Yahoo! Hosting Offers an Easy Way to Get Online

As a Publisher in our Network you no doubt already have a site up, running and getting valuable clicks. But there are sites and there are sites.

For example, you may be webmastering your employer’s online business, or you may have an ecommerce site or blog of your own. But you may also want an easy-to-develop site for your resume, portfolio or, perhaps, a new side business. Or maybe you have a less-than-web-savvy relative or friend who is starting a business and needs to put up an effective site quickly, with minimal hassle.

A solution to all of the above needs is Yahoo! Hosting’s Site Solution, a new, web-based site design tool. Site Solution is a super-easy way to get an effective site up quickly. It requires no HTML or other programming knowledge, and offers several elegant, customizable designs in a guided environment that takes you step-by-step through the process. In addition, Site Solution offers automatic site submission to the major search engines.

But we’ve saved the best for last. If you sign up now we’ll not only waive the set-up fee, we’ll give new hosting customers a 35-percent discount for the first two months*. Just visit the Site Solution page and enter the promo code YPNBLOG.

The new service has been getting some pretty good buzz in the b’sphere, including a short write up by Greg Sterling and a longer piece on ecommerce-guide.com.

—Guy Yalif, Director, Web Hosting Products

Our lawyers make us say the following (for fun, read it really fast like they do on the radio):

*Web Hosting discount offers are open to new customers who purchase Web Hosting plans and apply for 2 months, after which the then-current monthly or annual fees will be charged. Web Hosting discount fee offer expires on and must be redeemed prior to 12/31/2007. No other notice of the expiration of this offer will be given. All offers are open to new Yahoo! Small Business customers only, and are available only through Yahoo! Small Business. Customers are limited to one offer per customer on a single account for customer’s own purchase only. Offer is nontransferable and may not be combined with other offers and discounts, exchanged, or redeemed for cash. Other terms and conditions apply; see the Yahoo! Small Business Terms of Service when you sign up. Yahoo! expressly reserves the right to change the price or features of these services at its sole discretion anytime.

Avenue A | Razorfish wins award for “Choose Chase”

Last month we had the pleasure of presenting the good folks at Avenue A | Razorfish as the winner of the 2007 Yahoo! Searchlight Award for their work on the “Choose Chase” campaign.

It was our second year putting on the Yahoo! Searchlight Award showcase, which is highlighted by our top agency partners duking it out for the best advertising campaign that utilize search marketing. The awards are our way of celebrating the creativity and innovation of our search agency partners. Whoever says search isn’t creative, thought-provoking and innovative hasn’t had the pleasure of seeing our clients’ incredible work. We really couldn’t have been prouder of this year’s finalists.

This year Avenue A | Razorfish demonstrated that search campaigns can be used to build brand awareness, and that the message in search creative matters. This campaign made the case for developing “branding” search ads for high-volume keywords. Avenue A | Razorfish proved that a campaign building awareness around their client’s credit card program through search could be just as useful as one that drives users to sign up for the program.
 

Furthermore, the search creative reflected the branding messaging that was used in other media, both digital and analog. This is an incredibly powerful lesson, as the credit card acquisition space has historically been laser-focused on direct response metrics. The winning Avenue A | Razorfish campaign “shines a light” on a new strategy for measuring the power of search marketing as an awareness-building medium.

The other worthy finalists this year were:

• “Sprint-Talladega Nights,” presented by NeoSearch ‘
• “Special K,” presented by Leo Burnett
• “Lexus. All-new LS Launch, Unprecedented,” presented by Team One

All of the finalists presented  interesting, powerful campaigns, which were augmented by their search marketing components. For example, Leo Burnett’s offline advertising included TV spots, prints ads (in magazines like Shape and People), and re-branded cereal boxes, which all highlighted a very specific call to action: Search Special K at Yahoo!

Yahoo! implemented a custom-branded placement at the top of the search results page for searches on “Special K,” and the links drove users to SpecialK.com and the “Better in ’07” Yahoo! Health pages sponsored by Special K for an engaging brand experience. 

Team One’s Lexus campaign maximized the effectiveness of its online advertising with a holistic search and display campaign that echoed offline brand advertising.

All told, these integrated campaign strategies reveal how well search can work with a wide array of marketing needs. With all the progress we’ve made as an industry, we’re convinced there are still many new ways to make search useful for brands. I am sure that next year we’ll celebrate a new round of ground-breaking ideas that will push the industry further ahead. 

We plan to announce the call for entries in the Fall for next year’s awards, so stay tuned.

— Ron Belanger, VP, Agency Development

The Yahoo! Searchlight Awards and more

If you happen to be in Manhattan on Thursday, February 22, be sure and drop by the Yahoo! Searchlight Award show, which will be held on the 8th floor of the Time-Life Building, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, between 2:00 and 5:00 p.m. The entertaining and interactive show will celebrate the best and brightest in search advertising over the past year. A panel of industry experts will evaluate four agency search advertising campaigns and the audience will vote for the winner. While this isn’t exactly a publisher-centric event, it is a good chance to meet and greet successful folks in the search marketing field, get marketing ideas that you might be able to employ in your own business, be a part of the Yahoo! community, and have a good time. For more info, click here. 

More Upcoming Yahoo! Events
Yahoo! Publisher Network will be on-hand for these events over the coming weeks and months. Check back for more detail as the date of each draws near.

Lunch 2.0
When: February 21
Where: Yahoo! Mission College campus, Building 1, Training Rooms 3 &4
What: Meet us for sandwiches and lively conversation about what’s going on inside Yahoo! In addition to the Yahoo! Publisher Network, folks from Mail and MyBlogLog will also be on hand. Expect announcements!

South by Southwest Interactive
When: March 9 to 13
Where: Austin Convention Center, Austin, Texas
What: One of the best interactive meet-and-greets around, this year’s SXSW Interactive Festival will feature some of technology’s heaviest hitters. Yahoo! will be sponsoring a special party the evening of March 12, open to all registered SXSW Interactive attendees, and our own Cody Simms will be manning the panel “Online Publishers & Ad Networks” on March 10. 

Web BlogHer Business Summit ‘07
When: March 21 to 23
Where: Affinia Manhattan Hotel, New York City
What: A business summit for both women and men—web publishers, small business owners, media mavens, entrepreneurs and executives. Yahoo! Publisher Network will be welcoming all conference-goers with a cocktail party on opening night.

Web 2.0
When: April 15 to 18
Where: Moscone West Convention Center, San Francisco
What: The first event specifically designed to help teach Web 2.0 techniques and best practices to people in the trenches who are directly involved in the design, development, engineering, marketing and business of second-generation internet technology. We’ll be manning a booth, so look for us on the floor. (What’s web 2.0?)

EconSM
When: April 26
Where: Beverly Hilton Hotel, Los Angeles
What: We’re co-sponsoring The Economics of Social Media conference, which will focus on the business, financial and economic aspects arising out of the disruption being caused by the rise of social media, emerging business models, and how all this is changing the dynamics of many industries.

—Michael Mattis, Head Blogster

New release: Yahoo! Site Explorer badge

Ever wonder who’s linking to your pages, and from where, but can’t be bothered to dig into your log files? Yahoo! Site Explorer offers lazy webmasters—like this one—an easy way to measure links to (and within) your site. Just go to siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com and follow the instructions.

In addition, you can now share your linkbait success with the world by adding a Yahoo! Site Explorer badge to your site. This widget has a counter that displays how many links are coming into whatever page that it’s deployed on. When you or your users click on the badge, they’re taken to a page that lists who is linking to that page. As of this writing, our blog home page boasts more than 3000 links.

Setting up your site with a Site Explorer badge is easy. After you’ve set up your own Explorer account, just go the Site Explorer badge page, select your badge format, and copy and paste the code into your own website.

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor

Search advertising changes should benefit publishers

You’re probably hip to some of the hoopla by now. Yahoo! Search Marketing, which helps advertisers pinpoint potential customers and provides the ads that run on your pages, is in the process of upgrading U.S. advertisers to a new search marketing system. The initiative is part of an across-the-board Yahoo! effort to improve our offerings for advertisers, partners, publishers and users alike. You may have heard it referred to in the media as “Project Panama.”

What’s changing for advertisers
This ongoing effort involves phased releases of new enhancements, features and functionality. On February 5, Yahoo! will launch a new search marketing ranking model in the U.S. Under the current model, bids are ranked exclusively by bid amount. With this change, ads will be ranked in search results by both bid amount and ad quality.

The new ranking model  is designed to allow advertisers to focus less on competitive bidding practices and more on the quality of their ads. An ad’s quality will primarily be determined by its historical performance—its click-through rate relative its position in search results—as well as its expected performance relative to other ads displayed at the same time.

But what about me, the publisher?
We do not anticipate that this change should immediately affect your Yahoo! Publisher Network account—you won’t need to take any action. Over the long haul, however, encouraging advertisers to develop higher quality ads should bring up the value of our network for everyone, and benefit publishers in particular.

To learn more about the quality index and the new approach to ad ranking, check out our post on the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog. Also, be sure and check out the Yodel Anecdotal post from our CEO, Terry Semel, about what “Panama” means in the grand scheme of things.

—The Team

Raising the colors on Yahoo! Publisher Network

“Color” is a word with considerable value. It’s shaded with meaning. Expressions like “the color of money,” “color me old-fashioned,” “colorful language,” “local color,” “technicolor yawn” and “colorful character” rarely raise a hue or cry because of their cultural saturation, but they are still useful in letting others know the tone of your feelings and how your worldview is tinted—they let you reveal your true colors.

Each color has its connotations: Gray is associated with elegance; blue with peace, as well as technology; red with anger, protest and revolution—stand up for color and make a change!—green with fertility; yellow with joy; purple with sensuality and pink with gratitude.

Do you come from a red state or a blue one? Are you a full-fledged red or are you just a pink? Maybe you’re a patriot called to the colors? Are you red with rage? Green with envy? Does your cloud have a silver lining? Ever tied a yellow ribbon ’round the old oak tree? Did you know that people who have the colorful condition known as synesthesia can hear, taste, smell and even feel color.

At Yahoo! Publisher Network we like colors. Lots of them. That’s why we built a palate of 216 websafe colors and hues into our ad serving platform. That’s more colors than you’ll find a box of crayons. Don’t believe me? Just Yahoo! “crayons” and see for yourself. Your typical box of crayons has just 64.

In addition, you can upload any color of your choice, as long as you know the code for it. The possibilities are hexadecimal. In theory at least, there should be 16⁸, or 4,294,967,296, possible color combinations to use at your whim. Of course, not every single HTML color string will translate into a distinct color. But still, there are a lot of colors to choose from; maybe not a tretrigintillion or even a duotrigintillion, but more than enough to start your own color guard.

You’re free to dabble in our hues, and experiment with all the colors of our rainbow. You may not verge on a Van Gogh, and maybe your aesthetics don’t match Mondrian’s. Maybe you want your ads to stand out from your page, or maybe you want them to blend in. We’ll never tell you what colors you can and can’t use, as long as your users know they’re looking at “Ads by Yahoo!”

We’re not like those persnickety rock stars who insist that their dressing rooms be stocked with only the green M&M’s. Consider us colorblind, but in a good way.
 

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor

This social media service will be a boon to publishers

As announced this morning, MyBlogLog has officially joined the Yahoo! family.  As an early user and proponent, I’m personally very excited about this, but more importantly I’m here to report that it’s another terrific tool we can offer to help publishers analyze, understand, and maybe even increase their traffic.

MyBlogLog’s signature Reader Roll’s functionality is easy to grasp, but its implications to publishers are powerful: This distributed community widget turns passive readers into mini-publishers and connects publishers to each other via readers-in-common. In this way, the Reader Roll deepens the publisher/reader relationship—and transforms the entire web into a distributed social network.

Is that all, you ask? Nope, there’s more! MyBlogLog also offers full-fledged publisher analytics, which combine with its community features to create a unique and powerful way for publishers (be they large media companies, serious webmasters, or hobbyists) to learn about their readers. We’re not just talking about page-view counts and referral URLs here, but names, faces and personalities, too.

How it works is very simple. Check out this Reader Roll mock-up (or the live one in the right-hand column):

It’s the last five readers of this blog who are already registered with MyBlogLog. You’ll find similar lists on YPN friends Read/Write Web, TechCrunch, and AVC, along with thousands of other sites, blogs, and personal pages across the web.

If you click on the user photos, you’ll see a profile page that includes any websites the users claim as publishers (each of which has its own MyBlogLog page), join their contact networks or the community networks for any of their sites, leave them a message, and see what links are “hot” among their readership. You can also see any sites for which they’ve joined the reader community, information that the users have elected to share (such as their Yahoo! IM handles, Flickr usernames, and the like).

Once you sign up as a publisher, you get access to all the same kinds of information about your readers, plus detailed “eyes-only” web analytics stats in a really easy-to-use format. You can even expose some of that information to your readers, if you like. Note also that there’s a leverage effect to the network, because your readers, by interacting with each other, deepen their affinity as your audience—and because you can get information and insight not only on your readers’ activities on your site, but, in aggregate, off your site as well (for example, articles popular among your readers). You may even find that you get new traffic from visitors of other sites that you read or are similar to yours—my MyBlogLog community page has been among the largest sources of traffic to my own blog since I joined. 

Thus MyBlogLog helps us offer another set of innovative social media tools to publishers. Over the longer term, the terrific team that built it will continue to expand upon the explosion of publisher-enabling technologies that can help you drive revenue, grow traffic, and build cool experiences… but we’ll leave the details up to speculation for now ;-).

In the meantime, congratulations to Eric, Todd, Scott, and the rest of the talented MyBlogLog team.  Please welcome them to the Yahoo! publisher community and give their services a whirl!

—Greg Cohn Senior Manager, Market Segments

Announcing the new Tagometer from del.icio.us

Those clever mash-up meisters over at del.icio.us—the social bookmarking website where the world collects its favorites—have been at it again. This time they’ve come up with a widget called the Tagometer that you can use to enhance your site, help drive relevant traffic and hook up with others of like interests. And, it’s free.

Like the static del.icio.us badge, the new widget includes a button inviting readers to bookmark your page on del.icio.us. The Tagometer takes it a step further, however, offering an up-to-date ticker of those who’ve already bookmarked the page, plus a list of the top tags.

Your users can click on the ticker to see more detail: who bookmarked your page, when they did it, and how they tagged it.

For more info, check out the del.icio.us blog.

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor

Yahoo! Answers turns one

At one, most human babies are hardly walking, let alone answering difficult questions. But our one-year-old, Yahoo! Answers has already provided 160 million answers to 60 million users around the world. For more on the birthday celebration, visit the Yahoo! Answers blog.

Yahoo! Answers taps into the need that people feel to connect with others through social media, to share knowledge and get their questions answered—in a sense, to personalize the online world. It’s a huge trend, according to a recent Harris Interactive survey. The survey says that fully a third of all adults online have used a Q&A site of one kind or another, and more than half of those say that the information they have gleaned has influenced a decision they made. Check out this press release on the study.

Web publishers, online retailers and the like may be able benefit from putting a Yahoo! Answers badge on their site and by becoming active members of the Answers community, such as SmallBizResource.com has done. By using the badge and answering questions, web publishers can help grow their reputations as “gurus” in their fields, gaining user trust and helping drive traffic. For example, if you have a site that deals in, say, Apples and Oranges, it’s easy to put a badge on your site that allows people to ask questions—which you can then answer—about those tasty fruits.

For more info on how you can use Yahoo! Answers on your own web pages, go to the Answers Web Services page on Yahoo! Developer Network.

Happy Birthday, Answers team. Now blow out your candle.

—Michael Mattis

A new poll suggests a holiday boom for small online businesses

Holiday shopping can be a drag. Long lines, surly clerks, pushy crowds, miles of walking—at the end of the day, your dogs are beat. Fortunately consumers know what a pain holiday shopping can be and are turning to shopping online as an antidote to aggravation. In fact, according to a recent poll conducted by Yahoo! and Harris Interactive, 76 percent of shoppers polled said they plan to shop for gifts online—some of them while at work.

That’s good news for online retailers of all sizes. But what’s even better for many of you self-service publishers is that 75 percent of those polled said that they were likely to purchase gifts online from small businesses. Sixty-three percent said that online specialty, niche or boutique retailers were among the “best places” to shop for hard-to-find gifts.

The 3.3 keys to success
The survey showed that three key factors help consumers determine whether they might shop online at small business sites: a secure payment system, easy customer checkout and free shipping. In addition, participants stressed ease of navigation, a simple checkout process and easy registration.

Ads vs. e-commerce
Some online retailers may be understandably leery about displaying contextual ads on their pages, fearing that they may drive customers to the competition before a sale has been made. But what about serving up ads after a sale is made and the checkout process is complete—on the Thank You or Confirmation page, for example—or in the event that checkout has been abandoned? Using Ad Blocking and Ad Targeting publishers can help ensure that the ads they show are unlikely to be those of direct competitors, and more likely to be those of businesses complimentary to their own, while still in the interests of their users.

To learn more about this survey, visit Yahoo! Media Relations.

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor