Maybe you’ve heard about the bomb scare in Boston that resulted from the placement of electronic devices throughout the city as a promotion for Cartoon Network’s “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” program.

Opinions can vary on whether the promotion was well or poorly thought out, or whether the Boston authorities may have overreacted. Regardless, the case serves as a perfect example of what guerrilla marketing is – and perhaps, what it isn’t.

Guerrilla marketing’s purpose is to achieve maximum return in terms of exposure, at minimum cost in terms of money and resources. It’s geared particularly toward small businesses with limited budgets, although major corporations such as Sony, General Electric, Citigroup – and Cartoon Network – have used the approach.

Some guerrilla marketing efforts have led people to question the ethics of its practitioners. Boston Mayor Thomas Menino even called for a citywide ban on guerrilla marketing campaigns, calling it a “nitwit technique.” It makes me wonder if Cartoon Network and other large corporations are giving guerrilla marketing a bad name, but that’s another story.

Guerrilla marketing does not follow traditional marketing guidelines, which emphasize white space, short and snappy copy, and “sizzle” over “steak.” Its often unconventional tactics cost little if any money and stress the importance of imagination and hard work – taking time and effort to understand one’s customer base and creatively marketing to that base.

Sound familiar?

It should, because that’s what affiliate marketing is about. Affiliate marketing ventures should never draw the attention of Homeland Security. But through effective, substantive content and targeted promotions, many of which cost little money to produce, such ventures fit the guerrilla marketing definition to the proverbial “T.” In fact, guerrilla marketing guru Jay Conrad Levinson, in “The Myths of Affiliate Marketing” offers many pearls of wisdom about this. One in particular stands out:

“Affiliate marketing educates, informs, announces, enlightens and influences human behavior. Because it does this, affiliate marketing has an obligation to offend nobody, to present its material with taste and decency, to be honest and to benefit customers. If it does that and earns profits too, it is true guerrilla affiliate marketing.”

The more value you offer your target audience, the more effective your affiliate marketing efforts will be. Viral marketing reports, email newsletters, and other creative will do more for you than can traditional marketing methods – and more than distributing devices that might resemble explosives.

Affiliate Classroom was one of the first companies to introduce readers to the “scent” of a web page. (See “What Odor is your SEO?”) And now here’s a new term you may run across. It’s called Pogo-Sticking! I always wanted a pogo stick when I was a kid, so this one had me curious.

How many times have you performed a search and didn’t find what you were looking for? Or visited the same page of a web-site several times to get back to the main page, or search results page? Well, when you do this you are pogo-sticking!

Anytime there is back and forth activity it’s called pogo-sticking. This can happen within a web page, when a person goes back and forth between individual product pages and/or home pages looking for their desired information, or between SERP results pages.

Basically, pogo-sticking occurs when a person jumps back and forth between different pages. This usually occurs when something is searched for and the search engine results page (SERP) displays. The searcher then selects the result that looks like it will give the best answer and solve the problem. If the answer isn’t on that page the person hits the “back” button, goes back to the SERP and trys again.

So, why is it important to recognize this new word?

Because it could skew your back-end statistics!

You see, each time the visitor goes back and forth to pages within a web site, the statistical software on your server counts it as a page view. Sometimes it’s good to get a lot of page views, and then again, sometimes it means that the visitor is not finding what they are looking for.

So, the next time you jump for joy when you view your statistics and see that your page is sticky, do a double check. If you have a lot of pages views from a small amount of visitors, you might want to take a look at your site’s design and see if it is as user-friendly as it should be.

When visitors don’t find what they’re looking for in a reasonable time, they just pogo-stick back to the SERP and go elsewhere. Unfortunately, you get the page views, but someone else gets the sale!