You can't request more than 20 challenges without solving them. Your previous challenges were flushed.

Yahoo! Local Featured Listings - Submission Process

I just submitted two listings to Yahoo! Local - one Featured and one Enhanced, so now when I have some experience doing that I can clarify on the costs, which might be not even close to $25 a month. I think Yahoo! should be more specific about their pricing up front since the submission process is quite lengthy and may be a little disappointing to go through all of it and find out that the price is 5 or 6 times more from what you expected (yeh-yeh-yeh I know - read the fine print, but they mentioned it in multiple places under $25, $29.95 etc - you don't really see any larger amounts right away... it is rather deceiving strategy). It also needs some preparations done in advance, but not necessary since you can go back and edit your submission later. Anyways... The Featured Listings submission process is broken into 6 steps: 1. Listing Details - contact info; quite detailed location info with all your phone numbers and web site address; daily hours of operation; payment methods accepted (assuming you're selling something); additional info includes: year established, products and services offered, languages spoken, professional associations, brand names carried, specials. 2. Select Categories - allows you to select 5 categories - 1 primary and 4 secondary. It also makes you to narrow down your primary category to a subcategory - otherwise it doesn't accept it. After I selected my primary category and subcategory it let me to add my Professional Contact Information (first name, last name and title). Also it gives you opportunity to add some juice - custom content as Company Taglines, Business description (up to 3000 characters which is quite a lot) and 2 additional links which I used to link directly to our property listings page and contact us page. They make you to select your additional link types and I couldn't really find a title/type that would fit my needs perfectly... so I kinda was selecting my landing pages according to existing link titles :( Also they allow you to put Featured Ad Text which runs next to your link title and limited to 50 characters (I pointed it out in red rectangle below).
Yahoo! Local Featured Listing Preview
3. Add Images - allows you to add a whole bunch of images limited to JPG format and not more then 5MB per image. I added about 4 images and didn't see any quantity limitations. 4. Preview - gives you preview for your Featured Listing, Enhanced Listing and Details Page. It keeps showing you Featured and Enhanced Listings together because at the end you can choose if you want to run both of them (Enhanced is only $9.95/mo) or just Enhanced one... it is weired since I didn't see an opt-out option for the Enhanced listing because it added $9.95 on top of my Featured Listing... the question is - will it run both listings for me, or just one? I guess I'll find out when it's approved. 5. Select Regions - here is where the pricing fun starts. Yahoo! Local outlines the areas automatically where it will show your ad in. I think it is based on your business location which you enter in the first part. Then it gives you selection of the categories which you want your ad to appear under - remember primary category and secondary ones? Well, each category has it's own pricing - check it out below:
Yahoo! Local Featured Listing Priced Category Selection
It gives you an option where to place your ads - Top or Bottom of the page. Interesting part is that you can't select top or bottom - they make you to select top if it is available, or bottom if top spot is not available... why can't I select the bottom right away because it's cheaper? Well, no - I guess I have to pay for the top one because it is more expensive and it is available.... AND they charge you for each category separately. It also gives you a list of nearest cities that you can add to already selected by Yahoo! Local. Scrolling down to review our shopping cart:
Yahoo! Local Featured Listing Shopping Cart
Wow, now when the amount is not even close to $29.95 (how about "under $25") they let me get rid of my featured listing advertisement that I spend almost an hour filling out and coming up with 3000 characters description, creating third level domains for my landing pages because Yahoo didn't like my not so long ASPX URLs... and leave my Enhanced listing for $9.95/mo.. nice.. I am disappointed and of course not giving up. 6. Payment - payment is no brainer... another disappointment though was the message that review of my ad will take from 3 to 5 business days... are these guys still in the garage start-up business stage? Well, I end up selecting one category for 30 bucks and paid $39.95 for one of my listings and then I submitted another Enhanced Listing. I'm not cheap - those are not my credit cards :) The whole experience reminded me a bumpy country road - almost at the end of my first submission I received a "session expired" message and Yahoo made me to relogin - to my great surprise all my data was saved in the Yahoo Local account and I continued editing from the same spot. I think the main disappointment is the pricing - if they explained it in advance I just wouldn't expect as much. Hey 5 pages free web site is still waiting for me - looks like they provide a lot of templates and should be nice. Hopefully we'll see some results soon.

Reply

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.