The second reason to participate is to market. Some newsgroups permit posting of blatant advertisements. Most of these groups are full of bottom-feeder-multi-level-marketing-pie-in-the-sky-scams. Posting stuff to these groups isn't marketing. It is, at best, advertising (which isn't to say you shouldn't do it - more on that later).

Real marketing on Usenet news groups is done in classic model doctors, lawyers and professional service firms used back in days before they were allowed to advertise. (Does anyone other than me remember those days? That was before professional athletes were allowed to wear Nike swooshes on their arm pits.) In this model, you met someone, listened and talked to them and attempted to form a relationship. This was when actual human communication - or more technically a single-threaded-bi-synchronous-data-exchange-process-between-liveware-unit-interfaces - was used to market. Marketing on Usenet groups is a one-on-one, relationship-building, thoughtful-and-fulfilling way to work.

The third reason to participate in newsgroups is to play search engine game. The fact is, if your URL is in usenet postings it will likely get picked up by some search engines. A fascinating example of this is Green Eggs Report (http://www.ar.com/ger/). Green Eggs uses a Rumor database system that monitors newsgroups. It identifies urls contained in postings and indexes those web sites. It is a hugely different model than 'submit a web site to Yahoo for a couple of hundred bucks' approach. And of course, more places you are listed on internet, higher your ranking will be in many searches.

So there you have it. All newsgroup news fit to print. And three powerful reasons to participate. So get out there and learn something, build a relationship, and slip into a search engine through back door. There are four places I can think of to find news groups. First, your ISP. Your internet service provider can give you news server address for your system. The address will be something to effect of news.yourisp.net. You put this address into your newsgroup reader (often Outlook or Outlook Express for Windows users). Directions for setting up accounts is included in on line help systems of most programs and access to usenet is generally free. The second place to learn about usenet is www.topica.com. The third is www.groups.yahoo.com. Both Topica and Yahoo are a little more vanilla and maybe more commercial than original usenet. But they haven't been at it as long. The last place to learn about usenet is to visit your search engine and search for usenet. You'll get lots FAQ's, information, and opportunities to subscribe to third party usenet service providers.

Comments on this article? Contact me!

Jeff Gilman

jgilman@marketingforidiots.com

www.marketingforidiots.com

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