At present there are over 3.3 billion pages indexed by Google, and that definitely does not cover
entire Internet. With so many competitors around, you sure have to use every conceivable method available to promote your website. Newsgroups can be very powerful tools in your web promotion endeavor if you use them actively. What is a Newsgroup?
A newsgroup is a message board on Internet where users come to discuss topics of mutual interest. Each newsgroup is dedicated to a particular subject of interest and consists of messages posted by participants. You can find several ongoing discussions surrounding various topics within a single newsgroup. These topics are call threads. As a user you can start a thread, post messages to a thread and make responds to other postings.
Before Internet era, way you know it now, back in eighties and early nineties people used to connect to electronic bulletin boards (bbs) through modems and post text messages for others to read and answer. Usenet Newsgroups was started as a collection of these bulletin boards. Along with Internet, Newsgroups have also started to grow rapidly. Thanks to Interface introduced by Deja News in 1995 use of Newsgroups became simple and convenient, which also gave enough impetus to this growth.
Today, Usenet discussion forums or Newsgroups indexed by Google comprise over 800 million messages, which is around a terabyte of information! It is calculated that over 10 million people have regular access to Newsgroups!
Each newsgroup is formed with a certain purpose. This is described in its charter at time it is started. Normally every Newsgroup has its own single subject. However there could be many Newsgroups dedicated to one subject.
There are tens of thousands of newsgroups on every subject you can possibly imagine. The subjects in Newsgroups are hierarchically structured. Some of them are moderated, means somebody controls postings, most don’t.
How to use Newsgroups?
Since there are so many newsgroups, whatever your interest is you will most likely find a newsgroup which will suit you. Although, most email readers have built-in features to subscribe Newsgroups most convenient way to read newsgroups today is to use “Google Search”. Once you are on search page of Google, Click on Groups from menu. This will take you to Groups search page with a directory of Newsgroups under headline ‘Post and read comments in Usenet discussion forums’. The most common subdirectories for businesses are located in alt, biz and misc. For example: If you are in import and export business you might try alt.business. imort-export, which has several groups within it.
Run a search using a keyword related to your online business that you would like to promote from groups search page of Google. The result will appear chronologically, most recent one being at top. Check out most relevant Newsgroups from results. If your search produces a very big list of results, try advanced search option. Try reducing time frame of postings. By default Google searches within all messages posted from 1981.
For really worthwhile information I’ll suggest to use moderated groups. Most Newsgroups which are not moderated easily fill up with spam and you really have to wade through them to find something interesting.
Did you notice that Google has a new paid service under name “Google Answers”? For a fee Google nominated researchers will get answers to your hard to find questions. The service is located at http://answers.google.com. If you go through questions that are already asked, you will be amazed to see that by searching newsgroups you will find answers to many of them without paying a dime. Newsgroups are indeed a gold mine of information!
