If small business owners could read no other book, I would love to have them study Jay Conrad Levinsons Guerrilla Marketing: Secrets for Making Big Profits From your Small Business. Originally published in the early 1980s, Guerrilla Marketing is a must-read for entrepreneurs searching for inexpensive yet effective marketing strategies. Revised again (and again, depending on which volume you select), the book offers not only simple suggestions for making the most of the smallest things but also fantastic marketing advice on everything from developing a plan to waiting patiently for your strategy to succeed.

Levinsons usual mantra states that customer service is king. However, the 1993 version of Guerrilla Marketing focuses on bringing more customers in, rather than maintaining the current customer base. He provides numerous weapons for widening the customer base, giving ample detail on how each one should be worked. The 1993 volume obviously neglects the Internet (and a view of the 1998 rewrite online similarly neglects the subject), but otherwise the real-word tips are hands-on helpful.

Levinson splits the book into five sections. The first one focuses on the guerrilla marketing approach. This helpful, encouraging set of chapters describe marketing secrets, marketing plans, and my all-time favorite chapter, Secrets of Saving Marketing Money. Section two focuses on mini-media marketing, reviewing everything from personal letters to telephone marketing to classified ads. I found the last especially helpful, as trying to place an ad in a major metro paper such as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution can be daunting at best. He then moves on to section three, maxi-media marketing, and reviews newspapers, magazines, radio, and direct mail. A chapter on television advertising focuses on maximizing profits for the small business owner (with suggestions such as film several commercials at the same time to cut costs), and describes how cable and localized advertising makes the price tag for television more affordable for small business owners. The fourth section describes non-media marketing; free seminars and demonstrations, trade shows, public relations, and miscellaneous marketing tools (such as newsletters). Finally, he closes the book with a section on launching your guerrilla marketing attack.

The tips and suggestions within these pages have been implemented by successful small business owners for nearly twenty years. Implementing both humor and realistic examples, Jay Conrad Levinson has written a must-read for the small business owner involved in marketing (that should be all of them).

Levinson has written a variety of other guerrilla marketing books. For more information, see his website at www.gmarketing.com.