|
 |
|
BUSINESS BASICS CHANNELS 
|
Yahoo Floats, Withdraws, Trial Balloon That Would Make Business Express Submission ($199) Mandatory For Commercial Sites Last April, the stock market dropped alarmingly for technical stocks, particularly Internet-based ones. Growing quickly while losing buckets of money became a bad idea and a number of the dotcoms that were caught when the bank window slammed shut in April have since gone out of business. Yahoo was making a profit in April. Most of their money came from advertising but an increasing amount had started to come from their $199 Business Express service. Two weeks ago, Yahoo posted new information on its site that Business Express is now mandatory for all U.S. commercial sites. As of this week, that "mandatory" element had been revised but could be reintroduced at any time. If you've been thinking about getting your site listed in Yahoo, it is time to do it. Soon, you might have to pay $199 for a service that you can now get for free. Is there any good news in this potential change? Yahoo has had difficulty reviewing sites and getting them into the directory because they did not have enough reviewers. Commercial sites that pay the review fee now get reviewed within 7 days instead of dragging on for weeks or months. You will get a “yes” or a “no” answer in seven days and you can make one appeal. The pay for review, however, does not guarantee a spot in the directory or placement in the directory. Yahoo follows LookSmart which has required that all commercial sites pay a submission fee. The company said that it intends to provide a global directory of all English commercial information sites. How We Got ABCs of Small Business Listed on Yahoo We had submitted information to Yahoo several times on our previous site, www.ventureconsult.com, without success. Finally, we decided to take it seriously and to make sure that our site had the best chance for listing in the Yahoo Directory. We also resolved to use the Business Express service so that we would get a yes or no answer within a few days. We read a number of guides to getting listed on Yahoo, engaged a web design firm for our new site and buckled down to make sure that our pages were clean, our spelling was correct, the pages loaded quickly and that all of the links worked. At about this time, I received an email from Harmony Major offering to sell me a copy of her Yahoo!Secrets. Harmony has a very good reputation in the Internet Marketing community. She’s smart, has studied what gets into Yahoo and where it is placed. Short story: We bought her report, spent an extra 3 weeks following her suggestions and used the Business Express Yahoo submission. Then we asked her to review the site. She said we would get listed. Six days later, we were in the small business information category. She is selling this e-report at http://www.yahoosecrets.com/ for $49.97. ABC’s gets no commission on this report but we believe it helped us get listed. If $199 might make a difference to your business, now is the time to give your best shot at getting well-placed in the Yahoo Directory for free. If you just want to get in, we recommend doing your best and then submitting with the Business Express service. -Cynthia Nemeth-Johannes |
|