Guerrilla Marketing - How to Use Leaflet Distribution to Gain Free Publicity For a Web Site

If you have a new website or business that you want to promote, but you have a limited budget, how do you advertise at minimal cost to get visitors? Using some of the ideas from guerrilla marketing, one of the first approaches you should consider is leaflet distribution. The leaflets can be printed about the size that would fit into your hand easily. In a brief and informative way, the leaflet captures peoples' imagination and whets their curiosity enough to want to visit your web site to get more information.

The cheapest and easiest way to produce the leaflets is to print them on a single A4 or US Letter sheet, arranged in a 2x2 grid, then use a guillotine or paper cutter to split them into individual leaflets.

What can you do with leaflets like these once you have produced a pile of them? Here are some examples of why these leaflets are so useful:

• You can have a bunch of them ready to give to people who ask about your web site, showing the URL they can go to for more information.
• You can leave a small pile of them in places where people are likely to spend time waiting and reading magazines, such as in doctor's and dentist's surgeries, the hairdresser, the library, and so on.
• You can post them through letter-boxes.
• You can put them on car windscreens as you pass them.
• You can leave them in shops - at the checkout, for instance, when people have to wait and potentially spend several minutes looking at them.
• You can put one into magazines or newspapers.
• You can leave a few at kebab or hotdog stands, or at take-aways and fast-food restaurants.
• You can leave them anywhere you sit, or wait in line, as you go about your daily business.
• You can stand in the street giving them away to passers by.

The use of these leaflets is so flexible that your own imagination is the only limit. The results will not happen overnight, but the more you distribute, the more people will see the leaflet, and either remember the website, or pick up a leaflet and take it home. The more people see the leaflet and go to the website, the more your web site traffic will increase.

Just imagine the effects of these leaflets over time. If you leave some in a fast-food restaurant, dentists, doctors or hairdressers, for example, a small pile of leaflets could be sitting there for weeks before they are eventually taken away. In the meantime, with a captive audience spending many minutes looking at the stack of magazines, your leaflets will be seen by dozens and potentially hundreds of people over the next few days. It is inevitable that some of them will go to your web site, and you have gained traffic at almost no time and expense to yourself.

Over time, as you start to build this into your daily routine, you will automatically start to take leaflets with you everywhere you go and everywhere you travel. You don't need to do anything more.

As long as you only leave a few leaflets in places where you ordinarily go about your daily business, you will get free advertising. The only cost is printing out a new batch of leaflets every few days. Spend some time with your word processor and produce the leaflets yourself.

As long as you don't carpet bomb an area with leaflets littered absolutely everywhere and get complaints, using leaflets is an excellent way to steadily raise awareness of your web site in your local area and beyond. If you travel away from home, don't forget to take a stack of leaflets with you! Over time, tens of thousands of people will see your leaflet. That's pretty good advertising for a free idea!