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Web News & Tips - Issue #270 $7.00 per month web hosting from MateMedia Web News & Tips Published by MateMedia, Inc. Your Partner on the Web Providing quality Web services at affordable prices since 1995 MateMedia provides the following services: * Small Business Web Hosting (Shared & Managed Dedicated Servers) * Web Design & Development - Custom Web Applications * Database Development & Hosting * Website Maintenance & Webmaster Services * Search Engine Promotion (Optimization & Submission) * E-Commerce - Shopping Carts - Sample Shopping Cart * Domain Name Registration * Domain Name Affiliate Program * Web Hosting Affiliate Program * FREE Website when you order a web hosting account! For more information about our services email sales@matemediainc.com or call us at 877-309-7521 - Read what our clients have to say about us IN THIS ISSUE: Become a MateMedia Domain Name Affiliate Become a MateMedia Small Business Web Hosting Affiliate Free Webmaster Tools Free Scripts for Your Website Bulletin boards- The traffic you always wanted Web News A Step by Step Guide to Getting Started on the Web Recommend this newsletter to a friend Advertise in Web News & Tips $7.00 per month web hosting from MateMedia Bulletin boards- The traffic you always wanted By B.W. Wilcox In this article we are going to examine how to make bulletin boards work for you. They can be very time consuming but a very useful tool if done right. The first rule is do not post a blatant add. It takes research to advertise in a way that will seem beneficial to the board but send your message to many highly targeted visitors. Finding your boards What is your purpose on the internet? Once you answer that question you then know what sort of boards to look for. If you sell pet supplies while posting board whose main focus is home repair you are wasting your time. But if you sell pet supplies and you post to a board whose main focus is pet care you could potentially reap a lot of highly targeted traffic that will come back over and over buying your products. There are two thoughts on the size of the boards the first being that the biggest and busiest are always where to go and the other is that new boards are the key to success. I believe that both are true to some extent. In the busiest boards you will instantly get seen by a lot of people but since you are new it will take a lot of time for people to accept you. The newer boards will be easy to get the title of local expert but you are seen by a lot less people. Look for a couple of the large BB's and look for one or two of the smaller boards. What to write The initial tactics between the big boards and the small boards are very different. On the big boards you don't want to be seen as an advertiser while on the smaller boards you have to be more aggressive to procure your expert position. Let's start with the big boards. Read through a couple of posts and make a few replies. Make sure they are friendly while also being concise and informative. Do not mention your website! You have to sell yourself first so people will be interested in what you have to say. Only after a few weeks or a few months of posting do you start adding a footer that includes your website address. Try not to talk too much about your site. An occasional reference in your posts wouldn't hurt but it's much better to be known as a friend who has a website than a website that keeps posting. With the smaller boards you have to more aggressive but you still need to be perceived as a friend with a website. From day one use the footer and occasionally mention your site but still make friendly posts that seem the main purpose for you being there. Bulletin boards almost always have a "resident" expert. Have you ever noticed how at the end of a lot of posts people will ask what the expert’s opinion is? Being that expert is like putting money in the bank. People will trust you and want to see your site and for the new people coming in they will already start to trust you. What not to write This is as important if not more important than what to write since you as a person will be judged on your posts. Never attack a person but if you feel it’s necessary to correct a person then do it politely. A person made a post to a BB that was a blatant advertisement about a classic car site. While it was obvious that it was over hyped it turned out it was also completely false. I saw the local expert make the following reply: XXXXXX What you posted about www.------.com was nothing but a bunch of b*******t. I searched my a** off looking for a 1969 Chevy Nova and there wasn't s**t. F*** you XXXXXX While the person who posted this did get their point across most of the people on the board quit asking for his opinion. It may have made him feel a little better in the short term however, the good will and ultimately the traffic he will lose in the long term are going to make him feel a lot worse. Unfortunately, he'll probably never understand what happened. Always try to be the helpful and friendly person that people want to talk to. Initials make the person For some reason people think that initials make you more credible. Most people have a way to take advantage of this for instance if your full name is Benjamin Wilson Williams you could use the following initial sets: Benjamin W Williams Ben W. Williams B. Williams B. W. Williams While the third example is often used in business letters the first and last examples have more of an air of authority about them. This can translate into a higher level of trust by the people that are reading your helpful and informative posts. Some people disagree with me on this feeling that you are giving out too much personal information. The truth of the matter is it is very easy to get the name and address of any website owner. A simple who is search will usually provide the owners name, address and telephone number. If it’s a business that owns the website there a tons of resources both online and off to track down business owners. Truth of matter is that it is all public information that is easily attainable by anyone. E-mail: admin@surfdawg.com Author's URL: http://www.surfdawg.com B.W. Wilcox is the owner of http://www.SurfDawg.com. His search engine gives away free accounts to all new members.If you would like further information please go to his website or email to Admin@SurfDawg.com $7.00 per month web hosting from MateMedia Increase your rank in the search engines! Check out our new search engine optimization plans Become a MateMedia Web Hosting Affiliate Web News $7.00 per month web hosting from MateMedia Roughly half of the global executive respondents to a March 2004 IT Toolbox survey indicated that sourcing was very important to their organization's business strategy, and more than one- third deemed the function as somewhat important. The survey, sponsored by Ariba, was designed to identify the role sourcing plays in business, while analyzing trends, goals and challenges for successful implementations. Local online ad spending is expected to rise 28.7 percent to more than $2.6 billion — twice the growth rate of overall Internet advertising — according to the just released projections from Borrell Associates' WebAudit. These findings represent a dramatic change, considering it was only two years ago that the research firm reported that local advertisers were relatively uninformed about the benefits of advertising on the Web. Digital Envoy filed suit against Google this week, accusing the search giant of improperly using its technology to target advertising by geography. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, accuses Google of misappropriation of trade secrets, unfair competition, and unjust enrichment. It stems from a contract Norcross, Ga.-based Digital Envoy and Mountain View, Calif.-based Google signed back in November 2000, according to the complaint. In that contract, Digital Envoy licensed Google its IP-based geo-targeting technology for "limited uses," the plaintiff said. Copyright 2000-2004 MateMedia, Inc. |