Yahoo Publisher Network has just updated their interface with some great features to help ‘publishers’ make their site more ‘Yahooized’.

Publisher Services Section

A new section of the Yahoo! Publisher Network account interface called “Publisher Services” has just been launched. This area, “home base” as they call it, is for you to learn about and implement all available Yahoo! tools and services. When you visit the new section, it will quickly be apparent that being a publisher is about more than just monetizing your site. The Publisher Services tab offers three broad categories of Yahoo! products and services to help your site “be all that it can be”.

So how can you “be all that you can be” with Yahoo?

There are three new featurettes which include - Drive Traffic, Enhance Your Site and Build Your Site, details and pictures follow

Drive Traffic - A number of ways to get more visitors

Well first of all there is Submit your RSS feed to Yahoo - I don’t know how this is supposed to drive traffic to your site but you submit your feed in the said field and you get a succesfully submitted response. Apparently users of My Yahoo! and Yahoo 360! and more will be able to subscribe to your content. How? I don’t got no idea!

Also you can easily create those add to My Yahoo! buttons for people to subscribe to your feed, great tool for newbie’s to the world of RSS feeding.

You can also mash up all of your feeds,(swoosh sound effect), and share them from one central page if you don’t do anything else but blog across a 100 blogs.

Podcasting should be now a breeze with Yahoo taking it to the centre stage. You can easily prepare, record and publish. Haven’t tried it out myself as…well I don’t do podcasts, yet.

Video is getting a big push as well, now you can reach a mass audience of Yahoo users quickly by uploading and well…sharing again.

After that you get the usual search submission featurette’s like suggest your site, search submit express, sponsored and content search which is their CPC campaign manager yada yada.

Yahoo! Site Exporer (beta) is where you can see how many of your pages are indexed in their search pages AND discover who is linking to you and where. Nifty tool and I think a great comparison site thingy with google’s linked results.

Enhance your site - Quality Yahoo! tools and features

Here you can get the code to add a Yahoo search box to your site, with 4 options to choose from its nice for giving people the option to search more of your site as well, I wonder if the clicks generated on CPC ads give you credit? Haven’t tried it out yet, will let you know when I do.

Y!Q is a great new way to show your visitors more information about a certain topic you may be talking about. Again since this is new I haven’t tried it out yet. The only thing I still have to figure out is if you actually get credit for those CPC ads that show up. Beware though the information there is quite technical, this is also a beta feature.

Social networking is getting bigger and it is about to get even more. Yahoo Action Buttons provide you with easy tools to let visitors bookmark, share, blog and even print your content with just a click.

With Yahoo! Answers Badge, you can display all of your recently answered questions directly on your web site. It is a way for you to let the world see the topics that you are interested in and knowledgeable about.

You can now use Upcoming.org to display events you’re attending and syndicate event listings dynamically to your own site using Upcoming.org Dynamic Badges. It’s easy to configure a badge, and you can control the layout to fit your site.

Bloggers and personal publishers can show off things they are attending like concerts, book readings, art shows etc.. Small businesses and companies can promote their own events like conferences and that kind of stuff.
You can also integrate flickr and del.icio.us into your content and make it more dynamic.

Oh! and also concerning the podcasting thing, people can rate your show quickly and easily.

Something that I found really cool is the integration of Creative Commons Resource Center, you can search for content that is free to use without having to worry about copyrights and all that kind of stuff. You can search for photos, text, videos and music which has the CC license to it and use it for your site. This should give a huge push for open source kind of stuff and make information more easy to get as publishers use it to add more content to their site.

Also like YouTube, Yahoo is also integrating Yahoo Video to be easily embedded into your site, some videos have the “Add to My Site” feature - that explains itself.

Build Your Site - Solutions for creating and hosting your site

This has all that commercial stuff like Domain names, hosting and yahoo small business stuff that I’m not going to write about.

So there you have it in a nutshell all of the new features for publishers at yahoo “home base”.

I think it’s great new stuff that they have added and I do find myself integrating some of it into my blog/sites sometime in the near future.

Some of the features here have been around for quite some time but now that they are being integrated with the Publisher network should see higher usage of them.

Too bad they don’t have a referral center for sending would be publishers. I have two words for that “my sidebar”.

I mentioned ‘Yahoo’ 19 times in this post.

About the author

Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.