Poetry + Advertising = Are You Kidding?

by eRix)

Using Your Own Poetry to Advertise � Friday, August 27, 2004 Have you ever written a poem for somebody before? Have you ever written a catchy saying on someone�s birthday or anniversary card? Have you ever written a love letter to someone? Simple, catchy poems or sayings are very easy to create and an even better way to promote a website. Poetry websites or web rings are plentiful and give you a way to publish your poems and sayings, most of the time for free. Within signing up for the rights to upload and publish your work, you can give contact information that serves as a type of media that draws attention toward your email or website URL. Most of the time this information is placed with your poem or saying so that people who view the work will learn something about the author, you the website owner. On a poetry website, you are stuck with the hopes that someone will accidentally find your poem, read your biography, and then go to your website. This works periodically, but periodically is not what webmasters are after; webmasters want instant traffic from whatever effort is put out. If you post advertisements, you want a reaction from it�some do not care if the reaction is bad or good, they want any kind of reaction from the work. This is what is commonly known as branding your product or service. An easier way to brand your website is to join a poetry web ring that has a lot of members because when you post your poem or saying, usually, your entry is sent in email to a majority of the people inside the ring. It is like sending a mini-email campaign because at the end of every poem or saying you can put the vital information of your web site. I like to put my website�s whole address for a person to cut-and-paste into an address bar in case the address is not an active hyper-link. A few things to keep in mind before you try this is to only post one poem or saying a day because people in the ring might consider you as trying to spam all of the members and the moderator may reject your work or even kick you out of the ring, so be careful. Another good fact to know is that most of the poetry sites do not want poems or sayings longer than 20 lines; therefore, you can format all of your work into this limited number of lines and know exactly the amount of text you should have. Having a 20 line limit is also good for the writer because you can learn to focus your intended message in a short format.