by Mike Kline

Let's start with a ridiculous example. Let's say you have entered the Olympics. You are competing for the Gold Medal in the Bird Watching Competition. You are excited about the Gold Medal, but you sure would like to have the Silver and Bronze Medals as well. Of course, one person can only win one Medal; therefore you have a problem.

To compensate for your problem, you take advantage of new technology, and clone yourself, a few times. You then take advantage of your neighbor Bob, who is a cosmetic surgeon and change each of your clones to have their own resemblance, and therefore be unique. Then you send them all into the competition in hopes to win all three Medals.

This story may be a little far fetched, but it can come to life in your marketing endeavors. First off, let's identify the BIG event. It's your business on the Internet. The competition? Getting market share, or even simpler, getting traffic. As yourself, you can market to a variety of sources, banners, search engine submission, newsgroups, e-zines, classified sites, etc. Doing these things normally can get you traffic, and much of it if you are playing your cards right. But once you have tapped those sources are you all finished? Of course not! That is where "Sneaking in the Back Door" comes in.

1: The first step is to clone your business, in a sense. Or in other words, duplicate your ability to advertise. You could, if you wanted, create the same identical business, with a different theme, but I don't recommend it as that could get a bit harry. You want to create an idea that is different than what your business involves, such as a web page like this: http://www.spiritone.com/~msk/starrs_report.htm.

I took advantage of the Starr Report incident, by creating a web page for it (I didn't personally type the report out, just offered links to it!).

2: I then of course, put my ad on it, and a friend's (who provided the search engine submission service in exchange). The goal of course, is to lead people to my page where they can subscribe to the newsletter.

3: Once I have cloned my business and ordered the cosmetic surgeon on it, I now send it out to compete in the event. I submitted the URL with proper keywords, and description (fitting the Starr Report issue) to over 400 engines. Now people who are not searching on marketing issues, but are searching for the Starr Report, will find my cloned page and see my ad, and of course what they came for, The Starr Report. If they are not looking for Free Ad opportunities, they will ignore my ad. If free advertising is something they would be interested in, they just might click on my ad, and then they may subscribe.

This technique can allow you to market your business in categories, and newsgroups that you couldn't have before. I should point out that up to this portion only took me 30 minutes to set up. It's still working for me weeks later!

4: Of course, I did submit it to the Classified Sites I was already submitting to that week, and because I have a quick efficient set up now for newsgroup posting, I posted an ad about the Starr Report to many of the newsgroups that accept any kind of posting, and to some related newsgroups like, politics, etc., because, simply, I have no life and get a kick out of select, Post, CTRL+V, send, select, Post, CTRL+V, send........

TIPS: When building a page like today's example, if you decide to use frames, you can use it as a template for many various news stories that will attract a lot of attention. Then your ad is never in need of re-doing, just the links you provide on the main page....and speaking of links, I suggest that you do use frames, that way, when they are browsing the information you are offering, your ad is still there.

A. Virtual Promote offers a service they lovingly call the JimTool. You simply provide the address of your web site and an e-mail address and the JimTool does the rest. Find this service at: http://192.41.61.81/submitter/index.html.

B. Next, there is http://www.all4one.com. They offer an easy submission service that submits your site to the six biggest search engines. It is estimated that 80% of the people using search engines will use one of these big six. So these six sites may be all you need. It's fast and it's free!

C. Last but not least, Self Promotion offers a site submission service that submits to about 100 search engines and indexes. They claim that these are the biggest, most important places to get listed. I haven't used them yet but the service is free for you to try. If you like the service, you may send them money. If you feel that it did not perform to your expectations, you pay nothing. http://selfpromotion.com/

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