12.04.05 : Business Mail List and Internet Release re: commercial promotion via Elounda77.net

Dear Business Owner,

Thank you for having previously expressed an interest in promoting your business at Elounda77.net, one of Digital Freedom Ltd's affiliated sites for Greece. As you are probably aware GNMRP and subsequently Digital Freedom Ltd has fully financed the creation and promotion of these sites up until now in order to assess the type of content demanded by internet surfers and regional visitors in addition to the costs of marketing, maintaining, expanding and serving such pages. We hope that if you availed yourself of our services and promotion placements, given free to interested parties during our evaluation period, that your business has benefited from them.

As we have now reached the point where our Greek sites have begun to prove themselves as viable projects, and which we are committed to expanding, we are now contacting all those businesses who currently receive free promotional banner exposures, business ads and the likes to inform them that commercial services will be offered from April 19th 2005. Consequently all adverts and banners, that are now displayed free of charge, will be removed from the relevant sites and replaced by paid-for advertising placements.

After almost two years research into variables such as available traffic, search engine advertising and click through prices we have arrived at a variable market pricing structure otherwise known as the Athens77.com Market Base. This is a changing guide to the price of available advertising at any given moment throughout our Greece related sites and we hope that it will allow even those businesses with only a modest budget to gain exposure, over the year, at a competitive and sensible rate according to the time of year selected and demand by other users. Consequently, we have devised the following two different methods by which businesses and other site owners can purchase advertising exposure at our own affiliate sites and beyond through Athens77.com.

A) Package based advertising: For those who wish to know exactly what they will be spending each month of the year these may be purchased in advance at the current rate for your chosen package. These are currently listed at http://holiday77.net/mirrors/ath77/packages.shtml . These are continuous packages requiring payment each month, usually for a minimum of twelve months. Prices will be fixed for the duration of the package from the time of order and according to the prices shown at that time on the page identified above.

B) For those who wish to manage their promotional campaigns on an ongoing basis; to stop and start as they wish and to vary their advert placements according to their own circumstances, current demand and prices at any given time, we also offer membership of the Athens77.com scheme. Costing 75 Euros to register as a member you will be able to purchase any placements available at a given time either at the listed variable price or, for those where demand is extremely strong, by auction bid. The Athens77.com market base is currently listed at http://holiday77.net/mirrors/ath77/base.shtml . As a member you will, at the least, receive back your registration fee in exposures over the course of the year calculated at the rate on the day when you joined. Additionally, you can purchase listed advertising types and, should you wish, sell advertising exposures on your own approved site in the Auction Zone, according to minimum trading quantities and commission fees.

The move to offering commercial services in no way affects those free services that we will continue to offer at various sites, where applicable, such as Directory Text Links, Free Webcards and Athens77.com Reviews. It is, instead, the method by which we feel we can best generate the necessary revenue to continue to produce our pages, expand the reach of our sites, promote supporting businesses and offer further online community services. We hope that you decide to move onto one of our commercial plans but, should you decide not to, please feel free to continue using our free services where applicable.

With our best wishes and hopes to hear from you soon,

The Athens77.com team
Digital Freedom Ltd (UK)