IN THIS ISSUE: June 21, 2000 To Archive Index Site Promotion On A Shoe String Budget No More Boring Bios Online Shopping Statistics Web Site Of The Week: F**ked Company

Site Promotion On A Shoe String Budget

Roll up your sleeves and use some elbow grease

Catch 22 redux. You need to promote your site to keep it alive, but you have a limited budget. What to do? Roll up your sleeves and get to work. You'll need a lot of elbow grease, but you'll get results.

One Grain of Rice

Millions of people are exploring tens of thousands of electronic locations daily on the World Wide Web and online services. Trying to make yours stand out is like trying to make one grain of rice the most noticeable one in a 10 gallon pot. Here are a number of things you can do to build traffic.

1. Write articles (like this one!) that might be useful to a site or newsletter popular with prospective clients, and offer to give them to the webmaster or editor.

2. Change your site often, add features that add value for people coming to your site

3. Perfect your email signature file. Include your URL, email address, phone number and one or two short lines (maximum) explaining what you do. Don't make it a blatant ad. Instead, make the description of your business that you would tell someone in a 30-second elevator ride.

   I want to make it easy for prospective clients to reach me, so my signature says:
   
   B.L. Ochman is president of whatsnextonline.com, a full-service marketing agency that builds global traffic and sales for Internet businesses. Subscribe to our weekly marketing tactics newsletter, What's Next Online, at http://www.whatsnextonline.com 212.385.2200 BLOchman@whatsnextonline.com

4. Multi-talented Molly Holzschlag has a particularly good signature:
   Molly E. Holzschlag
   Managing Editor, Web Review
   Author * Instructor * Designer
   http://www.molly.com http://www.webreview.com
   molly@molly.com molly@webreview.com
   

   So does advertising agency head Allen Barkus, although I'd like to see a contact information:
   
   The Ted Barkus Company is now ranked 142 in the U.S. by Advertising Age Magazine, up from 149 in 1998.
   Innovative Marketing To Profit By...

Spread The Word

1. Participate in forums, discussion groups and mailing lists frequented by your potential clients. You won't need to include blatant ads for your site; the information will be in your signature file.

2. Use unique meta tags and title tags for each article on your site and submit each page to search engines.

3. Write a paragraph that succinctly explains the "who, what, where, why and when" of what your company does. You'll need it for any brochure, report, press release or pitch letter your write about your company. If you can substitute the name of any other company in any sentence and make the same sense you haven't arrived at a strategy. For example, if you say "Acme Nail is dedicated to the highest standards of manufacturing and customer service." You could easily substitute "Beta Widget," or "Prime Paint," or any other manufacturing company in that sentence. So that description isn't the one that describes your unique business. Keep writing until you get it airtight.

Understand that doing any of these activities once does not constitute a marketing/promotion campaign. The cumulative effect of doing all of these things and more over time is what brings results

No More Boring Bios

Most bios figure among the driest, dreariest and dull tomes ever written. Since prospective clients may judge you by your bio, it needs to be a good read.

Whether you are writing your own bio or doing one for someone else, you can add sparkle to your copy if you humanize your subject by asking open-ended questions.

Good writers want to tell something about what makes the person tick. The writer who found out that Roosevelt Greer does needlepoint to relax gave new dimension to the foot ball star. Here are some questions you can ask to help give life to a bio.

• Has your life had one big turning point?

• What do you do for fun?

• What goal would you go for if guaranteed not to fail?

• Do you usually push yourself to the limit or are you laid back?

• What message would you like to find in a fortune cookie?

• What do people find out about you only after knowing you for a long time?

• What do you do really well that might surprise people?

• What part of your life has been the happiest?

• What's most important in a friend?

• If you could be a kid again for just one day, how would you spend the time?

• What gives you the biggest charge from life -- the most satisfaction?

• If you could make a wish for any person except you, who would get it, and what would you wish?

For example, let's say you are writing staff bios for a company web site. You might be interviewing an accountant and discover that he used to be a Broadway dancer. (Mine was!) With his bio, perhaps you could include a photo of him dancing with a laptop computer in hand. Learning his past makes him more than just another dull accountant. (No offense to all you number crunchers out there.)

Gather this information not to use every word of it, but to seek out enough interesting, humanizing facts about the person to make a reader able to relate to him or her. It's hard for people to talk about themselves. Questions like these make it easier. And they'll help make your writing less stiff and formal and therefore more readable.

Note: When you write the bio, don't refer to the person by his/her first name. Follow journalistic style and use her last name. Instead of "John says..." say "Smith says..."

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Online Shopping Statistics

66% of female online shoppers say they would not make a major purchase without first researching it on the Internet

Among online users, online purchasing (43%) is catching up with catalog purchasing (57%), and that it's far ahead of infomercial purchasing (17%)

58% of Gen Yers are online, yet only about one quarter (28%) of them buy online, compared to 46% of older online users

Source: The Industry Standard http://www.thestandard.com

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F**ked Company - the dot-com deadpool

NOTE: Headlines, rumors, and commentary in the following item utilize liberal and uncensored use of the basically only the F**k word. If such language offends or is blocked by your browser looking at F**ked Company - the dot-com deadpool might not be a good idea for you. We are running this item because it has gotten a huge amount of media attention and because - profanity aside - it is a clever idea. We are 100% sure they could have used a better name.

F**ked Company - the dot-com deadpool

F*&ked Company - has a dot-com deadpool where visitors guess which celebrity or in this case, dot-com is about to bite the big one. In the old days it was easy to see on the horizon, when the last hourly employee working for Commodore Business Machines was the person who processed payroll it was more than obvious that the firm was way beyond doomed. With new companies it's much quicker and F**ked Company - the dot-com deadpool takes that into account by rating the signs and signals and thus awarding points based on the drama involved.

The bottom line is that sometimes it's obvious when a technology or dot-com company is hurting, and other times it's not and that's where the fun starts. As long as it's not your money doing a vanishing act.

This is the sort of thing that visitors contribute and get to see:

"The best press release ever Official press release: 'All of the directors and officers of U.S. Digital Communications, Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: USDI) have resigned, effective immediately. Presently the company has no employees, officers, or directors. The corporation has no assets, no revenues, and no money to continue in business. In addition, the corporation does not have the capability to transact business in the future.'

Source: Site DuJour of the Day Visit the Site du Jour of the Day Archives at http://members.tripod.com/~SdJotD/