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.