Posts Tagged ‘yahoo’

If you spend any time at all on the internet, then you know that nearly every major website has some form of community features.  Whether it is posting a review, setting up a profile, or making friends, most websites have features that allow visitors to participate in some fashion.

While there are many fantastic communities to participate in, for this article we will focus on Yahoo! Answers.  The principles are adaptable to many other sites.  My suggestion is to start with Yahoo! Answers and then expand to other community sites based on your own niche.

What is Yahoo! Answers?

Yahoo has a service called "Yahoo! Answers".  Yahoo! Answers is a web-based service where visitors can ask questions and other visitors will answer them.  Someone might ask a question and get several responses from various visitors.   It is rewarding to answer questions for people, but done right, you can use this tool to drive more business to your website.

Visit http://answers.yahoo.com and look around.  Search for questions related to your own industry.  Even if the question already has answers, you can add your own answers as long as the question has not been marked "resolved".

Be a Good Citizen – Tips for Success

Answer questions in your niche. Stay focused on topics within your target audience for your products and services.  You are building relationships in the virtual community and your answers should help you create a reputation as a subject matter expert.

Participate Often. You will build relationships, earn a few points, and create more links to your website.  Try to answer several questions once a week.  Yahoo! Has a point system.

Always vote on other people’s answers. Vote thumbs up or thumbs down, just vote.

Contribute value and go easy on the links. People do not mind if your answer has a link to your website as long as the answer was a good contribute to the question.  Answers like, "find your answer on my website …" are not good enough.  Contribute real value and place your link in a subtle fashion at the bottom of your article or wherever it fits best.  NOTE:  To place a link, simply include the http:// along with your website address.  You will see it is clickable when you preview.  If it is not clickable, you probably forgot to put the whole thing like this:  http://www.AnythingInternet.com .

Do Not Post Commercials. This is not an advertising system.  It is a community support system.  Always do your best to provide good value and keep the marketing verbiage to a bare minimum.

Once upon a time, it was easy to email total strangers. All you needed was their email address. Most people would give you their email addresses and were excited to hear from you, even if you were sending a marketing letter. Times have changed. People are inundated with spam, scams, and more.

If your business relies on sales or leads through the internet, your mailing list is a critical part of your business. It is common to have thousands of email addresses in your marketing database. If you are sending emails to your list, you need to know that the people on your mailing list are actually receiving your email. This affects your newsletters, account notices, and personal emails. You want to be able to contact your customers. How do you break through the spam filters and reach your clients?

So what is the problem?

Every spam filter program uses a complex set of rules to filter out spam. The rules keep getting stricter, so more emails end up in the spam folder than ever. Users rarely go through their spam folder looking for emails. If they do, then they can white list your address.

It is more than just convincing your customers to "want" to read your emails. You have to make sure they will actually receive your email in their inbox. You cannot count on them to do this on their own.

NOTE: If you use a spam filter, please go through your spam folder periodically and add any valid senders to your white list or to your address book. Spam filters will not block anyone from your address book.

The Solution

There are several methods for improving your delivery to your clients. Choose any, or all, of these strategies based on your own needs.

Use a Newsletter Service – Newsletter services have already taken the necessary steps to comply with the CAN-SPAM act and have already had their mail servers added to the white lists on all the major internet providers. This helps with newsletters. You will still want to take extra steps to ensure your other emails are making it all the way into the inbox.

Choose Your Words Carefully – Search engines look for emails with web addresses in the message, the word "free", graphics, and other triggers. To make sure your email is getting delivered, create a test email account on Yahoo.com, MSN,com, hotmail.com, gmail.com, aol.com, and other major domains. Enable spam filtering on those accounts. Send a test email to those accounts and see what happens. Do not add your sending address to those address books or white lists. The object is to use that test to determine what words to put in your email so that it gets delivered to your list.

Instruct Your Visitors to White List You – Display a message on your site that tells users how to white list emails. Basic instructions that simply say, "Add the following address to your white list," will usually do the trick. Most users will follow that advice. Send them the same info in your very first email to them. Be sure the very first email to them has a subject line that encourages them to open that first email.

TAG Your Subject Line – Every email from your newsletters and account management services should include a tag in the subject line. This makes it easy for them to identify your email. I like to put square brackets around the tag. Emails from my newsletter service might say, [AI News]. Then instruct people to watch for that tag in the subject line.

White List Your Own Address – Most people do not know this, but you can actually get white listed at the major email services. They all have a process. You can go to each of the major email providers, fill in a form, make a few promises, and they will add you to the list of white listed senders. You will have to promise to comply with the CAN-SPAM act. It is important that you learn the requirements and follow them carefully. It is not difficult.

The bottom line is that email is a permission-based marketing system, but permission is not enough. You need to educate them so that they actually receive your emails. You need to know that email is NOT a reliable delivery system. Never assume your emails get to the recipient. If you have something important to say, you should put the important message on the web page and then you can programmatically determine who read the message and who did not.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is actually more complicated than most people realize. After all, not every business needs results from the search engines. Some businesses only need local results. Then there are businesses that rely on search engines for 100% of their revenue.

Once you figure out what your basic needs are, then you have to determine who your real online competition is. In traditional terms, your competition is the business down the street. On the Internet, however, your competition is the website that is beating you out on your keywords. Your competition might not even sell the same products or services as you. If he is getting your search engine traffic, he is the competition.

Know Your Keywords

Your keywords are your “turf” on the Internet. Your success depends on two things. First, what are the keywords that represent your products or services? You should be able to figure that out on your own. Secondly, what are the keywords your clients are searching for when they want the products or services you offer?

Let’s say that you sell cars. If you sell Chevrolet vehicles, you can easily guess a few keywords. It is not a surprise that “Chevrolet dealership” is a key phrase. Since your prospective customers are generally searching within one city, you do not have to beat out the whole world for “Chevrolet Dealership”. You must have to beat out the local competitors. Phrases such as “Chevrolet Dealership Houston” or “Houston Chevrolet Dealership”, will be easier to target and will produce your best results.

Know the Competition

Search Google.com, Yahoo.com, msn.com, and see who comes up in the top five results for your most important keywords. It does not matter if those sites sell cars. You want to be on top for your phrase so whatever comes up … that is your competition.

Beat Them at Their Own Game

Analyze those sites for the most common SEO tactics. Then whatever they are doing, you should one-up them in every respect.

Here are a few tips on what to look for:

Keyword frequency – How many times do they use the words you are targeting? Count them. Use those words and phrases more frequently and more times.

Inbound links – How many links do they have coming in? Search google.com using this format: link:www.anythinginternet.com

Prominent Keywords – Bolded keywords, keywords in the website address, keywords in the title bar, and keywords in headings are all considered important.

There are many other things to look for. I recommend you hire a professional SEO consultant if search engine results are important to you. These tips will help you optimize a few of the most obvious parts of your web page. There are a lot more things to do. You want your keywords in your page title, your META tags, and you want to optimize every page on your website.

Increasing the number of inbound links can be a lot of work. If your competition has a lot of these, you should hire a professional to help you compete. Experts can add hundreds of new inbound links for you quite easily.

If you make changes to your website, prepare to wait a long time for those changes to be 100% effective. Some things could take six months to become fully effective.