Marketing Your Website Through E-zines and Newsgroups
It's almost comical how easy it used to be. The rise of blogging, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., did away with most of the ezines. Newsgroups were supplanted long ago. This kind of marketing has been replaced with social media marketing.
ARCHIVAL CONTENT (from circa 2001):
E-zines and Newsgroups are both areas where it can be worthwhile to market your website.
Newsgroups have rules, however, and you can't spam them all with an ad for your website--it is very bad manners.
To find newsgroups use your email program -- Outlook Express, Eudora or whatever. Subscribe to a few of the newsgroups that would be of interest to people looking for your products or services. Read what people are saying. When you can honestly offer some helpful advice or a solution to one of the questions or problems that come up on those newsgroups, post a notice with your solution -- and make it relate back to your website. People will visit. By doing this you build credibility for yourself and for your website.
Many E-zines allow you to post relevant, helpful comments and articles, and to include your URL. This is a way to establish credibility for your company. For example, if you sell Western Saddles and Tack, subscribe to the E-zines about horses and western riding. When someone has a question to which you know the answer -- answer it and include your URL. People will visit your website as a result.
By way of example, we subscribe to about a dozen E-zines on website design and marketing. People ask questions in those E-zines and if we know the answers we answer them. We get a lot of traffic to this website from such people and have obtained many clients in that fashion--while at the same time helping people and generating good will. This kind of activity is a win-win situation for the E-zines, for the people asking the questions, and the people answering the questions.
Participating in E-zines and Newsgroups can be a vital part of marketing a commercial website. Blatantly commercial messages are usually forbidden on E-zines (unless in the form of paid advertising, as a sponsor of the Newsgroup or E-zine). However, a signature line with your website address on it, posted in a newsgroup or ezine that goes to the kind of people who should be visiting your site, is one of the most effective ways to get people to visit your site. This ties in with giving away something for free at your site, especially if it is a resource of interest to a whole group of people. You can and should respond to questions by offering solutions that somehow involve a visit to your site.
This form of marketing is one that the site owner or the person in your company responsible for marketing the website usually does. We do not do this kind of marketing for our clients, but we do help them figure out to which E-zines and Newsgroups they should subscribe.
Your participation in these groups is what makes them valuable to the people reading them--and to you. Your advice, your commentary, and your willingness to help others are valuable marketing tools through E-zines and Newsgroups. This is an effective way to build traffic to your site and get you customers, and it's not really something anyone else can do for you. It requires your active participation. This is one way you can be part of the "community" which is the internet.
Researching which newsgroups and E-zines you should participate in usually takes a fair amount of time, as there are about 25,000 newsgroups and more than 7000 E-zines. This is homework you should do yourself.
One other step you can take in this arena is to start your own E-zine on a subject in which you are the expert.
You can start your own list like this by going to Yahoo! Groups. This used to be OneList.com, but they sold out to Yahoo! long ago.
Click this next link to read a free tutorial on how to start an E-zine of your own. Handbook of Ezine Publishing published by E-ZineZ.com. (No longer in business.)
We can help you in creating your own E-zine and get it listed where people will look for new E-zines to subscribe to them. It needs its own bit of marketing to become a successful E-zine. Contact us for details.
