Fair Measures Corporation: A case study in online "thinking outside the box"Written by Philippa Gamse
Fair Measures Corporation is a nationally recognized management training company made up of attorneys and professional speakers. They consult with companies such as Oracle, Sun and Cisco around preventing employee lawsuits by treating employees with respect. Their Web site, at http://www.FairMeasures.com/ contains over 500 pages of free in-depth legal information and analysis, provided for both employers and employees. It includes a monthly e-newsletter, and an "Ask Lawyers" page where visitors can post additional questions. The site attracts frequent media attention, and has been featured in "HR Magazine". Last year (2000), we completely restructured site to add content for many employees who come there looking for information. Previously, we'd been concentrating on traditional markets for Fair Measures - human resource professionals and managers who hire them for workplace training programs. But we realized that in doing so, we were missing out on a very different audience for their expertise - and one that really only exists in online context. How did we know this? In two main ways: 1. by looking in our traffic analysis at key search phrases that brought visitors to site; and 2. from content of questions submitted to "Ask Lawyers". We could see that many visitors were looking for information around sexual harassment, overtime exemptions, Internet e-mail monitoring and privacy issues, and wrongful termination. Employers wanted to know how to create policies and practices that would protect them against costly lawsuits, and employees wanted to enforce their rights.
| | Creating Your Website's Promotional StrategyWritten by Shelley Lowery
Creating a successful Internet presence involves much more than designing a great web site or having "perfect" product. Listing your website with Search Engines is your first step, however, you must not solely depend upon Search Engines to bring you traffic. You must design a complete promotional strategy and work it every day. A good way to organize your promotions is to set up a webpage, for your personal use, that will contain your complete strategy. This page should be stored on your hard drive and not uploaded to your server. Your page should contain four sections. - Daily Promotions - Weekly Promotions - Monthly Promotions - Miscellaneous Promotions Each of these four sections should contain appropriate information for each of your promotional resources such as, website name, user ID, password (if applicable) and hyperlinked web addresses for each website you plan to use for your promotions. This will enable you to open your webpage each day and visit each daily promotional link you have listed. Your daily promotions should include posting your ads to a list of free classified ad and free for all sites. In addition, visit some popular discussion boards. Although you may not advertise on discussion boards, you can include your signature file with your post. There are several websites that will enable you to submit your classified ads and links to an entire network of sites with just one form. Here is a list of resources to get you started: Yahoo Classifieds http://classifieds.yahoo.com/ AdlandPro Networked Classifieds 5000+ http://www.web-source.net/adlandpro.htm Web Sitings Networked Classifieds 40,000+ http://www.websitings.com/classads/sites/source.htm Epage Networked Classifieds 16,000+ http://www.web-source.net/classifieds.htm SmallBizFFA 35,000+ http://www.smallbizffa.net/ffa.pl?35984 FFA Network 10,000+ http://www.ffanet.com/submit.htm Free Submission 9,500+ http://hbb.nu/freesubmit/ MGA web 5,000+ http://www.mgaweb.com/submit/mgacat.asp Link Place 3,000+ http://www.linkplace.com/ Link Station 8,000+ http://global.gr/mtools/linkstation/ USubmit 9,500+ http://www.usubmit.com/ Wizard 8,000+ http://wizardsoftheweb.com/partners/wizard/links.shtml URL Submitter 183,500+ http://urlsubmitter.com/url.shtml For a complete listing of some of top discussion boards, visit: http://www.web-source.net/web/Discussion_Forums/ Your weekly promotions should consist of placing a paid ezine advertisement and/or arranging ad swaps with fellow publishers. Visit Free Directory of Ezines for all information you'll need to place and/or swap ads with over 700 ezines. http://www.netmastersolutions.com/ To organize your ad placements and swaps, place publication names, publisher names, ad dates and hyperlinked web addresses within your weekly promotions list. Your monthly promotions should include writing an article in area of your expertise, Search Engine submissions, promotional exchanges with similar websites and offline promotions. Writing Articles: Writing articles that may be freely published with your bylines is one of best promotional methods online. Your article may be published in hundreds of ezines, on websites or even in magazines. To learn more about writing articles for publication, read article entitled, "Write For Publicity." http://www.web-source.net/art13.htm To organize your monthly promotions, place names and hyperlinked web addresses for each of your promotional resources within your monthly promotions section. Article Announcement Lists: Article Announce Subscribe: mailto:article_announce-subscribe@egroups.com http://www.web-source.net/articlesub.htm
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