By David Gikandi, CEO, SearchPositioning.com
January 26th, 2000

See Also   How to Build a Web Store for FREE   How to choose mailing list management software   How to Grow Your Web Business   How to Accept Credit Cards without a Merchant Account   How To Develop Online Products That Sell   How to Change Your Web Hosting Service (ISP)   How to Deal with Disgruntled Customers   How to Get Top Search Engine Positioning   How to Beat Credit Card Fraud   How to Design an Affiliate Program   How to Accept Credit Card Payments   How to Choose a Shopping Cart

[This is the third part of a three part article. The first part can be read here].

Newsletters and Mailing Lists

These are really underrated, yet so effective. What you need to do is find as many lists and newsletters as possible that are related to your business. Yes, that will get you a lot of email every day but it is worth it. Read the postings and respond to them when you can, preferably daily, using your blurbs, signatures, FAQs and articles.

Many lists have thousands of subscribers and by becoming an active contributor to a number of them you will be getting exposure to thousands of focused prospects for free - very powerful yet underrated. Make sure you do not become overtly commercial in your postings - just let your signature do the work of directing the reader to you for business. Your actual posting should be a helpful bit of information, not advertising. You can find lists at Listz and in Yahoo's categories.

Newsgroups and Forums

Newsgroups are under-estimated by most. Yet over 20% of Internet users use them at least once a week. Forums are like newsgroups, the most popular being the forums on AOL and CompuServe. Subscribe to all the newsgroups and forums that are related to your industry. You can find them at Deja News, Listz, and by joining AOL and CompuServe. Read new messages regularly, daily when possible, and reply to them using your arsenal of signatures, blurbs, reports and FAQs. Just don't be overtly commercial in your postings.

Other Things You Can Do

There are obviously many other ways you can promote your online business. You can learn a lot of tricks by visiting successful sites and seeing what little gimmicks and techniques they are using and copying them. Depending on your budget, industry and audience, you can get into banner advertising, offline advertising, promotions and contests, coupons, selling through auction sites like eBay, classified ads on AOL and CompuServe, sponsorships, and much more. You might want to buy some good books at Amazon.com on online marketing for a thorough look at many of these techniques.

The Bottom Line

The Internet is a complex place and concentrating on just one marketing idea will not get you any long term, huge gains. Your best bet is to follow the time-proven strategies we have talked about in their totality, daily. And this marketing should consume 80% of your daily work time (or get someone to spend 80% of their time marketing for you). I guarantee you that if you spend this time daily enjoying yourself as you get into the things we have talked about, your traffic and online success will grow to amazing proportions! It is a time-proven 'secret' success formula.

David Gikandi is CEO at SearchPositioning.com. PositionWeaver.com features tools and resources that get you top positions for your Web site on AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, Infoseek, Lycos, Northern Light and other search engines. It also has forums, articles, links, and other resources useful for the Website owner and marketer. You can also download free trial copies of the PositionWeaver Gold and PRO software packages for Windows 95/98/NT from this site.