The Chamber of Commerce

Updated: Nov. 10, 1995

Promoting your business or publication

The Gastown Chamber of Commerce provides a page of links to various directories and indexes which work like telephone directories (white or yellow) for the Internet. Although your operation will get a certain amount of 'foot traffic' from tourists visiting Gastown, it is your responsibility to promote your own goods or services to the Internet community. The Chamber of Commerce will assist you in this task by providing links to free or inexpensive services which will allow Net surfers to read a short description about your business, and to find your web pages as a result of a search for a keyword.

The Mayor will update this listing as new places to advertise become available, so you should periodically check this list to ensure that you have 'spread the word' as widely as possible. For some valuable information about succeeding on the Internet, look around Global Concepts.

Guide to Directories and Indexes

'Yellow Pages' for Businesses and Publications

What's New? You are! You may even get to be on someone's Best of the Web or Cool Site of the Day if you get discovered on the What's New page by the makers of the Internet's original killer app -- Mosaic. Compose a brief description in HTML style with a URL link and mail it to the NCSA What's New at whats-new@ncsa.uiuc.edu.

Put your listing in the New Riders' Official World Wide Web Yellow Pages in exchange for a link back to their site.

INFOSEEK SEARCH is a comprehensive and accurate WWW search engine. You can type your search in plain English or just enter key words and phrases. You can also use special query operators.

Visit the business lists of OpenMarket and Yahoo. Search their indexes and submit your listing.

Investigate the Lycos Search Engine, and WebCrawler, both huge robot-maintained Web databases. Search before adding your own listing, and be sure to include the /index.html in your URL).

Sail across the Atlantic to CityScape to make yourself known on the European Web scene.

To learn how to place a listing in the Internet Mall (an e-mail list), send e-mail to taylor@netcom.com with 'send addme' in the body. To receive the Internet Mall, use 'send mall' instead. I also strongly recommend Dave Taylor's book called How to create cool web pages: it is an excellent guide to HTML which includes screen shots to show you exactly what your tags will look like!

Use the Online Image SearchPlex as front-end fill-in form for multiple search engines.

Click a map by region at Apollo Advertising.

Read The Goldpages for a linked list of places to register your URL.

'White Pages' for Individuals

Look at a good list of both free and commercial indexes for personal e-mail and web pages, or look at NetScape's White Pages index .

Classified Ads

Although Gastown businesses and publications may carry their own classified ads, you may want to use the free, searchable index at the I-mall, which includes the archives of the newsgroup misc.forsale as a service to the Internet community.

Consider posting an announcement to an appropriate USENET newsgroup such as comp.infosystems.www.announce, biz.misc, alt.internet.services, or comp.internet.net-happenings. Before posting your short announcement (one screen full), read the other postings for a while to get a sense of the content and tone of the discussions.

Back to Gastown

If you have questions or comments about Gastown, send personal e-mail to:

The Mayor <mayor@gastown.com>