Web sites that accept articles love well written, timely, focused content, generally of less than a thousand words. They prefer articles that are informative rather than merely blatant self promotions. Surveys always make for good articles (‘Yellow Paint Forecast - Survey of Municipal Parking Lot Managers' would be a hit) and how-to articles are popular. But best advise is to read web site's article guide lines to learn what their market wants.

The second reason to put content on web sites is to get higher search engine rankings. Search engines, as part of their methodology for deciding which sites to present first, often determine how many others link to your site. They figure site with most links must be most popular place to go and therefore should be listed first. Some engines rank alphabetically, and some don’t think at all so more links won't get your site ranked higher on those sites. That can't be helped. But for those that will move you up list based on popularity, this is a good way of telling them how popular you are. If you want to know yourself how popular you are on internet, visit I Need Hits free popularity link at http://www.ineedhits.com/free/popularity/. Type in your url and they’ll tell you how many sites link to yours.

One note on this. Web sites that generate content dynamically – keep articles in data bases and assemble pages only on request – don’t get indexed by search engines as well. The data is in database – not in text on a web page. The point is you might try, after you have built a reputation, to get your name and url on a real text page at ezine’s web site – not just in data base. That will give you best of both worlds - more promotion and better search engine rankings.

Comments on this article? Contact me!

Jeff Gilman

jgilman@marketingforidiots.com

www.marketingforidiots.com

What about .cc, .tv, or .info and similar names? How many .cc or .tv web sites have you been to? Probably very few. And I think that is issue. Customers are conditioned to use .com but not .tv or .info. So you probably lose with a non-traditional name. I would avoid them unless there was something special I could work into name - equivalent of Amazon or Yahoo approach to being memorable because they aren't obvious or expected.

Good names probably aren't cute. www.countonshell.com and www.iflyswa (South West Airlines) are probably a little to hard to get into a customer's brain because they are a little too cute. Remember, most people are only going to hear name of your web site briefly, and only once or twice. Wouldn't they be easier to remember Southwest if they copied Continental (www.continental.com) or Delta (www.delta.com) and just used their own name? Names need to be straight forward and simple for customers to remember them.

Hyphenated names probably aren't as good as non-hyphenated names. For instance www.federated-fds.com (Federated Department Stores) would probably be stronger as just federated.com. And www.shop-4-savings.com is probably a harder to remember than shop4savings.com. The trend, if there is such a thing, is to use whole name as one name.

Some really good names come from retail sector. www.sears.com, www.jcpenny.com, www.maycompany.com really do protect and promote brand and are perfectly obvious and intuitively easy to find. If you hear it once on a radio commercial, see it once on a business card, you will never forget it.

You can find out what names are available at several locations including http://webhosting.yahoo.com and http://www.internic.net/whois.html and of course where ever you wish to register your web site name.

Comments on this article? Wanna talk about golf? Can you get me on to Augusta National? Contact me!

Jeff Gilman

jgilman@marketingforidiots.com

www.marketingforidiots.com