Yahoo! Search Marketing

Just like with the MSN AdCenter program, Y!SM has occasional freebies too for new

members. I found one for you all, this time, worth $25 to any new sign-ups.

Simply go to Yahoo.com, and click at the bottom where it says “Suggest a Site.”

The page will then take you to an account login screen if you’re not already logged in. Do so, and then the next screen will be the familiar website URL suggestion form. (You ARE submitting your urllist.txt sitemap here, right?)

On that very page, at the bottom, there is a $25 credit link for Y! Search Marketing. (Until this offer is gone, but I bet it will last a while.)

Like MSN AdCenter, Y!SM requires a $5 deposit. Unfortunately, the Y!SM minimum bid is higher than anyone else’s at $0.10 per click!

Still, because of this higher entry barrier and lesser popularity than AdWords, this can still equal upwards of 20-75 highly targeted visitors to your site.

Yahoo! Groups

Despite their no-marketing policies on many of the boards there, many have found an effective way to market through Yahoo! Groups that doesn’t seem spammy.

They simply network. It’s a little more time-consuming than posting an Ad and moving on, but it has worked since the dawn of Commerce and works here in online channels too.

Since there are uncountable thousands of groups to choose from, you’re sure to find one on your niche topic to join and participate in. The majority of Yahoo! Groups out there are open to any new members who simply confirm their email addresses.

Once in, all you really have to do to take advantage of all these prospects is to talk about your shared interest with them. Don’t tell everyone what you do up front unless you’ve found one of those rare few groups that are just for networking businesspeople. (Those will have hundreds of posts a day though, operating much like a Safelist. No one reads all of that stuff!)

There are some groups that let you just post your ads as long as you put some thought into it, not simply pasting a link and moving on. Other groups are more restrictive, it’s up to the group owners to set those preferences.

The problem with the less restrictive groups is of course that fewer people actually read the posts, so what you want is to find the happy medium boards, halfway between “all postings ok” and “restrictive.” Inside any group you would want to join, you will do best to try and answer the question someone else asks with your business being part of the solution.

In case this sounds familiar, it’s exactly like Forum marketing. Never sound spammy, offer help and advice, and only market when it’s part of a solution to someone else’s question.

Go to http://groups.yahoo.com to get started. It’s a huge place but well worth the effort in any niche where people want to get familiar with other people before buying from them.

Yahoo! Answers

I’ve been having fun while testing out this resource. It seems that Yahoo! Answers is not a bad little way to pick up some extra Web 2.0 traffic… Although it will never flood your site with hungry buyers.

Head over to http://answers.Yahoo.com sometime and give it a go just for fun.

Don’t waste your time Asking questions of course, go directly to the Open Questions in a category that your niche market would fall under. Read through any question titles that haven’t gone to voting yet and if your websites or opportunity would make a good fit as an answer to their question, don’t be shy about hopping in and letting the asker know about it.

Certainly you shouldn’t just say something obvious like: “This site has your answer: www.blah.com” No, the point in Y! Answers is to give them instant answers to their questions.

So spend a few sentences explaining it to them, and end with your link in the resource box. That’s it, you’re done, move on to the next answer.

I have found if I spend one hour a day doing this for about a week, I can have an initial boost of 20 site visitors a day for that week and then an ongoing 5 or so for a long time afterwards.

Surely it’s no great flood, but these are targeted visitors that can keep coming for a long time. –Especially when your answer is chosen as the best answer.

The only reason I only gave this free marketing method 2 stars in quality is that these people are hardly ever in the buying mindset… So this tactic is much better for people who are just looking to feed their AdSense farms than for those who are doing actual sales.

Web 2.0

This catchphrase describes the new & popular Social engineering, networking, and bookmarking sites out nowadays, such as MySpace, YouTube, Digg, Squidoo, Del.icio.us, Fark, Furl, and so forth… There are Thousands of them now and more growing every day.

They are broad in scope and purpose, but on a root level, they all exist so that Humans can share & interact online. We find information more relavent when coming from others like ourselves than if google just puked it out onto a page after entering two little keywords…

Some Web 2.0 sites are great for us to market with, especially when they have a large member database.

I have singled out many the best ones for our purposes as of June 2007, and you can find them independently reviewed in other sections of this Encyclopedia.

See: “Social Bookmarking,” “Digg,” “MySpace,” “Craigslist,” “Videos,” (YouTube) “Squidoo,” and “Yahoo! Answers.”

Viral Marketing

You are reading a very Viral eBook right now. Wait! Get your mouse away from your virus scan button; there is nothing wrong or involving mischievous software in Viral marketing.

In Internet Marketing terms, any type of content that allows you to pass incentives along is referred to as “Viral.” In this book, there are a few Affiliate links that normally I alone would get some kind of referral fee for if you were to click on them.

However, with the use of some special software that allows PDFs to be “Re-Brandable” (meaning others can make the affiliate links theirs instead of mine) I’m giving anyone who wants the ability to make some money and pass my work along for me.

For the launch of the eBook I won’t have to do very much. I’m going to tell my list, of course. I’m going to place it on my site and maybe send some traffic exchange or safelist traffic to that page. Mainly, however, I’m going to get a few JV partners to re-brand it and send it to their lists. That’s it; all my marketing will be complete.

Video Marketing - (Including YouTube.com)

Thanks to YouTube.com, (#4 in Alexa currently, Still going up!) online Video is “in” right now in a major way.

All you need to do to grab some of this traffic is to make your own simple video on your niche’s topic.

It doesn’t even have to be a music video or a well scripted video… Nor a big budget video or heck, even an interesting video. Like everything else in Marketing, attaching the right Keywords to your video will get it found. And in your video, much like an Article or a Podcast, you simply present a “Call to Action” that gets them to click over to your website.

Even Better… With Camtasia you can simply set the movie to automatically re-direct them to your website when it’s finished!

Videos can also be used on your site as content, which in fact is a great use for them… Video is the highest form of content on the web right now, as proven by YouTube. However, for our purpose here today, you should come to think of making videos as the same thing as writing articles… Plus a little bit of a software learning curve.

Traffic Exchanges – Automatic

There is something to be said for Automatic Exchanges too. Although everyone prefers their traffic to be highly targeted, there are times in which sheer bulk traffic has its advantages.

Do you know how Alexa.com gathers its’ data on how popular websites are? It depends on people who download the Alexa Toolbar, and that program constantly reports back to Alexa which websites they are viewing.

Naturally not everyone uses this tool, especially since McAfee and Norton spyware scanners identify it as a security threat! However, the largest segment of the population that uses those Alexa bars would of course be the people who care about their Alexa ranking the most… Internet Marketers.

ESPECIALLY the ones who use traffic exchanges. You’ll find that a large number of traffic exchange members have the Alexa Toolbar installed and their browsers are set to run the automatic exchages every night.

Traffic Exchanges – Manual

Traffic exchange websites, either manual or automatic, are simply places that shows you a bunch of websites, and for every one you look at, your website is displayed to others on the exchange.

These aren’t Banner Ads or Impressions of some other kind of Ad, this is truly traffic to your site, although it’s not targeted.

Manual Traffic exchanges bring visitors that are more targeted than Automatic exchange visitors, because you know that every one you get is someone who is actually looking at the page.

Automatic exchanges, by comparison, allow you to leave the program running while you go to sleep for the night and wake up with a couple hundred credits in the morning… Not exactly top quality traffic.

Even Manual exchanges suffer in quality a little because you know that the person looking at your page is pressured to move along in 15 or 20 seconds, and also that they don’t fit into any one demographic… Nothing there is binding them to any other niche other than that of a generic Internet Marketer. (Putting this kind of campaign in the IM2IM Niche with Safelists, Trafficbars, and list builders.) 

TrafficBars (Built into your Browser)

Instant Buzz and Free Traffic Bar, are two unique and unusual applications that allow marketers to market to other marketers quite effectively. There may be others but these two have the sector cornered so far.

Their concept is simple enough, you build up free Ad impression credits just by surfing the websites that you already go to. (You never have to go anywhere you wouldn’t already want to… This is nothing like a traffic exchange program in that respect.)

Both traffic bars display Ads to other internet marketers who load these programs into their browsers as well. The ads are cute, sometimes funny, little one-liner text Ads that either change when you reach a new page, or change at a pre-set amount of time.

I give them a higher-than-usual quality rating only because anyone using these methods would already assume that the target market would be only to other Internet marketers. (Inside the IM2IM niche)

If you try to use these to market to a different niche, such as golfers or horse trainers, then the amount of clicks you’ll get will be very low.

Since delivery is instant, and targeted text ads are always high in quality to the people that do click on them, this method is a great way to test your Ad campaign quickly, if not to be used for full-fledged advertising itself.

See: “List Builder Traffic Strategy” at the back of the book for more on them both.

Testimonials - (A Subset of Link Building)

There are endless products sold online that the owner of would be more than happy to publish a testimonial about. Most info-product sellers have a whole page set aside on their website just to display testimonials, and they actively have to go out and drum up the first batch of them before they can properly launch their product!

It doesn’t really matter if you find them before their product launch or years afterwards, you can still get great, targeted links to your website from these short blurbs.

The nature of testimonials is that the more you provide proof that you exist, the more the business owner will be compelled to display your link, closest to the top.

Give it some thought. If you just send in a testimony that says:

“Your product rocks!

-Bob Jones”

Then the site owner might not even publish it because it’s not a ‘credible’ testimonial that proves that you exist and he didn’t make that entry up.

Squidoo Lenses

Any Internet Marketers not Squidooing right now simply haven’t tried it yet! This exciting Web 2.0 application is truly a Business Marketer’s dream come true. You can think of it as MySpace, but for serious professionals. It’s a lot like being given editorship of your own topic at About.com, but with even more functionality!

A lens is a web page on their domain that “brings into focus” your niche topic in a new and dynamic way. It’s a place for you to show off everything you know about your topic, as dynamically as possible.

Started in the Fall of 2005, within one year flat Squidoo had already gotten itself into the top 1000 sites according to Alexa, and it’s been pretty steady ever since, slowly growing. (It’s #601 today, still steadily growing.)

I believe a lot more Internet Marketers would use this service if they only knew about it. I’ve even witnessed many Squidoo pages pop up in the #1 spot at Google for that lensmasters’ keywords!

They’ve now got about 180,000+ lenses, although considerably fewer members… A few people have cranked out many lenses on all of their favorite topics, so there’s no reason you can crank out one for each of your business ventures or marketing ideas.

Solo Ads

Refers to the sending out full-page Ads to eZine list subscribers other than those on your own list.

Social Bookmarking

Digg, Technorati, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Fark, Furl, even Netscape. Web 2.0’s largest trend has created over 1,000 of this new breed of “Tagged News sites.” On them we mere

humans share our online bookmarks with each other, and on the latest incarnations, we vote them up and down against each others to point out which ones are the most interesting or useful.

These tools are great, and their power is staggering at times… But all they do is essentially just use humans to duplicate Google’s work to the same end!

Why would we go through such trouble? Because computer algorithms still just don’t “know” their resources the way humans do. Having another person select a website and “tag” it as relevant to your keyword is much more intuitive for us to find resources with. It has its problems too, mainly when combining keywords, but overall it’s becoming an extremely popular way for people to find other websites.

SiteMaps

Both Google and Yahoo! let you write a “map” of your website and submit it to them, so their spiders will know in advance exactly what to go index and how often. This has nothing to do with your website’s “Sitemap” page, those are for a human being’s eyes, although technically those make it a little easier on the spiders as well.

Google’s spider map is commonly a file named “sitemap.xml” that must be placed on the main web directory of your server host. Google demands that it be written in the XML language, which looks a lot like HTML except for a few other commands. Don’t worry, you won’t have to write a single line of code for this. There’s an excellent free tool coming up in a minute to write these for you.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization is big business. The number of companies out there providing SEO services is quite staggering, and it’s growing every day. Does that mean it’s too difficult to do all by yourself?

Not at all. It’s very involved, and it will take a little time and ongoing effort, but it’s not rocket science, and you can even do everything you need to organically Rank #1 in all major search engines by yourself, all for free.

When I opened my SEO Services business in 2004 I only had experience working with my own websites before that point, and I learned VERY quickly one last, very important thing about SEO… 

It’s personal.

If you pay a big company to optimize your website for you, as opposed to you learning how and doing the optimization yourself, then you’ll never be able to rank as highly. Another company cannot have the very discreet knowledge of your businesses’ keywords and market that you had to learn the hard way.

Safelists

An often dismissed way of advertising online is by using a Safelist. It’s named that because you have to agree not to report the flood of emails you get as spam… So the emails you’re agreeing to use is therefore “Safe” from spam accusations, no matter how many come in each day. I normally get a few hundred emails daily just from the three accounts I mention below… Way more than I or anyone else is planning to read through.

Safelist’s major problem, which everyone agrees is substantial, is that no one really reads these emails. Conversion rates (people actually clicking a link in one of the emails) are down in the toilet around 0.0001%.

RSS – (Syndicated Content)

There are actually many great uses for RSS, which stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” Website Publishers & especially Blog owners should use RSS feeds in their pages to give fresh, on-topic

content to their readers each day without having to lift a finger. Alternatively, they can offer their own RSS feed to other webmasters so that those other sites can publish their site content elsewhere (with a link back to their site, naturally.)

Your visitors will like having the fresh industry news there at a glance. I know that I certainly appreciate my Yahoo! news start page portal, which is nothing but 50 RSS Feeds all crammed together.

Press Releases – (A subset of Link Building)

Much like Article Marketing, writing and submitting press releases can be an incredibly effective way

to get attention to your website or cause. 

However, not just any informative article will do for a press release; these are meant to go to the News agencies of the world… So your submission has to be at least a little newsworthy & time-sensitive.

Many businesses apply this tactic by hyping up their product launches, writing a press release about the release of their upcoming product that is factual but implies that the launch is quite a newsworthy event where they are located.

Pay Per Click Freebies

Other than the big-name traffic like Google, MSN, and Yahoo!s text-ad programs, there are endless

competitors for pay-per-click venues… More than you could imagine.

So many in fact, that yep, you guessed it, there are freebies here too for us to take advantage of. How much? Well, how about $1,040 in PPC money, without even showing a credit card? (With minimum bids as low as $0.005!)

These types of “Old School” PPC engines are the dinosaurs of the net. Most of these companies you’re about to see are older than Google, and even older than any kind of Search Engine Ranking!

Opt-In

As in Opting into a subscriber’s list.