Publicity Ploys Some marketing services are free while others are fee-based. If you have a Web site, there is a plethora of marketing companies ready to promote it for you. But there is much you can do yourself to improve sales or attract business with just an e-mail address.
 
For some general advice on Internet advertising, check out Lycos's list of advertising resources. On the Lycos Sites by Subject page select the category called Business and Investing, then choose Advertising, Marketing, and Public Relations, then Archives and Indices, which brings up an informative list of Web advertising resources, including the Internet Advertising Resource . This invaluable electronic handbook furnishes links to print publications on Internet advertising, online-advertising discussion lists, Web tracking services, advertising associations, and select Internet storefronts.
 
People can't buy from you if you are invisible. But you can list your company's products and services with many online business directories and classified-ad sites. The more ubiquitous your Internet presence, the easier it will be for potential clients and customers to find you.
 
Register with Four11, an online directory that enables people to reach you by phone or e-mail as long as they know your name. Four11 has a database of over seven million e-mail listings and will include your e-mail address free of charge. You might also want to join the WhoWhere? online community. You can add your e-mail address, company name, snail-mail address, and home page to its directory at no charge.
 
Post an attention-grabbing classified advertisement. Several places on the Internet will list your advertisement free of charge. Links to dozens of them are available from WebCrawler if you enter "classified ads" in the search field.
 
One of the best advertising resources available is a site called Classified Ad Sites That Are FREE to Post (http://www.magpage.com/~rispoli/free.html). It takes you to an A to Z index of free classified sites. While each classified-ad service has its own rules regarding the kinds of classifieds you can submit, the posting procedure is similar from one service to another.
 
For example, Advertise It Web Classifieds (http://www.netimages.com/classifieds) requires you to fill out a simple on-screen form with your e-mail address, country, state/province, advertisement category (e.g., announcements, employment, merchandise, personals, pets, real estate, etc.) and a brief description.
 
WebMall Classifieds posts ads that are three lines long with up to 60 characters per line. Ads remain up for only one week. Again, you fill in an on-screen form providing your ad description, e-mail address, and ad category. Category choices include software, hardware, distributorship, merchandise for sale, and financial information.
 
Internet Doorway Marketplace limits ad size to 400 characters, but you can choose how long ads remain up at the site (from one week to four months). Name, e-mail address, and ad text are all that are required to submit an ad.
 
Free Net Classifieds lets you compose classified ads with embedded links and pictures, in addition to just plain text. First you select a category that best fits your classified ad, then you fill out an on-screen form with information that includes price (if you want others to search your ad by price), description (with HTML formatting codes if you prefer), your area code (so people searching the ads can look for services by area), password (to prevent others from making unauthorized ad changes), and length of time you want the ad to run (up to a year). When the ad expires, you can resubmit it as often as you like.
 
If you already have a Web page, consider listing it with a variety of different directories, catalog services, and search engines. In keeping with the maxim that "the best things in life are free," the Internet provides ample opportunities to promote your company's Web page at no charge. Most of the popular search engines offer free Web site listing services. These include: Yahoo, AltaVista, WebCrawler, Infoseek, and Excite.
 
For example, clicking the Add URL button in the banner at the top of every Yahoo page brings up an electronic form with instructions on how to get your Web site listed in the Yahoo database. You register by category. Commercial sites are listed in the Business and Economy subcategory, either under Companies, Products and Services, or both. Personal home pages are listed in the Entertainment/People category. The form includes fields for a title, URL, and a 20-word description of the page. A Yahoo search looks for keywords contained in a listing's URL, its title or name, and the text contained in its comments field. Given the popularity of Yahoo's Add URL service, it takes two to five weeks before your listing appears in the database.
 
To list a URL with AltaVista, use the Add URL feature at the bottom of every AltaVista page. After typing in the main URL for your site, AltaVista adds this page to its index. Turnaround time may be as short as one day. Once your site is indexed, you don't have to worry about updates. AltaVista regularly sends out a spider (a computer program that surfs the Web) to visit listed sites and look for content changes. If pages have changed, the program updates the index.
 
AltaVista will index all the words in your document (except for comments) and use the first words as a short abstract. You can exercise some control over how your Web page is indexed by setting up a <META> tag within the site's <HEAD> section to specify keywords or a brief description. The <ETA> reports information about a Web document without displaying the information in visitors' browsers.
 
AltaVista indexes a page description and keywords up to a limit of 1,024 characters. If it sees the syntax <META name="description" content="A site for sore eyes."> or <META name="keywords" content="vision, seeing aides, glasses"> (with keywords separated by commas), your site will be returned as a match for searches on vision, seeing aides, or glasses, and your site's abstract will read: A site for sore eyes.
 
Be sure to follow the Submit It link available on AltaVista's Add URL page. Submit It offers a free Web promotion service for companies and individuals. You fill out an electronic form providing your site's title, URL, keywords, company name, address, and 25-word description. Submit It automatically registers this information with 15 sites, including Yahoo, Infoseek, Yellow Pages Online, BizWiz, MallPark, and WebDirect.
 
WebCrawler's Add URL form (available from the site's home page) lets you submit up to nine URLs to the index at one time. While its spider visits submitted URLs every day, new listings may not appear in the WebCrawler index for up to two weeks.
 
Infoseek's Add URL service requires you to e-mail your site's URL to www-request@infoseek.com, noting the URL in the body of the message. It adds this information to its index the next time it updates, using your Web site's title in its listing and displaying a Web site description based on the first 200 characters appearing on your page after the <BODY> tag. As with AltaVista, you can customize the description that appears by setting up the <META> tag.
 
To ensure that your Web site is listed in the Excite database, click the Add URL button available on any page at the site, then enter your URL. Within two weeks of submission, Excite sends out a spider to visit the site and add its text contents to the Excite database.