However, one method which is often overlooked is writing an article and submitting it to various publications. This is, in fact, an amazing, no-cost, way to obtain great publicity for your company, Web site, or organization. And all it takes is a little bit of effort and information about where and how to get article published.

Today there are over 300,000 online newsletters and "ezines", and their numbers are growing daily. They cover virtually any topic you can think of, ranging from working at home, to parenting, to genealogy.

But best part is that most of them rely on outside contributors for their information. In fact, many ezine publishers are only too pleased to receive quality content. Consequently, they need experts (and you are an expert on something, aren't you?) to provide short articles, tips, and advice to their readers. And we're not talking major treatises or giant tomes here. generally, about 500 - 600 wordfs is sufficient, and many ezines publish articles as short as a paragraph or two.

In spite of a huge amount of time and effort put in, our first attempts at marketing products were minimally successful. As "newbies" we tried usual techniques: search engines (all of them with automatic submissions), web rings, banners, links (with sites getting fewer hits than ourselves), free classifieds and a guest book - all with very limited success. (I never did try newsgroups). However, all we got was other "internet pros" trying to sell us something (we still get that many times daily - trash bin). Fortunately, we had no money to spend on promotion, so capital was not wasted. With our "learners plates" on, this was all done on two "freebie sites" (Geocities and Tripod). However, steep learning curve and persistence gave us a great deal of new knowledge regarding internet marketing.

Things changed drastically once we got our own domain at NZ Enterprise.com (with Webcom), and suddenly all our sites got listed with Yahoo, as well as all major search engines. Must have been PERCEPTION that we were "successful" and "bigger" than we were. Image is everything (as in life!). It also helped having quite a unique product in getting a high ranking ("creative writing courses"). Eureka, Hooray! Incidentally, we submitted to Yahoo (Australia and New Zealand); so I suggest you try regional Yahoo, rather than their main database. We also get quite a few hits from some of lesser known S/E's (see even I'm learning internet terminology!), like Looksmart, Snap and Northern Light. ( we also tried Go To http//:www.goto.com, but with limited success). The traffic to our various sites started increasing substantially and sales started materialising. Mostly, our creative writing courses and money management courses, but a few books too.