Yahoo! manages to utilize its huge network of websites and portals to provide Yahoo! Search Marketing services which provides you an opportunity to advertise your business in a number of methods. The methods are sub-divided in the following categories:

Sponsored Search: Display your ad prominently in leading search engines such as Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista, CNN and Infospace

Product Submit: Get your product listed in Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Buyers Guide and be found by millions of users

Travel Submit: Get your travel product or service listed in Travel Deals marketplace or Travel Deals listings and allow easy access of information to potential travelers

Directory Submit: Powered by the powerful Yahoo! Search, submit your business information in Yahoo! Directory.

Each category is defined to meet the requirement of a certain type of advertiser and you would need to first decide your category before proceeding further. Once you have decided which category suits your requirements best, you can proceed to set up your marketing campaign at Yahoo!.

Other than the above categories of advertising Yahoo! also provides the option for providing Local Advertising and Search Submit. Local Advertising is again split into two sub-categories of Local Sponsored Search and Local Listings. This is very beneficial for businesses having local presence and they can catch users who are searching for a particular service or product in a locality and the costs of advertising in this section is probably one of the most affordable for an online campaign.

Search Submit on the other hand provides Search Submit Express and Search Submit Pro both of which are purely related to getting your site put on the search results of a group of top search engines.

If you are confused with the various types of products being offered with Yahoo! Search Marketing, you can use their online tool to help you determine which product suits you the best. All you need to do is answer a few simple questions and the wizard will recommend the products which suit your requirement best. All products of Yahoo! Search Marketing provide detailed analysis of traffic coming to your website which helps you make further decisions on your online marketing campaign.

Should you have a budget of over $10,000 per month for online advertising, you can contact Yahoo! sales team for a customized package that better suit your business.

Though Yahoo! Search Marketing programme sounds a bit complicated, it has some excellent Marketing Tools to help you go through the entire programme with ease. The two components are a Marketing Console which tracks how effective your various campaigns are and provides you with detailed information on them. This is definitely a time-saving application as you can see the end results of your campaigns in a jiffy. The other application is Search Optimizer which helps you get the maximum return of investment out of a Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) campaign.

The sign up process requires you to create an account and deposit funds in the account via a credit card and choose one of the many marketing products described above.