I need money these days. The wheels are coming off financially. So I put my mind to getting some money that wouldn't involve dealing with "clients" who don't pay or business partners who don't hold up their end of the deal or delay or produce shoddy work or whatever. Money to me without needing to rely on other people too much -- that was the goal.

I had what I thought was a clever idea, something so simple that it couldn't possibly go wrong. Put up a website designed to highlight a problem and offer the solution, drive people there. Steer them toward the solution, and get paid when they take the two minutes to solve their obvious problem.

That's marketing in a nutshell: Identify a group with a problem, reach out to that group with a message offering a solution in the form of your product.

The group I identified was people who still have something to lose, people with jobs, apartments, credit ratings that haven't been ravaged by the economy. People whom we unemployed people would like to be.

These people are all vulnerable to identity theft, and I happen to be an affiliate of a great identity theft protection product: Identity Lookout.

I put up a very simple website to give the facts and offer identity theft protection. Cost: $9 for the domain and a few hours of designing, writing, and coding.

The site highlights the problem and offers the solution throughout. If only I could get my market to visit, I would make money just as surely as the sun will rise.

Now here's the smart part (or so I thought): I would print zippy promotional fliers and put them in areas where my market would find them. Once people visit the site, they can click through to the free trial of the product. You get three impressions: The flier, the site, and the opt-in form. By the time someone clicked the banner, they would be pretty close to buying/trying, I figured.

So I printed 100 fliers designed to stoke the flames of bourgeois paranoia -- "Protect your identity!" "Are you already a victim?" "Paranoid? Maybe you should be!" -- with little tear tags of the site's url. I figured 100 fliers with 12 tags would result in around 300 visits of people who are already a little bit interested. If I could get 20 sales out of that, it would be worth my time (about four hours) to hang the fliers, and I could rinse and repeat, maybe hiring some kid to hang the fliers for me. New York City is pretty big, with lots of upper-middle class areas.

The weather was splendid last week -- sunny and in the 70s, perfect. It was fun to hang the fliers in two nice neighborhoods, carefully placing them outside apartment buildings, near transit stations (you know, where commuters with jobs go, theoretically), and outside nice spas and salons.

I decided that a watched pot does not boil and did not check the results for a few days. When I did check, the results amazed me: Not only were there zero sales, but nobody had even visited the site! So much for guerrilla marketing.

Back to the drawing board. I still have 22 days until rent is due again.

Unemployment sure is an adventure!