guerrilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson, Mitch Meyerson, and Mary Eule Scarborough.  Published in 2008 from Entrepreneur Press, this 236 page paperback book explains the concepts and techniques of “guerrilla marketing”.

No, Rusty, I said “guerrilla” not “gorilla”.  So what exactly does that mean?

Guerrilla marketing is a philosophy devised way back in 1984.  The term was coined by this book’s author, Jay Conrad Levinson, and is geared towards the small business.  Unlike big business that relies on mass media advertising backed up by huge monetary budgets, guerrilla marketing relies upon time, energy and imagination.  Such tactics are what Guerrilla Marketing on the Internet is all about.  A lot of this material can be used to assist in marketing your comics.

The book itself talks about various subjects, such as the twelve biggest Internet marketing mistakes, building a website at low cost, how to drive traffic to that website, writing effective direct response mailings, using multimedia, and tricks to use on the Internet to marketing.  This chapter of the book is where Guerrilla Marketing on the Internet really shines.  Levinson and his co-authors discuss primary weapons to use for your guerrilla marketing online (i.e. blogs, social media, SEO) and lists 175 tactics to use such as researching your competitors’ websites, keywords and meta tags to using online viral marketing to increase traffic to your website to providing outbound links from your website to others.

The only real problem that I have with this book is the formatting.  It is somewhat weak as there are some spelling and grammar errors in here.  The book also claims that it takes time to work; you won’t get overnight results so using many of these tips will require an investment of time on your part.  Other than that, this book is very powerful and definitely delivers on its title message.

So what can this do for marketing your comics?  A lot.  You can construct a blog, use viral marketing and social media to tell others about your comics, put together a direct email campaign, offer RSS feeds, podcasts, and videos, and much more.  This can be highly effective in efforts in marketing your comics.

This isn’t the only such book on guerrilla marketing.  There’s a whole bunch of books in this series (i.e. Guerrilla Marketing in 30 Days and Guerrilla Publicity) and there’s even an official blog with more resources.

In conclusion, Guerrilla Marketing on the Internet is a winner and should be on any shelf for a strong method in marketing your comics.

That’s all for this post.  I’ll see everyone when I get back from Anthrocon.  Subscribe via RSS or email if you haven’t already and don’t forget to buy Sunnyville comics through the links in the store.

Plus, I’d like some feedback.  Anyone who use the Guerrilla Marketing books?  Have they worked for you?  How do you like to market your work?  If you haven’t already, I reiterate: for a valuable resource on marketing your comics, get a copy of Guerrilla Marketing on the Internet.