I-Sales Digest
"Data -> Information -> Knowledge -> Wisdom"
Published by: AudetteMedia www.audettemedia.com
Moderated by: John Audette ja@audettemedia.com
October 18, 2000 Issue # 1192
"Getting Listed on Yahoo: Greased Palms Method"
~ Robert Farris
From: Robert Farris <<>
Topic: Getting Listed On Yahoo: Greased Palm Method
Paul Crane wrote:
Here's a little tip on how to get listed in Yahoo! The best way
to get listed is to simply buy the minimum $100 worth of advertising - therefore qualifying yourself as a valuable customer. Once you've
done so, Yahoo! is usually happy to oblige you in any way possible, (so he says) including listing your site in applicable categories. This suggestion even aroused our moderator. :))
[ moderator comment ] Can anyone verify this? If true, it: (a)
sounds like the best way to get listed into Yahoo by far and (b) doesn't speak very well of Yahoo's editorial integrity.
Well, our company has followed and tried just about every 'method'
in the book... including this 'greased palms' Yahoo method.
So last January when we heard about this 'method' of getting into
Yahoo; we decided it was worth the $100 to see if this back door method existed. We own a flower price comparison site
www.discountroses.com and with Valentines Day just around the corner
we decided to do a Yahoo banner buy for our flower site. Now we oppose banners, but to get our site listed and to get our flower
site promoted in one swoop, that was just too good of a deal to pass.
We learned two lessons... maybe more.
1) Yahoo does not give preferential treatment to banner buyers.
After our banner ads were running on Yahoo, we emailed Yahoo and said, "Hey, we got a banner running on your site and so we would
like to get our site listed as well," they responded with the URL to the submission page and something to the effect of "lots of luck."
2) Banners can be very ineffective. Here it was just before
Valentines Day, we offer discount roses and we had a whopping 27 people click thru our banner out of 1,000 impressions. I have read
(and believe to be true) that the content, quality, image etc can heavily influence click-thru's, and while our banner wasn't a
Picasso, it was similar to many banners being run. But a 0.27% click-thru rate - with a major flower buying event, was less than we
anticipated.
3) We decided to hedge our bets and got our flower site into almost
all of the engines/directories and had over 8,000 visitors in the two weeks leading up to Valentines Day.
** So what does this all mean??
a) You are best to submit directly to Yahoo and pay the $199
business express submission. This 'greased palms' Yahoo method (that Paul suggested) does not work.
b) We also confirmed (like we didn't already know); that the most
cost-effective marketing is by the search engines...and not banner ads. More and more companies are realizing the marketing power of
search engines; that is why our company has a 4+ week delay for any new corporate marketing clients. Good problem to have. :))
Robert Farris
How To Internet.com
www.howtointernet.com
// Corporate Search Engine Marketing Services //
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