"10 GOLDEN TIPS FOR ADVERTISING ON A ZERO BUDGET"
By Dirk Dupon

Here are the 10 best tips for increasing your visibility on the web.

1) Swap an ad with another ezine, that has a comparable subscriber base, and be sure to promise in the ad that you will give a FREE gift to the new subscribers. Let the free gift be an e-book or a screensaver. Send them to a special web page where they can download the gift, and add some extra promotion about your service or product to that page. Sit back and watch the traffic flow in :-)

2) Subscribe to several mailing lists, and post questions, answer other questions, and be sure to include your well designed signature file.

3) If you publish an ezine, always give something away for FREE to your readers in every new edition, like a screensaver, an e-book etc... in change for 3 or 5 e-mail addresses of their friends/family/relatives. They'll love you!

4) Explore all the different Usenet groups , BBS's and forums that are of interest to you, and post or answer questions, with inclusion of your sig file. Or better: write an interesting article (like this :-) and send it to an ezine with a huge subscriber base. You'll become known soon...

5) Write a positive note to another ezine editor or webmaster. They like that, and maybe they'll include your comment in their publication. If so, ask if they will place your sigfile beneath it. You should also sign all the guestbooks that you find while you surf web sites that interest you, of course with your catchy sig file attached to it!

6) Announce your ezine in the following announcement services. There are several with searchable catalogues. They get lots of visitors and are a sure way to quickly find new subscribers.

The E-ZineZ Search Engine: http://www.e-zinez.com

InfoBot: E-mail Publishers Resource Center: http://www.infobot.net

John Labovits E-Zine List:

http://www.meer.net/~johnl/e-zine-list/submit.html

The Ezine News: http://www.ezine-news.com

NEW-List - You MUST announce your e-zine here!

http://scout18.cs.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/lwgate/NEW-LIST/

Newsletter Access searchable Directory http://www.newsletteraccess.com/

Liszt: http://www.liszt.com

Escribe http://www.escribe.com/

The List of Lists http://catalog.com/vivian/interest-group-search.html

Zinew0rld http://www.oblivion.net/zineworld/

List of Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists

http://www.neosoft.com/internet/paml/

There are a lot of other useful sites related to mailing lists:

http://www.promotefree.com
http://www.webcom.com/impulse/list.html
http://tile.net/lists/addlist.html
http://www.listsnet.com/
http://www.goodstuff.prodigy.com/Lists/main.htm
http://alabanza.com/kabacoff/Inter-Links/listserv.html
http://jlunz.databack.com/zines.htm

Tip: Looking for a list of ridiculously cheap advertising rates? I have put together a whole list for you to pick out at:

http://www.theweirdsite.com/advertising.htm

7) If you have a web site, set up a reciprocal link page, and trade links with sites that are of similar interest with yours. Write the web master a nice letter and ask him for a reciprocal link. You may lose visitors by having their link on your site (they will leave anyway!), but you'll win visitors from your link on their site! It's a win win situation!

8) Submit your ezine or newsletter manually to all the major Search Engines. Take care of your Meta Tags! Place the "Title" tag before the "Name" and "Keywords" tag or your page will be neglected! Front Page 98 automatically places the "Title" tag behind the other tags when it saves a document, so before you save your HTML in FP98, copy it, paste it in a plain text editor like Notepad, and only save it from there! This is very important!

9) Place a 'Subscribe Now' box on your web site, and ask visitors to fill in their email address -nothing more! Explain that the email addresses will be hold in complete privacy, and offer a FREE gift for new subscribers. Send them to a special URL where they can download their gift after they have subscribed. Tell them about your product when they're there!

10) Add a contest in your ezine; offer a FREE CD or book for the subscriber who sends you the most email addresses of his friends/associates to subscribe to your ezine. Let the contest be date limited, that way they'll hurry up :-)

Tips written by Dirk Dupon, editor of 'The Weird Side E-zine': A highly entertaining selection of weird sites and strange news, book tips, useful software, web master info, free software and email, funny quotes, hot spots
on the web etc... Subscribe and get a FREE HTML-tutor:
weirdside-subscribe@onelist.com Or via the web site: http://www.theweirdsite.com