Whether your business operates on or offline or both, your business' success must involve effective networking. At times networking can appear to be no more than chit chatting. Networking can be considered - communicating with purpose. It is not a tool that allows one business owner to take advantage of another. It is also more than passing out business cards. To be effective, networking requires give and take. A business owner alerts you to an upcoming event; you, in turn, direct business owner to a graphic artist who produces unforgettable web-site banners and clip art. Besides your local business associations (which can be found in yellow pages of telephone book) and small business association, following are online networking resources you could benefit from checking into: Small Business Association (www.sba.org) or Fortune Small Business (www.fsb.com). Strive to network (both on and offline) at least once a day. At end of 2001 results will astound you.

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