ANNOUNCE YOUR E-ZINE

Once you have your e-zine or webzine in place, visit yahoo.com, google.com and msn.com and submit your URLs (if you have a lot of pages, its wise not to submit more than five URLs per day). Dont pay for services that promise to submit your website to hundreds of engines. It wont affect your traffic as much as just hitting the larger ones. For a primer on how the various engines work, visit SearchEngineWatch.com. It offers a free of price newsletter that gets into tons of details about how engines work. Anytime you contruct a major change to your page or add new pages, submit or resubmit the URLs.

The next step is to enter your URL at the major online directories. Youll save yourself a lot of time if you prepare enticing 25-word, 50-word and 100-word descriptions first. "If you may explain your zine in a sentence you have a fighting chance," says George Myers Jr. of LitKit. A one-sentence description might help you focus on the audience youre after, and it helps when youre deciding where to place your e-zine in directories. Yahoo! is the largest directory, followed by Open Directory. A grand guide to smaller engines is directorylist.org.

Yahoo seems to prefer sites that have their own domain title ; even then you may have to submit several times before youre listed. Do not do it more than once every two weeks, and chose your category carefully (suggest a second category if it applies, but do not get greedy). Submit your webzine under targeted topics, such as Travel or Humor or whatever best describe its content. Yahoo! no longer accepts free submissions to Business categories; instead, it charges a $299 annual fee.

Finally, promote your e-zine by sending announcements to various services that alert surfers to new sites. Post a notice to the Usenet group alt.ezines. If you do a non-commercial paper or electronic zine, post a notice on alt.zines. Announce new non-commercial Webzines on comp.infosystems.www.announce, or any e-zine at bookmarkz.com.

You also might add your zine to the many ezine directories, but most do not produce much traffic. If you have the measure and patience, beginning with our costless list of zine directories at http://www.zinebook.com and look for the "Directories" category. It includes directories that list specialty zines such as literary zines, fan fiction, indie music and even one-word titles.

GETTING RETURN VISITORS

Some zine editors include a sign-up form on their page where visitors may leave their email addresses. This allows the editor to compile a mailing list of everybody who are interested in the content of the zine, and he or she may send notice when the Webzine has been updated. However, sending your ASCII text zine unsolicited via email to a whole bunch of people is a bad idea. You can join a accomadation that will automatically notify visitors who sign up when you update your page. Theres more information at http://www.changedetection.com