Marketing on the Web used to be a low-cost proposition. Build a Web, register it with the search engines, exchange a few links, and you were in business. Those days are long gone. Launching a Web brand today is little different than launching a new brand in the off-line world. To succeed you need talent, money, and luck, but not necessarily in that order. Search engine banner ads are probably the most effective way to generate traffic, but with companies like GetSmart and First USA bidding up the price of financial keywords, search engine advertising may not be cost effective. Luckily, there are always alternatives to the conventional approaches.

Guerrilla Online Marketing Tactic #1

Buy Dormant Web Sites*

1. Use personal finance terms to search for defunct, dormant, or underutilized personal finance and/or banking sites, preferably ones within the first few pages of search engine results.

2. Visit the Web sites and find out who owns them.

3. Contact the owners.

4. Negotiate an outright buyout or exclusive long-term traffic-sharing arrangement. The arrangement should be flexible depending on the needs of the individual Web owner. For example, create a new home page that directs most of the traffic your way, but still sends appropriate visitors to the other Web site.

*This technique recently made headlines as fish processor Zapata bought or invested in 21 Web properties with total traffic of nearly 1 million visitors per month.

 

Guerrilla Online Marketing Tactic #2

Bill Pay Associates Program

One of Amazon.com’s brilliant grassroots marketing ideas is the Associates Program. Associates essentially co-market books on behalf of Amazon.com, picking up a small percentage of sales originating from their site. There are nearly 60,000 associates registered with Amazon.com including major players such as Yahoo and Quicken.com.

We plan to follow a similar path, introducing a bill pay associates program. For each bill pay/credit line user referred by an associate, we will pay $1 per month forever, as long as the account remains active (pays a bill or revolves credit).

Associates will place our catchy “Pay Your Bills Now” logo on their site, and we’ll track usage, paying associates on a monthly basis.

 

Guerrilla Online Marketing Tactic #3

Flood the Market with Press Releases

Sure, the world doesn’t need any more press releases, but until they stop working we strongly recommend an aggressive preplanned series of press releases touting your online initiatives. Why? Press releases are served up and read by potential end-users subscribing to many of the major news areas such as NewsPage, NewsBot, and many others. They cost as little as $75 each to distribute through the two major U.S. wire services, PR Newswire and BusinessWire. Any actual media interest generated is a bonus.

Hints for maximizing exposure through press releases:

•  Run multiple smaller press releases, rather than a single huge one at launch. Why? Sometimes, the news sites will put your release in the wrong category, e.g., electronic commerce when you hoped for home banking. Multiple releases improve your odds that at least one ends up in the right place.
•  Space the small releases one to two weeks apart. Why? Many online news outlets such as Yahoo and NewsPage only archive a week’s worth of news. Your prospects can easily miss your release unless they log into the news server every week.
•  Use catchy keywords. You want users to find your release when doing news searches. Make sure you have as many of these keywords in the release: online banking, home banking, Internet banking, bill payment, your town, your state, PC, personal computer, bank, Microsoft, Quicken, and any other appropriate term your target market might be searching on.
•  Use a hook in the title and first 25 words. Many news sites index articles by title and the first few words. Make sure your press release grabs the attention and interest of your target market in the first few lines.

Guerrilla Online Marketing Tactic #4

Private-Branded Bill Pay Centers

Using a similar model as the associates program, we’ll try to build Bill Pay Centers on Web portals and other well traveled sites, especially those dealing with news and personal finance. If the top-tier sites are locked up by MSFDC and others, or require significant up-front fees, we’ll move downstream to lesser known and regional sites.

Bill Pay Centers will provide much the same functionality as our flagship site, but will be private- or co-branded for the sponsoring site. Sponsors will share in revenues based on traffic, outstanding loan balances of their referrals, and other factors.

 

Guerrilla Online Marketing Tactic #5

Bill Presentment Keyword Buys

If we have the funding, we’ll try to negotiate with the search engines for long-term sponsorships of certain billing keywords that are little used today, but could become hot when the Internet billing hype begins to grow in 1999. Here are some keywords to look at:

•  bill(s)
•  bill pay
•  bill presentment
•  Internet billing
•  pay bills
•  MSFDC
•  Checkfree

 

Guerrilla Online Marketing Tactic #6

Multiple Domain Names

For $70 each, you may as well register every domain name related to your company and service offering that you can think of. Of course, people have been doing exactly that for the past 12 months, so most of the obvious ones are taken.

But if there is one you really want, don’t hesitate to contact the owner and make an offer. How many offers do you suppose Bill McCauley has received since he registered bill.com in Nov. 1994? If you would like to make him an offer he can’t refuse, he’s at (650) 596-1700.

 

Guerrilla Online Marketing Tactic #7

Send-a-Buck Campaign

Registered bill pay users, especially new ones, will be encouraged to send a buck to their friends and associates. We’ll gladly pick up the $1 expense since it will buy us up to five impressions with each recipient. Following is how it works. You might want to sweeten the pot for the senders, automatically entering them into a drawing for $10,000 each time one of their bucks is cashed.

1. Registered users can send a buck to anyone in the U.S. through a special screen in your bill pay area.

2. With each buck, recipients will receive an email from the sender that includes a personal message, if desired, and our brief sales pitch. This is how Hotmail and others built their free email user bases. (Note: You’ll need a clear privacy guarantee to assure both senders and recipients that their personal info will remain confidential.)

3. The envelope containing the buck will include our name, Web address, and 3 x 8-inch flyer explaining the program. (We’ll do the stuffing in in-house if our bill pay service provider cannot accommodate inserts.)

4. Ten days later, each recipient will receive another email asking whether they got their dollar and inviting them to our site to send their friends a buck. The catch is they must become registered bill pay/credit line customers to send out bucks (they don’t have to register to receive a dollar).

5. Finally, when the check clears we’ll send a thank-you email which will contain another brief sales pitch. We’ll also ask for permission to send future offers.

 

Guerrilla Online Marketing Tactic #8

Biller Database & Notification Service

As a public service, and killer marketing technique, create an area on your Web where users can search by biller name, location, and/or industry to see if a company supports Internet billing (aka bill presentment), preauthorized debit, and/or automatic credit card payments.

Also, we’ll allow users to sign up for notification when specific biller(s) comes online.