If you own an internet business or you're involved in an affliate program and you're having trouble getting traffic to your website or gateway, consider Yahoo Groups as an option to expand your visibility. You can sign up for dozens of these groups tonight--some which have subscriber bases of over 10,000 people--and then submit your ad to them immediately.

Before you begin, you'll need to determine what approach you're going to take for this. There are two ways to generate traffic through Yahoo Groups: 1) by submitting your ad to groups that are specifically looking for ADS; or 2) by providing a free service, such as a business advice article, a free ebook, or anything else you can think of that might help someone in you shoes - and then adding your resource box at the bottom, giving a link to your website or product. I personally would suggest doing both if you want to get the best results. There aren't that many groups that allow shameless promotions - and the ones that do are generally saturated with them.

Your next step is to get a text-editor/writing program that allows you to format your documents by characters-per-line (I would suggest getting the free trial version of textpad- http://www.textpad.com). Once you have this text-editor setup, type or copy-and- paste your ad, article, or whatever else you're going to use into the text-editor and then format it for 55 characters-per-line (most submission forms require you to use 55-60 characters-per-line; if you do not, they'll reject your submission out-right).

Once you have done this, you'll want to sign up for a Yahoo email account if you do not have one already. This is free and you can do it easily by going to Yahoo.com and filling in your information.

Next you'll want to head to http://groups.yahoo.com, where you'll find a directory of Yahoo Groups. You will want to find groups that coincide with whatever product or service you are selling. For instance, I sell marketing and business-building tools. When I go to Yahoo Groups, I go to Business & Finance and then to Marketing.

You should have a pretty good selection for whatever you plan to market. There are hundreds of groups and--as I mentioned earlier--some of them have over 10,000 members currently. Sign up for as many of these groups as possible.

Just click on the group. Click to sign up - and then fill in your information. Make sure you have all of the boxes filled in and then submit the form. For most of the groups, you will receive an email in your inbox immediately. Others will take a few days.

Your next step is to read all of the new emails in your inbox. Check out the rules list for all of the new groups you just signed up for. Make sure your article, service, or whatever you're posting conforms to all of the rules. Now go back to your groups. You should see a list of groups you're in with "Post" next to the group name. Begin posting it to each individual group, making sure you follow the rules. Also make sure it includes your resource box.

Now you wait. The submission process can take a while. Most posts have to be manually reviewed by group editors/moderators, while others will go up immediately. Sometimes you'll receive a letter from the editor, saying whether it was posted or rejected and sometimes you wont. Once you start receving the submission responses, that means people can now read your article or ad.

Congratulations - you just advertised to an ENORMOUS group of targeted potential leads for no cost whatsoever.

Now sit back, relax, and watch the hits accumulate on your website.

You may use this article for reprint if it remains unaltered and includes the author information and resource box. - Isaiah Hull