Poor Richard's Internet Marketing and Promotions: How to Promote Yourself, Your Business, Your Ideas Online (Poor Richard's Series)

Operators of small business have always been attracted to the Internet's seemingly bottomless supply of ready customers, but their hopes can quickly be dashed by the competitive realities of business on the Web. Poor Richard's Internet Marketing and Promotions aims to take the entrepreneur by the hand and show him or her how to draw attention to an Internet resource without spending a lot of money.

What the authors present is a sort of guerrilla model for online business in which you use your apparent weaknesses to your advantage. You might, for example, exploit your woefully low traffic level by delivering an extraordinary level of attention to the customers you do have. The idea is that good news spreads, and the publishers of Web resources should provide lots of good things for their visitors to pass along. You can also go outside your customer base to attract visitors without buying banner ads--you can join a professional association or a Web ring, for example.

In addition to their particular brand of marketing advice, authors Peter Kent (who also wrote the excellent Poor Richard's Web Site) and Tara Calishain do a fine job of explaining more pedestrian technical subjects, such as how to prepare your pages for listing on search engines. --David Wall

Topics covered: Audience identification, basic page design and coding, registering with search engines, creating newsletters and other mailing lists, joining affiliate programs, filing press releases, and tracking reactions.