JimWorld Gazette Issue #1 04/25/1997

Gazette - Issue 1 - April 25, 1997

Welcome to the first edition of the Gazette. Each Friday you will receive a list of things you can do in one weekend to improve the performance of your web site. Here at JimWorld, we define promotion as getting the results you need from your web site. Sometimes it is higher traffic counts. Sometimes it is more sales. Whatever reasons caused you to create your web site, keep those reasons in mind and strive to make your site achieve those goals.

CONTENTS

-- Promotion Tips
-- Design Contest
-- Get Listed
-- Summing It All Up

Link to this issue of the Gazette as http://gazetteworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g1


PROMOTION TIPS

Participate in newsgroups.

Newsgroups are one of the most powerful ways for you to build awareness of, and traffic to your web site. The Internet contains an estimated 15,000 newsgroups and many of them have thousands of subscribers. No matter what the subject of your web site, you will find several newsgroups that have a bearing on it.

Newsgroups are large mailing lists of people who want to give, and get, information about a given subject matter. Mostly, newsgroups are non-commercial in nature. That means they are not set up for people to promote their sites or businesses. They exist to allow the exchange of information between groups of people.

You can promote your site in newsgroups, but be careful. There are rules. That is why you start by lurking. Lurking means that you are a subscriber to a newsgroup, but you are only reading the postings. You are not yet a contributor. Lurking allows you to see how the newsgroup is structured, what is OK and what is not. When you get a handle on things, you can start participating actively.

Try to respond to other people's inquiries if you have information that will help them. Become known as a good Net citizen. Share your knowledge. And each time you post, make sure that you include a signature at the end of your post. A signature is 4 or 5 lines of information about yourself and your web site. Include your name, email address entered as 'mailto:jim@jimworld.com' so that people can e-mail you just by clicking on that line. Include the name of your site and its' complete URL - 'http://www.jimworld.com' and a line or two about the purpose of your site. This is considered acceptable commercialism by newsgroups, but try to keep the hype level down.

How do you find a newsgroup to participate in?
Visit Deja News

Deja News is a library of every posting to every newsgroup on the Net. You can easily search for keywords in the entire library or you can search for newsgroups that discuss any subject. You can read postings to these newsgroups and determine if they would be of interest to you.

Your task for this weekend is to find 6 newsgroups that might be of interest to you. Use Deja News to locate them and subscribe to them. Pay special attention to the moderated newsgroups (meaning that a moderator decides which postings are relevant and only allows good postings to be distributed). Also learn to subscribe to the daily digest version of these groups. It is better to get one email each day containing all of the postings for that day. Getting the postings one at a time can be a bit tedious.

Follow these 6 newsgroups for 1 week, and at the end of the week, evaluate which ones you want to become active in. You should be able to find 3 newsgroups this way to stay active in.

You can get your message out to thousands of people each time you post to a newsgroup. You will build traffic and sales if you keep at it. JimWorld receives about 30% of its traffic as a result of newsgroup participation.

In addition to the specific topic newsgroups that you are looking for, you absolutely should subscribe to the following newsgroups to stay abreast of techniques in Internet promotion and marketing:

• I-ADVERTISING DIGEST - A moderated, global discussion on Internet Advertising, Marketing, and On-line Commerce. To subscribe.
  
  
• LINK EXCHANGE DIGEST - A moderated discussion of advertising on the web. Special focus on banner advertising. To subscribe.

Web Cards

How about some Web Cards? What, you haven't heard of these? Well, neither had I until I got some e-mail from the developer of this great new marketing tool. A Web Card is a 4-color postcard with a picture of your home page and the URL on one side, and a marketing message on the other. You just address them and drop them in the mail. A great way to stay in touch with prospects and a nice direct mail piece for companies you would like to turn into prospects. The price starts at a modest $95.00 for 500 4X6 inch cards. Larger quantities are available. Visit Web Cards

(BTW - this is NOT a paid ad)


DESIGN CONTEST

Edwin Hayward, Tokyo, Japan, cyberjunkie extreme, has a very busy site. In fact it is so busy he needs a little help. If you're a good banner ad designer, visit WIN NOW and get the details on how to submit your design. Edwin gets a great new banner and the winning entrant gets a month worth of free banner space on his busy site - FREE.

While you're there, visit another new part of Edwin's site (how many are you going to do, Edwin?) The site contains listings of sites that offer to exchange links with other sites for free. It is a completely new site and growing at 3-6 listings a day. If you want to exchange links with quality sites, get listed here and contact some of the sites that are already listed. Remember, nothing works as well as lots of links.

OK, last opportunity from Edwin. (I told you, he has no life. Just the web.) Edwin wants to build a new site area. He has thrown up a few pages and it is already getting 4,000+ hits a month. But it needs A LOT OF WORK. Of course, he has no time to do it. If you can design nice, simple sites; good clean, simple graphics; good text layout; a touch of CGI; no JAVA or other tricks, you might just be able to do some 'business' with Edwin. No money, but how about 30,000 FREE banner impressions on the site when it is finished? Sounds pretty good. The developer will be selected just as if he or she were being paid in hard cash. References, samples of past work, all that stuff. Do a good job and you will gets lots of exposure for your talents.


LinkMonster Is

LinkMonster has had a complete makeover. Now you can get much better placement and take advantage of the new search engine Larry Steinberg has installed. LinkMonster is on its way to become a major directory of web sites. Go to LinkMonster and make sure you are listed. It could get you a lot of traffic.


GET LISTED

Got your META tags done? All your TITLES beefed up to describe the page with keywords in place? Ready to submit to a few search engines? Then run, don't walk (catchy phrase, isn't it) to JimWorld Reviews and read the review of ROBO-Submit. Then run over to ROBO-Submit and do some serious submitting. You can select the exact category to submit under for each site you are submitting to. This is THE WAY IT SHOULD BE DONE! (Ditto. This is not a paid ad. Get the drift? There's only the one ad at the top. This is known as a tip.)

Opportunities Only Search Engine is a new site featuring listings of (surprise) business opportunities only. They're just getting started, so your free listing will not be buried under thousands of others. Worth the time to visit and submit if your site deals with any type of business opportunity. Go there now.

Add BizCardz Business Directory to your list of sites to submit to this weekend. Just for business sites, and you can list your site under 5 different categories from just one submission form.

Have you considered all of the associations that are online on the web and might be interested in 'discovering' your web site? If you haven't, now's your chance. The American Society of Association Executives has put up a data base of all of the associations they can find who operate web sites.

The list is long. Such shining examples as Fur Information Council of America, American Association of Cereal Chemists, Ben & Jerry's Foundation, and the ever popular Cigar Smoking Golfers Association - CSGA. Do you get the drift? The list is long and there seems to be an association for just about every human (and non) activity. Do a little digging. See if some of these associations might give you a link or a review. After all, it's the weekend. What else have you got to do.

Or try the Virtual Community of Associations (VCA). Just as big a list of associations. Each of these two sites are 'complete listings of all associations online' and each have different lists. Hmmm. The VCA site actually has a listing for the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals. How did I miss joining that one? Anyone want to start a directory where competitive people can post their IQ's? Or a booking service where MENSA members can meet other members and schedule cyberduels?


SUMMING IT ALL UP

This represents our first issue of the Gazette.