First off, I will give you the link to use to sign up for a Yahoo Search Marketing account.

If you want a $50 credit towards your account (which means you get $50 in free advertising), please use the following link. I recommend this because it is basically free money. In case you're wondering where I get these YSM $50 credits, I get them because I am a Yahoo Search Marketing Ambassador. They give them to me to use as incentives to get more people to sign up for YSM.

Click on the following link to access your free $50 Yahoo Search Marketing advertising credit:

http://www.reviewsolution.com/affiliates/free-credits.php

If for some reason you do not want to use the YSM $50 credit, you can always sign up using the following link.

http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srch/choose.php


Choosing the Right Account Type

When you are signing up, be sure to sign up for the Self Serve account. You can do this by clicking on the sign up button for Self Serve accounts. Please note that upon creation of the account you will be required to enter your credit card number and you will be charged a $5 account setup fee. This is a standard fee with every search engine.

After you click on the "Sign Up" button, you will be taken to a new page where it asks you to Select your country, and to select additional countries to receive information on. Only select the country you live in by using the drop down box. Don't check additional countries to the right. Once you're done, click on the "Continue" button.

Entering Campaign Name

On the next page you will be asked to "Enter a category name". Just type in "Make Money" here.

You will also see a large text box on the bottom right of the page titled "Enter Keywords". Just enter one keyword here and click on the "Continue" button at the bottom of the page.


Creating a Quick Text Ad

On the next page you will be asked to enter a title, description, and URL for your advertisement.

For title type in: 7 of These Ads Are Scams
For description type in: Find out which products are scams and which products are safe.
For URL type in: the address of your review site

After you type in everything, you will see a preview of what the advertisement looks like on the right side of your screen.

When you are finished, click on the "Continue" button at the bottom of the page.


Editing Keywords & Bids

You will now be taken to a new page which will ask you to enter in your bidding information, and it will also give you an estimated monthly search volume and bid price for your keyword.

Make sure that your bid price is set to $0.10 per click and that your maximum daily budget is set to $10.00 per day. Don't worry, this doesn't mean that you are going to spend that much.

Now click on the "Continue" button at the bottom of the page to continue.

On the next page you will be asked to enter your user information such as your name, address, email, etc. You will also be asked to create your YSM username and password. Complete all the information required and hit the "Continue" button at the bottom of the page.

The next page will ask you for your billing information and the page following will be a quick survey. Once you complete the survey your account will be created and you will receive an email notifying you of this.

Now log into your account so we can continue


Creating A New Campaign and AdGroup

Before you begin to create your campaign & adgroup (besides the campaign I told you to create earlier, which you can pause if you wish), you should read the rest of the guide covering the sections of creating a campaign, adgroup, and keyword list. This is because it will be a lot easier, quicker, and productive for you to read through these parts before you begin to create your advertisement.

Creating a new campaign
It is not very hard to create a new campaign for your account. There are two ways you can do this. The first way is to click on the "Create Campaign" button on the main page within your account (the page you see when you first login). It looks something like the picture below.

The second way is to click on the "Campaigns" button near the top of your account page.

After you click on this button you will be taken to your campaign page. On this page you will see a text link that says "Create Campaign". Click on this to create the campaign.

Once you click to create a new campaign you will be taken to a page which lists the steps you are about to take to create the campaign. When you are finished reviewing the list simply click on the "Get Started" button at the bottom of the page.


Choosing Locations
On the next page you are required to name your new campaign and you can create a description for your campaign to help you know more details about your campaign (the description text box will not affect your campaign no matter what you put in it, the description is meant to only help you in organizing your campaigns). You will also see the option for choosing your "geo-targeting preference". This is just a big phrase for choosing which countries you want to advertise in. If you remember when we first set up the YSM account, we were asked what country we lived in. Well if you have "Entire Market" selected (which I recommend doing) you will advertise to your country and your neighboring countries that speak the same language. If you have "Specific Regions" checked you will be able to choose a more specific area to advertise in such as a specific state, city, or territory.

Naming Your YSM AdGroup & other AdGroup settings

After you click on the "Next" button at the bottom of the page, you will be taken to a new page where you are asked to name your AdGroup.

You should name your AdGroup after the product you're promoting. So if you're promoting a dog training product, you should name your AdGroup "Dog Training".

You will also see settings for "Match Type" and "Distribution Tactic".

Distribution Tactic
This will tell you how your ads are going to be displayed. If the "Sponsored Search" is checked, then your advertisements will only be displayed on Yahoo.com. If both "Sponsored Search" and "Content Match" are checked, then your advertisement will be displayed on both Yahoo.com and other online search engines and webpage that use Yahoo's search engine. If you have both options checked, then you will receive more traffic. I recommend you have both options checked for now.

Match Type
Match type is an easy way for your account to cover a broader range of keywords. If you have the match type set for "Advanced" then Yahoo will display your advertisements for keywords similar to the keywords already in your account. For example, if you use the keyword "laptop" and you have the match type set to "Standard", then your ad's will be displayed on keywords like "lap top", "laptops", etc. If you have "Standard" selected you will only receive traffic for searches that match the keywords within your account. I recommend having "Advanced" selected.

After you name your adgroup, click on the "Next" button at the bottom of the page to choose your keywords.

Getting Keywords

In case you don't know what a keyword is, a keyword is basically a search term that someone enters into a search engine to find related webpages. So if you search online for "dog food" the word "dog food" is your keyword.

When you're prompted to enter keywords for your advertisement, I recommend you use the keywords that ReviewSolution has supplied for the review. You can see these keywords by going to the review page you want to advertise and clicking on the "How to Advertise this Page" link located at the bottom of the review page.

If you don't want to use the keyword list that ReviewSolution has supplied, you can always create your own keyword list by using the techniques below:

Here's what you should do:

1. Go to Google's Keyword tool by visiting the following website: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
2. Click on the tab titled "Site-Related Keywords"
3. Where it says "Enter a webpage URL…" enter the URL of the webpage you want to send your visitors to (remember I mentioned this earlier, this should also be your destination URL used in your test ad)
4. Then click on the "Get Keywords" button.

Google will now display a large list of keywords relevant to the review site address you've entered. Next to each keyword you will see a link titled "Add". Click on this link to add that keyword to the keyword list you want to use (your keyword list will appear on the right side of the page). Go through the list and add all the keywords that you feel are relevant to the review website.

Once you've selected all the keywords you feel are relevant to your keyword list look towards the right side of the page just under the last keyword in the keyword list that you've added keywords to. You should see something that says "Download These Keywords". When you see this, click on the link titled "text" to download these keywords in the form of a text file to your computer.

Now you have your keyword list for this review created.


Adding the keywords to the YSM Adgroup
This is very easy to do and there are two ways to do this.

The First Way is to create a new campaign or adgroup, and when you get to the page which tells you to choose keywords, you simply copy and paste your keyword list (the one you just created) into the box.


The Second Way

When you are finished adding keywords, simply click on the "Next" button at the bottom of the page.

Selecting Bids

On this page you will be asked to specify your maximum bid price for all of your keywords at one time. This means that for now all of your keywords will have the same maximum bid. Since YSM's minimum bid (the lowest amount of money you can pay per click) is $0.10 per click, I recommend that you set your bid price to $0.10 or $0.11. This way you will not be paying an absolute fortune on your advertising. There is a slight advantage of bidding $0.11 rather than $0.10. This is because a lot of advertisers set their bids at $0.10, and by setting your max bid one cent higher than theirs, you will have a higher ranking. Sometimes I look and see that there are 10 or more advertisers bidding $0.10 for a keyword, and all I have to do is bid $0.11 and I am automatically ranked higher than them.

When you first see the keyword page, you may see the following message, and if you do then don't worry, because it is perfectly normal.

Basically, all this message means is that Yahoo has found some duplicate keywords within your keyword list and they have removed the duplicates for you.

You may be thinking "I know I didn't have any duplicate keywords in my keyword list…". If you're thinking this, then remember back to the Match Type settings. If you checked the "Advanced Match Type" then Yahoo will delete the keywords that are similar to other keywords within your account. So if you use the keyword "laptop" then the keyword "new laptop" will be removed, because your advertisement will already be displayed when someone searches for "new laptop" because the "laptop" keyword will display it.


On the Bid page you will also see the following graphs:

A – This the your current Max CPC bid price for the AdGroup. This price will be applied to all of your keywords within the adgroup.
B - This is the estimated clicks the keywords within this adgroup are expected to generate per month.
C – This is the estimated position your text advertisements will be throughout the month.
D – This shows the number of clicks in the graph
E – This shows the average Max CPC for the graph

If you look at this part of the bid page, you will notice that there are two graphs. One graph is for the Sponsored Search and the other graph is for the Content Match. There are two graphs because you can bid differently for each of these search types.

After you enter your Max CPC, click on the "Estimate" button. This will display new estimates for your adgroup's performance. When you are done editing your AdGroup bids, click on the "Next" button at the bottom of the page.


Writing Your Text Advertisement

You will want your text advertisements to be catchy, accurate, and attention getting. I recommend using the text ads ReviewSolution has supplied. To access these text ads go to the page you want to advertise and click on the link titled "How to Advertise this Page" located at the bottom of the page.

If you decide to write your own text advertisements, I recommend basing your text advertisements after the text ads ReviewSolution supplies.

The Title should draw the users attention towards your text advertisement. Then the description should convince the user to click on your text advertisement to go to your review site.

In the picture above you will see an example of what the text advertisement looks like when you are creating it.

On the left of the page you see where you specify the title, description, destination URL, display URL, and the name of your adgroup.

Title – This is the first line of the text ad. It is often a different color so it will stand out more. It is usually the first line the user reads when they are looking at your text ad. The title's job is to make the user read the description of the advertisement.

Short Description – This is the actual text within your text ad. You describe the product as best as possible here. The descriptions job is to get the user to click on the advertisement to go to the website.

Destination URL – This is the actual page the user will go to when they click on the text advertisement. This is where you enter your review site's web address.

Display URL – You should enter the address ReviewSolution.com here.

Name of Your AdGroup – This is to help you to better organize the text advertisements within your account. It doesn't matter what you name the text ad, the name is only meant to make it easier for you to manage your text ads. It will not affect your advertising at all.


You will notice that there are two description options. One is for "Short Description" and the other is for "Long Description". I recommend only using the Short Description.

After you create your text advertisement, click on the "Next" button at the bottom of the page.


You will now be taken to a page titled "Review Your Ad Group". This page will just show you a brief overview of the settings you just applied to your account. You shouldn't need to adjust anything here so just click on the "Budget & Schedule Campaign" button at the bottom of the page.

This will take you to another page which will give you budget and campaign schedule options (campaign schedule just allows you to specify when you want your advertisement to be displayed, I recommend selecting "No end date". I recommend that you make sure the "Yes" option is selected in the frame that asks you "Would you like to set a campaign daily spending limit?".

When you are finished, click on the "Next: Activate" button at the bottom of the page. This will take you to your campaign page and your new adgroup and campaign will be activated shortly.


How to Avoid Potential Yahoo Problems

Like Google, Yahoo has shifted to majorly focus their attention to eliminating irrelevant keywords. This means that they are going to reward those who have relevant advertisements by displaying their ads above others who are bidding more and they will punish irrelevant advertisers by giving them a lower position regardless of their bid. The date they began doing this was February 5th 2007.


Basically, since the technique for avoiding the Google Slap works very well for all search engines, the Yahoo technique is going to be very similar.

The way you avoid being penalized by Yahoo is to organize your account with your website. If Yahoo looks at your account and sees that your advertising looks more like gibberish than a work of mathematical art, then you're going to get penalized. You see, Yahoo uses computers and robots to determine whether or not your account is relevant or not. If your account setup is sloppy then Yahoo will tell you that your keywords have a low click index and will penalize you by lowering your ranking without lowering your bid. But if your account is very organized then you will be rewarded with very low bids for your clicks.

Here's what you need to do:

Make sure you organize your keywords. By this I mean group your similar keywords together and put each group of keywords into its own adgroup. This way Yahoo will look at all of your keywords in your adgroup and think "These keywords are all related to each other, now it is much clearer to see what this advertisement is about".

Next Yahoo will look at your text advertisement in each AdGroup and will compare it to each keyword within that AdGroup. If your text advertisement is related to your keywords then you will be rewarded by Yahoo again. This is why we grouped similar keywords together and put the keywords into their own adgroup.

Now come the tricky part. You will need to link your keywords to your text ad, your text ad to your website, and your website to your keywords. What this does is tell Yahoo that you are the ideal advertiser. Instead of having random keywords with the same text advertisement you have specific keywords pointing to a specific text advertisement that goes to a specific website. To do this try to include the same keyword in your text ad and your website. Like if your keyword is "make money", include the phrase "make money" in your text advertisement, and also make sure the phrase "make money" is in your website text.

If you do all these things then Yahoo will be appreciative and will reward you with much lower bids, higher quality scores, and better rankings.


If you want one on one help with Yahoo Search Marketing I recommend signing up with the Affiliate Data Center at www.AffiliateDataCenter.com. There you will receive one on one help from me for Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN AdCenter.