Sunday, January 22, 2012

Spreading the Words; 20th Century Way


Back in 1998 I had an opportunity to work for a company in Japan which was selling items online.  As an entry job for me back then, my job was to go through all the blogs that was kept in Excel sheet and post an ad on each one of them.  Along with the blog, there were list and list of search engine that was kept in the same Excel sheet. Every time the company created a new page, my job was to go to each one of the list and submitted the site to all the search engines.  There was no Google back then, and no Facebook or Twitter. Time has changed since then.

As you can see on my previous blog, I have been focusing on the 21st century way of getting the words around such as Google and various popular social media sites to promote selling Shiroi Koibito Japanese Chocolate, but it made me ponder: would the 20th century way still be beneficial?  People do still blog, and there are still many minor search engines out there aren’t there? If I can reach even one potential customer, it might be  a worth spending Saturday night posting some ads on those sites. 

So I looked around, and found some sites that we can post advertisement for free.  What I found quickly was that many of the sites do not allow commercial use.  As Google says, don’t do evil. I don’t want to violate rules and posting my link to those who don’t want me to.  I learned it kind of hard way; I signed up for Flicker account and posted some of the pictures of the products with linked to the site.  They sent me an email the next day basically asking to remove the link.  I removed the link right away, and sent an apology email.  After that, I am more careful. I don’t want to make anyone mad. 

So below are the Saturday night list of places that I posted my ads.

Social Bookmarking and classifieds:
  • www.Delicious.com 
  • www.diigo.com (I could join a group of interest and post a topic. It allows me to bookmark and share with public, but little hard to do. You have to drag their icon to tools and then go to the page to bookmark. Once you do it, it is easy, but it was hard for me to understand at the beginning)
  • www.ClaigsList.com (You can only post one ad in one city.  There are some people saying that you can use different emails etc, but I just created one ad)
  • www.manta.com (Business Listing)

There are a lot more list of social bookmarking sites here, but I burned out at this point.  I'll see if I am getting a lot of traffic from these pages, then I might continue down the list later. 


Search Engines:

At this point, I have already submitted my site to the obvious: Google and Bing.
This blog gave me an idea if it really is good to do this or not, and my ultimate decision was, why not?

There are many of the search engines that I used back in 1999 that are no longer doing business.  Many are simply using google or yahoo as their feeder and no longer have “submit URL” page.  Below are the list of search engines that allowed me to submit a site.  I suppose many of the ones below will quickly be obsolete in next few years, but this is THE list of the survivors as of January 2013.  All the list below are free submission sites.
  

In addition, I have listed my listing in below Japanese Classified sites for Japanese audience:


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