A.P. Lawrence

Poor Richard's Internet Marketing and Promotions

Order (or just read more about) Poor Richard's Internet Marketing and Promotions

See also Internet Marketing and Promotions Usability

and Poor Richard's Web Site

and http://www.poorrichard.com/

Peter Kent and Tara Calishain have continued or extended Poor Richard's Web Site with this book that focuses heavily on promotion. I'm considering buying half a dozen copies so that I can hand them out to relatives and friends who ask for advice on how they can generate more Web traffic-this has much more useful advice than I possibly have time to give. This covers all the fundamentals, and more. I admit that even I learned a few things here, and it gave me some new ideas that I'll be trying out soon, so I'll definitely be keeping one of those copies for myself.

Of course, the book isn't perfect. The authors are blissfully unaware of Unix, as the following paragraph shows:

Got it? Simple. But there's one catch. You don't necessarily want people to really visit this yak.htm page. You want them to visit your main page. Of course you could create lots of copies of your first page, but then you have to maintain all those pages-if you change one, you'll have to change them all.

But there's little else that is as glaring as that. Not that you'll necessarily agree with every opinion offered, but even the authors don't always agree either:

So how often should you update your site? Well, we (the authors) don't completely agree on this point. Tara believes that you should be continually updating your Web site-daily if possible.

...

Peter has a different view. He believes that if the information is still up-to-date--still valid today--then it's still of value, regardless of whether the information has been changed in a couple of weeks or not.

Topics covered include everything from initial domain registration, search sites, awards, promoting in newsgroups, affiliate programs, buying and selling banner ads, and e-mail promtion. Everything is covered thoroughly and well.

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