Guerrilla marketing is the art of war for small businesses. Faced with corporate domination in so many markets, how can the small businessman survive? He or she must become a guerrilla marketer and exploit the corporate America weaknesses.

One of the greatest weaknesses in large corporations is lack of focus and commitment. If you had a lot of money, you would probably do it do- a take a slice of 6 or 8 different marketing approaches. Why not? Well, the reason why not is that there is usually only one right approach and working it out normally only requires common sense.

As a guerrilla marketer, you need to find the right approach for you and commit to it. You can't play with it and treat it like a sideshow. Even if it means late nights, once you have formulated your plan, you have to stick with it, work it over, smooth it out and push it through.

And you can't expect miracles. This is not the lotto. You are not going to become an overnight millionare through some single stroke of genius.

You must commit to your plan and follow it, nurture it and ride it through the ups and downs.

If you are willing to do that, then right away you have something that money can't buy, and in fact, something that money normally does not buy- focus and commitment.

So how can you, a practicing dentist or chiropractor, keep up a good business during hard economic times?

Well one way to go about it is to start from the most simple basics and work outwards. If you are in the health industry at all you know all about referrals. In fact, you probably get 80% or more of your new patients as referrals from your existing patients.

Patient Referrals: There is no way around it. This is now and always will be your largest source of new patients. The question you have to ask yourself it this. What am I doing to encourage existing patients to speak well of me and refer new people?

Well there are a few things I can recommend. Firstly, I presume you have your receptionist ask every new patient how they found out about you. You do that right? But what do you do when you find out that a new patient came to you from an existing patient? Well, certainly a movie ticket or some flowers would not be out of line. OK. How could we take it a bit further.

Free Advertising? What about some of the tried and true old postcards. But you don't have the address of the next new patient, because they aren't a patient yet. And it would cost a fortune to mail to everyone. Well, you do have the address of your existing patients. How about a postcard to them letting them know that you are making a special offer for the month, and that new patients can get an even more special offer. It has been done and does work. Here and there some of your existing patients will read the card and remember the cool deal for new patients. It works because you anyway need to stay in touch with your existing patients and keep making them little offers. It doesn't cost you a dime to add on some enticement for new patients. OK, so its not really free. But there is an edge there to exploit, and this is the day and age of exploiting any edge!

If you would like help with this, or have questions feel free to comment on the blog.

1st marketing secret: Your task: to make prospects confident in you.

This comes before anything else. All your marketing grows out from customer confidence, so this is where you start. Ask yourself the question. What can I say that will inspire confidence in me and my product?

When you have answered that question, you need to make sure that whatever that is appears on your website, your postcards and every other place you can think of. In fact, your receptionist should answer the phone with that exact statement.