Yahoo! has had a great opportunity to leverage its webhosting and other services as a channel to acquire small business advertisers. From my point of view it has not taken full advantage of that opportunity. Now BofA is trying do that by partnering with Yahoo! on a small business Q&A site:
The site also features a contest that gives away Yahoo! search marketing credits:
Running a small business is hard. This contest is easy. Four separate contest events.one small business topic per event.make up the contest, so you have four opportunities to win. Enter your best small business question for a chance to win a $20,000 Yahoo! Search Marketing adjustment, and of course, a good answer to your question.
The bottom “community” section on the Yahoo! site hands off to a BofA branded site:
You click through to this site, which prompts you to register:
It’s smart for BofA and doesn’t feel like “advertising” though there are plenty of BofA logos around on these two sites. The success of the initiative will depend on the quality of the content and level of participation among SMB owners. Accordingly success here is a fairly longish-term proposition. It’s not clear however that Yahoo! or BofA have that level of commitment in mind.
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Related: Kiva starts lending money to US small businesses.
July 22, 2009 at 4:50 pm |
[...] the subject of small business, beyond the remarks above, Bartz also highlighted the Yahoo-Bank of America small business answers center: [L]arge advertisers such as Bank of America come to us because of our leading sites and [...]
July 23, 2009 at 1:42 pm |
[...] She then even went on to talk about Yahoo’s new partnership with Bank of America that aims to promote a small business answers center. She gave every indication that small business was a major component of Yahoo’s bright new [...]
July 27, 2009 at 2:57 am |
[...] She then even went on to talk about Yahoo’s new partnership with Bank of America that aims to promote a small business answers center. She gave every indication that small business was a major component of Yahoo’s bright new [...]