I come from the marketing and advertising world. In 1991, I graduated from the Advertising Program at Loyalist College in Belleville, Ontario, Canada. Immediately after graduating I started an advertising agency with a partner. Six months later, I sold the agency to my partner and moved to the "big city" – Toronto, Ontario.

But things were a lot different than I expected. Landing a good job in a big advertising agency turned out to be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Competition was fierce and the job market was quickly drying up.

To pay the bills, I took whatever jobs I could find. I sold vacuum cleaners, shampoo and soap, drove a delivery truck, and eventually ended up managing a paint warehouse.

Although they weren't glamorous jobs, they were full of enriching experiences. I learned the psychology of sales. I learned what to say and more importantly - what not to say to make a sale.

Along the way, I bought a small mail order company and started experimenting with direct mail campaigns. I worked through the typical learning curve and made all the typical mistakes. I paid too much for advertising, mailed to cheap junk mail lists and used a good deal of time and money learning the ropes. Luckily, I learned from my experiences. I was able to turn my learning curve into a positive learning experience and profited greatly from my trials and tribulations.

In 2001, I hopped onto the internet with the hopes of expanding my mail order business. At first glance it seemed pretty simple. The upside of online marketing was, it cost next to nothing. The downside was, I was getting very little response. I spent a lot of time experimenting with ways to advertise effectively online. I tried everything and anything. Although I was experiencing minimal success online, I could see it was the future. The problem was, I still hadn't connected the dots. It took me three years before I had my epiphany.

My big “A-HA” moment happened when I suddenly realized my online business was actually a direct marketing company. It was exactly the same as what I had been running offline, but with a lot more advantages. As soon as I started running my online company the same way I ran my offline company, my business started growing.

When I discovered the power of joint ventures, it started growing exponentially. I have been very fortunate to meet hundreds of wonderful people like Jay. And I have dozens of joint venture partnerships and strategic alliances with fantastic people all over the world.

I urge you to capitalize on the power of the internet and start making contacts, and network with your peers and colleagues. You’ll find some joint ventures happen naturally, while others take time and effort to accomplish. Either way, the power and potential of joint venture partnerships is unlimited.

Take your first step. Order the Guerrilla Marketing Breakthrough Strategies book, or set up a consultation with me.

I wish you all the success you deserve now and in the future.

Enjoy your day!

Terry Telford

I will start at the very beginning. I worked as a Counter Intelligence Agent in the American Spy Corp. Part of my job was finding spies and writing reports about my investigations. Since all my investigations were about shady people, I got very juicy information about very exciting James Bond-type people.

But the part I liked best was writing the reports. I really got off on writing. I was in the army at that time, but I was going to get out and go back to law school, which was a bad idea.

I loved writing so much that I started picking up writing jobs. I knew I couldn’t get a job as an author, because I "knew" you couldn't make money writing a book. At about that time, somebody told me I should look for a job in a advertising agency I hadn't thought of that. I had never taken any courses

So I got a job in an agency, but not as a writer. They do not hire writers without training, so they hired me as a secretary. I was typing 80 words a minute and I was willing to go to shorthand school, so they liked that.

Eventually I became a copywriter in that agency and then another agency, and then I moved to Chicago, where Hugh Hefner hired me to be the promotional copywriter for Playboy. I ended up writing pieces for advertisers to advertise in Playboy. I wrote pieces for subscribers to subscribe to this new magazine and I wrote ads about Playboy itself. I wrote the series ‘What sort of man reads Playboy?’

After doing that for a little over a year I was getting bored, because I had to write with the same voice all the time. It would have been perfectly insane to say to Hefner, "Hey let’s change the voice I am writing in here, I am getting bored." I knew what he was doing was working. Hefner was a wonderful boss. Wow, talk about the ideal boss. But I couldn’t stay there, because I am a creative type and writing in the same voice over and over wasn’t really going to cut it. So I left and I got a job in an advertising agency, then another, and finally I ended up at Leo Burnett.

Leo Burnett sent me to London and that was a great three years. I got to travel everywhere in Europe. Then I came back to the United States. Leo Burnett had died while I was away and the agency had changed its personality. It changed in a lot of ways. It was still the best advertising agency in the world, it really was, but it was different.

In Leo’s shadow, the agency had changed, so I went to work with J. Walter Thomson. At that time it was the largest advertising agency in the world and luckily they let me work in Chicago, which was my home base. I was raised there, and it was a lot of fun. However, I remember one morning waiting for a bus and it was -13. I remember that February it never went above 0.

I thought I had achieved my lifetime ambition, a Vice Presidency, a corner office, working on wonderfully exciting accounts, but here I was standing on the street corner freezing my butt off waiting for a bus.

So I asked J. Walter if they would transfer me to a place with a better climate, like San Francisco. They said, "You know Jay, you have been doing a really good job and you have been getting very closely connected to Quaker Oats and Alberto VO5 and they would resent it if we transferred you, we’ll give you a big raise, but we can’t transfer you."

Standing in 13 below 0, waiting for busses didn’t appeal to me, although everything in the agency world did. I put out feelers for a job in San Francisco and I got an offer. At the time I gave my notice, Quaker Oats and Alberto Culver said, "We do not care where you live as long as you continue writing for us." So I accepted that. I told the advertising agency I was going to work with in San Francisco that I would be willing to take the job, but just on a once a week basis. They only had to pay me a third of what they were going to pay me, but I would do 100% of all the assignments they were going to give me. They liked that idea.

Now I was living in San Francisco, I was doing work for Alberto VO5, for Quaker Oats, for this advertising agency and I was beginning to pick up little clients in the new industries in San Francisco. The computer industry was pretty new and the solar energy industry was just making itself known. So here I was keeping really busy, working with my clients and it dawned on me that I was only working 3 days a week.

I was working from my home and the reason I worked 3 days a week was, I didn’t have any memos to read, any committees to chair, and no meetings to attend. I didn’t have those wonderful people coming into my office to shoot the breeze. I realized that being free from those interactions, I was able to work a 3-day week.

There’s nothing special about me. I used to be the same as everyone else. Most people are trapped in the commuter lane of life. They are working 5 or 6 days a week. Somebody above them dictates to them. But here I am, I got rid of my alarm clock. It was one of the first things I did when I started working for myself.  Plus, I only did the assignments that I wanted to do and wear what I wanted to wear, and work from my home office.  So after I really faced up to the fact that anybody could do it, I thought I should write a book about it. So I wrote a book called, “Earning Money Without A Job.”

People said, "You can earn money without working?" I said, "What do you mean without working, you have to work your tail off, but you do not need the standard 9-5 job where somebody else calls all the shots." That book, which was a pretty big seller, became the basis of a course I taught at Berkley, at the University of California, in their extension division. They said "Jay, do not call it 'Earning Money Without a Job,' our professors will think it’s a get rich quick scheme, and we know it's not." They said, "How about 'Alternatives to the 9 to 5 Job.'" It sounded good to me so I started teaching 'Alternatives to the 9 to 5 Job.' My students at Berkley were young kids with long hair, big ideas, and absolutely empty pockets.

I wrote a follow up book and people said, "Your concepts of earning money without a job are great, but can you give us some ideas of the ways people are doing it." So I subscribed to a clipping service. I asked people to send me articles on new and unusual ways that people are earning money around the world. My second book was called “555 Ways to Earn Extra Money,” which lead to even more people attending my sold out class at Berkley.

One day, one of my students said, “Jay you know we have good ideas, but we do not know beans about marketing. Is there a book you can recommend for people with big dreams but empty bank accounts?” I said, "I would be happy to come up with a book recommendation for you." After class I went to the library at Berkley. I couldn’t find any books on that topic, so I went across to Stanford’s library - same thing. I went to the public libraries in all the big cities in California. There were no books in the early 80’s on marketing for people with budgets of less than $300,000 a month. And that certainly wasn't the level my students were at. They didn’t have anything like $300,000 a month. Still, I had promised them I would recommend a book. So I put together a list of all the things I did for my clients in the solar energy industry, water beds, and computers.

I knew they needed my help, so I made a list of all the ways that people could market without investing much money. That is a great and noble concept, but it’s a heck of a bad title for a book. So I decided to call it “Guerilla Marketing,” because Guerillas want conventional goals, but they have to attain them with unconventional means. So I wrote “Guerilla Marketing" for my students, just for my students. I never knew the book would take on a life of its own. I never knew it would be published in 44 languages. I do not understand 43 editions of my own book. The book has sold 15 million copies, but I only wrote it for the 100 kids in my class.

Those kids in my class, the ones with the long hair and Levis, went out to make huge inroads in the big Silicon Valley companies, from Hewlett Packard, Delphi, Alpha Graphics and so on. Many, if not most of the Fortune 500 firms from Silicon Valley have students from my class.  Most of them are still running their billion dollar companies according to the same simple seven-sentence-marketing-plan that I outlined for them. So that book, with no help from me and no planning, grew exponentially.

The real key to marketing is to start with a plan and then commit to that plan. It’s only a two-step process. But here I am being hypocritical, because I didn’t have a plan. I responded to needs. When I wrote the book “Earning Money Without a Job,” I was responding to the need of a lot of unemployed people.

Today, I have written 57 books and they are all in response to a need. In the mid 80’s, my publisher, who published Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau, said there’s a lot going on online, is it possible for you to write a book about marketing online? And I said well sure, I will learn about it, because I was just getting my feet wet in that. They didn’t like the word internet, I wanted to call it “Guerilla Marketing On The Internet,” and my publisher said no, you can’t use a new word in a title, people do not know what internet means. And I said that everybody WILL know what it means.

Fast forward to today and I still work three days a week. Most of my work is speaking and writing. The rest of my time I spend with my lovely wife Jeannie riding the rapids, skiing and exploring the many national parks in our beautiful country as well as all over the world in our luxurious motor home.

I can live the lifestyle I always wanted, because I have been able to expand my business exponentially using joint ventures. After you finish reading this book, you will be able to do the same.

I wish you much success in your ventures.

Jay Conrad Levinson