Announce It- or Not!

By Terri Seymour
Posted Friday, October 15, 2004

Having an online business means that you need to find as many free or very affordable ways of advertising and promoting that business as possible. Fortunately, there are many such ways of advertising online. Some of the experts and Newbies have debated which ways were effective and which ways were not. One of the ways said by some to be a waste of time is Announcement Lists.

Now I agree that announcement lists are not one of the Power-Packed methods of promoting your ezine or business but for a few minutes work a day for a couple weeks a month, you can pick up a few contacts, customers, or subscribers. That doesn't sound too bad.

I have found that announcing to these lists will be a confusing and lost task if you do not set up a system for managing your lists and submissions. The first step is to subscribe to several of the better lists. Some of the lists will be loaded with junk ads and/or spam. You want to find the lists that are for posting ezine and website ads. There are several lists that are for posting home biz opps and work at home jobs, but I found those to be too filled with junk ads.

Here are a few that I have subscribed to: mailto:listyourgroups-subscribe@yahoogroups.com (new one) mailto:Team2000_Opt-In_List-subscribe@yahoogroups.com mailto:Announce-Lists-subscribe@onelist.com mailto:List_Of_Lists-subscribe@onelist.com mailto:ListBuilder-subscribe@onelist.com mailto:ListPromote-subscribe@onelist.com mailto:listpromote-subscribe@egroups.com mailto:List-Your-List-subscribe@onelist.com mailto:list-your-list-subscribe@egroups.com mailto:list-your-lists-subscribe@topica.com mailto:Mailman-subscribe@topica.com mailto:websurfing-subscribe@onelist.com mailto:WritersZines-subscribe@onelist.com

Here are some for your website mailto:AllSites-subscribe@egroups.com mailto:webbyweb-subscribe@onelist.com mailto:websitedaily-subscribe@egroups.com mailto:ourwebsites-subscribe@onelist.com mailto:A1_WeB_SiTeS-subscribe@onelist.com mailto:MyPageAnnounce-subscribe@egroups.com mailto:URL-Announce-subscribe@egroups.com

Some of these addys may no longer be active. If you find several dead ones, feel free to email me for some alternate addresses.

Now for getting set up. What you want to do is get a financial notebook that has the five columns. In the title area, you will write the name of the list and the main guidelines, such as no urls and post once a week. This is for a reminder. In the first column header write the month and year, May-01. In the next five column headings write Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5.

The next step is to read the guidelines for each list and write an appropriate ad or announcement. When you have finished each ad, address it and save it to your announcement lists folder. When you complete an ad for each list, save it to disk also. As soon as all the ads are finished, you can then send them out. What I do is separate them throughout the week, so I have about 10 - 20 that get mailed each day.

Once your folder and your date book are set up, all you have to do is open your book, go through each list to see which ones you mail out on that particular day and then open that message up then click and send. You would then write in your date book under the appropriate week, the day and date, Wed. 22.

You follow this procedure each day and it will only take minutes to send out all your announcements. I would do this every other week. You also might want to update your ads every so often. I have found that this method is very effective and it could be for you as well.

About the Author
Terri Seymour owns and operates MyOwnEzine.com MyOwnEzine.com is a website, ezine and service which provides the resources, tools, guidance and more to help you start, publish and promote your own ezine. You can contact Terri at mailto:ter02@newnorth.net Subscribe at mailto:subscribe@myownezine.com or visit (http://www.myownezine.com) for lots more info.