How Can I Monitize My Yahoo Group?

Written by Terry Brazil

Monday, 18 September 2006

Many people overlook the power of running your own Yahoo, MSN, and Google group. These groups are very niche oriented and can often times yield thousands of members. It is very easy to start up your own group for free that you can promote affiliate and resale rights products to. The first thing you need to do is select a popular and active niche topic. To make this easy you should write down a list of at least ten things that you are interested in or have experience in. This will make posting to your group very easy to do. Now that you have your list of topics made it is time to choose a winner. To do this we will turn to a tool called Niche Bot. Simply go to nichebot dot com and type your first topic in the space provided and hit search. You will now be shown the top ten related search terms. We are not really worried about how easy it will be to get ranked in the search engines since this will not be our focus. Most of our traffic will come from other groups as well searches done on the group hosts (Yahoo, MSN, ect..) main page. In this case we want to find a topic that has lots of searches done on it to make sure our group topic is popular. Now you should have a smaller list of wining topics. But we want to do one more thing before starting your group. What you need to do now is search for your main topic on Google. On the right hand side of your search results you should see the paid ads. Look through them and make sure that people are selling digital products. This will ensure that your target audience is willing to buy online. For now just choose one of the ones that are left over to start your first group with. You by no means want to get overwhelmed when starting out so start with only one topic. You can start your group on any site that has such an option. The most popular sites that have groups are Yahoo, MSN, and Google. I suggest starting a group on all of these sites. We will not go into any detail here since it is pretty self explanatory and each site differs. Once you have your groups setup you will want to make your first post. Once you post to one of the groups you can also put the same post on the others. This way you should have three mirror groups. Your posts can be almost anything. Some of the easiest things to post will be articles and excerpts from other sites with your opinion mixed in. Your group will be very much like an exclusive blog. Your members can post messages to the group to hold a conversation as well as ask questions and make comments. You will find yourself getting new members all of the time. As long as your topic is popular members of the site will find your group via searches as well as word of mouth. It may take a little while to build a good fan base this way but there is a couple of tricks you can pull out of your sleeve. The first and most effective one is to JV with other group owners. You will most likely find that someone else has created a similar group who's topic is related to yours. The easiest way to JV with another group is to simply join it. Once you have joined you should make an informative post or two to get known as a reliable source. Now that you have made yourself seen look for the group owners email. Write them a simple e-mail explaining what you would like to do. In this case you would like to promote their group to yours and have them do the same. This will equally benefit both groups. You could also try offering things like niche products with resale rights to get them to promote your group to theirs. The next easiest thing to do is write some articles. These can be used for content on your group as well as get submitted to article directories with a link back to your group's in the author BIO so people can join them. This option will get the word out allot better than doing a JV. However when using a cross promotion JV the people your group is being advertised to are more likely to join since they are already part of the community. The third thing you can do to promote your group is post on forums. To do this simply put links to your groups in your forum signature. Once you have done this start making informative posts as well as answer other forum members questions. This will give you credibility and you will soon start seeing new members sign up for your group from the forums. By using all of the above techniques you should be able to build up a few thousand members in no time if your topic is popular. Once you get your members make sure to keep them by posting new information frequently. If you do not make it worth while for your members to stay they will leave your group. The next thing you want to do is start selling to this group of hungry members. There are two option you have to make money from your group. The first way to make money from your group is to promote affiliate products. You can do this by writing articles that relate to the topic as well as post reviews on products. When you write a review make sure that you have actually seen or used the product or service. When your members go to buy the product they will know if you have actually seen or used it. Lying or falsifying information will simply hurt you in the end so try not to B. S. your members. This is the quickest way to loose their trust and chase them away from your group. The second thing you can do is sell products that are related to your niche that have resale rights. This means that you can sell the product for any price and keep 100% of the profits. The best way to sell resale rights products to your group is to have a site to upload them to and a simple order page with a Pay Pal order button on. You can always simply have your members send the money to your Pay Pal account and just email them the product but this will be very time consuming. If at all possible you will want to automate this in one way or another. This will give you more time to create content for your groups and find products to promote. Setting up your very own group is not hard at all. In fact anybody with a computer and an Internet connection has the ability to do it. Many people overlook the possibilities of starting their own groups and for this reason it is not a very crowded market. If you are looking to make money online without having to invest any money this is a great place to start. http://www.guruofinfo.com/affiliate/how-can-i-monitize-my-yahoo-group.html