The most direct approach to publicising your web is to post an announcement for it to one or more newsgroups. This is an extremely effective way to seed a web launch and start the turbo-charged publicity of word-of-mouth.
The main difficulty is deciding which newsgroups to choose and how to frame the announcement. If you make an announcement in an newsgroup whose topic is not closely-enough related to the subject of your web, you are likely to be flamed. If you word your announcement in too commercially aggressive a manner, you will also be flamed.
The secret is to post a carefully worded announcement to a small selection of relevant newsgrous. Keep an eye on the newsgroups and if anyone posts followups, reply to them so as to keep the thread going. Then let word of mouth do the rest.
One newsgroup you should definitely post to is:
whose sole purpose is to carry announcement of new webs.
Newsgroups with the word "announce" in their name are usually designed to carry announcements on particular topics. If your new web contains information on such a specific topic,it would make sense to post to such a group.
Here is a list of all the newsgroups (that I could see from Australia in April 1996) that contained the string "announce". Choose wisely and take a look in the newsgroup before posting. You can click on any of the newsgroups below to browse the latest messages posted to them.
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