5 Alternatives to Yahoo Groups

5 Alternatives to Yahoo Groups

Jan 14, 2021 | Blogging

Yahoo Groups was one of the original online communities. You could use it to create or participate in online chats with people from across the world who have the same interests and ideas as you.

A host of new online communication tools have been released in recent years. Many of these new platforms offer features Yahoo Groups doesn’t. After lagging behind their competitors for a few years, Yahoo Groups officially shut down in December of 2020.

Thankfully, if you were a fan, there are a plethora of alternatives to Yahoo Groups. Below, we’ll discuss our favorites so you can pick the best online group platforms for you.

What Was Yahoo Groups Used For?

Yahoo launched Groups in January 2001. Users could post messages, polls, photos, events, files, mailing lists, links to websites, and more. The platform soon became a popular host for vibrant online discussion boards.

If you owned a group, you could also assign moderators to help you run and oversee all the group’s activities.

Online businesses and marketers took advantage of the platform. This is a place where you could easily post a recent blog, image, or file to drive brand awareness and increase website traffic.

I know what you’re thinking—this sounds very similar to many of the online tools we have today. That’s because Yahoo Groups was similar. In fact, you could argue that Yahoo Groups was the foundation for many popular social media and online groups.

At the height of its popularity, Yahoo announced it had 115 million users and 10 million groups.

But a quick search for the platform today will show you this:

Where do you go from here?

Here’s a list of the best Yahoo Groups alternatives to create valuable online connections with your market.

What Are the Best Alternatives to Yahoo Groups?

If you used Yahoo Groups and want to continue creating online communities with like-minded people, drive traffic to your website, or build brand awareness, it’s essential to look for an alternative that will meet your needs—and the needs of your audience.

Here are five options to consider.

1. Facebook Groups

Facebook has over 2 billion monthly active users, and over 1 billion users participate in Facebook Groups each month.

Besides catching up with old and new friends, creating a group on this platform makes sense, especially for businesses. It can help you position your brand, find potential customers, and build long-term relationships with them.

Like Yahoo Groups, Facebook Groups allow you to schedule group events, share files, images, and other useful tools to continue engaging and connecting with your market.

While many brands may have Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups are where the magic lies because they see a lot more engagement than Pages.

Facebook Groups allow members to start and participate in conversations easily. They can also be private—when you have a closed group, members can engage and share their thoughts in a private setting that can only be seen by group members.

There are three types of Groups to choose from. Depending on your needs, you can create:

  • A Public Group: Anyone can access the group and see what users post.
  • A Closed Group: This is a private group. You can search and find the group, but members still need approval before gaining access to the group.
  • A Secret Group: These are invite-only groups where only invited users can find the group or see what other users post.

Here’s how to create a Facebook Group:

After logging into your account, click the + button from the top right and select Group.

Next, enter your group name, choose privacy options, and invite people to join the group.

Once you’ve filled in the details, select Create.

You can further personalize the group by adding a description and cover photo.

If you want to start a successful Facebook Group for your brand, the first step is to decide on your Group’s purpose.

  • Are you a new brand and trying to increase brand awareness?
  • Are you trying to reach new customers?
  • Do you want to provide a group for your existing customers where you can nurture long-term relationships?
  • Would you like to showcase your expertise and establish authority in a niche market?

Understanding the purpose of your group will help direct all the content you create.

For instance, let’s say you sell a weight loss coaching program that lasts for six months. You can create a private Group for customers who are currently in coaching to share unique content and allow members to support each other.

Creating this type of group allows members to learn more about your brand and get the support they need while using your service.

2. Meetup

The concept behind Meetup is simple—choose what you’re interested in or passionate about, find a local group that shares that same interest, attend events the group organizes, and connect with like-minded people.

The groups you join or create on this platform can be about anything: book clubs, bike rides, business networking, music, or other niche social activities.

Of course, the main difference between Meetup and Yahoo Groups is that Meetup focuses on creating real-life encounters with the people you meet online.

If your business or brand caters to local communities, then Meetup could be a great fit.

Let’s say you own a coffee shop in New York. You can find and join groups of other coffee lovers in the area. Once you’ve joined the groups, you can engage with members, build relationships, and invite them to a company event.

If you can’t find a relevant group, you can create one.

Once you’ve signed up, you’ll go through a seven-step process. This includes:

Selecting your group’s location:

Choosing topics that best relate to your group:

Choosing a group name:

Describing what your group will be about:

It is free for users to sign up for the service. However, meeting organizers pay a monthly fee.

There are currently two pricing options:

  • $4.99 per month for six months. This plan is for smaller groups.
  • $15.00 per group per month for six months. This plan includes unlimited groups and allows you access to attendee emails.

Whichever plan you choose, creating a Meetup group will help you connect with relevant people in real-life.

3. Nextdoor

Like Meetup, Nextdoor is a platform where local communities connect in real life, outside of online communications.

For Nextdoor, you must be a part of a particular neighborhood, as the focus is more on building a good network with your neighbors.

On the site, they explain:

“It’s where communities come together to greet newcomers, exchange recommendations, and read the latest local news. Where neighbors support local businesses and get updates from public agencies, borrow tools, and sell couches. It’s how to get the most out of everything nearby. Welcome, neighbor.”

Nextdoor shares a few similar features to Yahoo Groups, such as file sharing, chat messaging, and wiki pages.

For a local business or brand, creating a Nextdoor account makes sense as the platform has grown exponentially. It doesn’t just focus on residential neighbors anymore. Local businesses, public agencies, nonprofits, and brands are also recognized on the platform.

You can then decide whether you want to create an open or a private group.

For an open group:

  • Anyone in the neighborhood can search, find, and join the group.
  • Potential group members outside the community can still request to join if you send them a link.

For a private group:

  • Anyone in the neighborhood can find and request to join the group.
  • Group admins approve requests.
  • Only members of the group can view messages and discussions.

The platform is completely free to use, but you can also advertise your business or brand using Local Deals to gain traction. This is where you can share discounts and promotions with your neighborhood.

The price for Local Deals depends on your neighborhood and how long you want to advertise, but the average cost is $75.

4. Groups.io

Mark Fletcher created groups.io. You might have heard of him before. He founded ONElist, which eventually became known as Yahoo Groups.

When he introduced Groups.io, Fletcher explained that:

Yahoo Groups and Google Groups both exude the dank air of benign neglect. Google Groups hasn’t been updated in years, and some of Yahoo’s recent changes have actually made Yahoo Groups worse! And yet, millions of people put up with this uncertainty and neglect, because email groups are still one of the best ways to communicate with groups of people. And I have a plan to make them even better.

Groups.io is an email-based service with features that include:

  • Integration with other popular products, such as Slack, GitHub, Facebook Pages, and Dropbox
  • Hashtags to help keep group messages organized
  • Unlimited chat rooms

Groups.io is a Freemium product, which means the basic features are free to use, but you can pay extra to customize your homepage, access extra storage space, schedule events, and send reminders.

The best part about Groups.io is that there is no advertising! If you spend a lot of time online, you’ll appreciate this.

5. Discourse

Another popular online discussion forum is Discourse. Users can use it as a discussion forum, mailing list, or chat room.

Creating an online group on a different and unfamiliar site can be an overwhelming process. There’s a free 14-day trial, which you can use to help familiarize yourself with the platform and see if it can be a good fit for you and your needs.

Like Yahoo Groups and the other options on our list, Discourse is an online discussion forum that allows you to create discussions, share links, files, and integrate with various devices and online tools.

If you’ve been on online discussion forums for a while, you’ll know that some users don’t follow the rules. The platforms we’ve covered so far allow group moderators to filter out inappropriate content and users.

On Discourse, the focus is more on community moderation. However, they do offer various moderation tools, including the ability to move posts to an existing topic, merge with other posts, or delete.

Members who’ve displayed consistently positive behaviors earn likes and badges. Furthermore, they can help to maintain and moderate content and resolve disputes.

There are three pricing plan options:

  • Standard: $100 per month
  • Business: $300 per month
  • Enterprise: You’ll need to contact them for a custom quote

Conclusion

A lot has changed in the world of online communication. Yahoo Groups was once a popular pioneer of online communities, but it’s closed down, like many other trailblazers. Thankfully, there are plenty of advanced Yahoo alternatives to choose from.

Whatever you decide on, I hope you found the above information helpful.

Can you think of other alternative online groups that are great for building connections?

How and WHY to Create Content Groups in Google Analytics

How and WHY to Create Content Groups in Google Analytics

Oct 1, 2020 | Seo

The weather is starting to improve and spring is definitely in the air around here.

I love that my family and I can go out in the backyard and enjoy playing games or just running around in the sun.

However, with all the good things that come with spring, weeds also come with spring. I hate weeds. Out in front of my house, I noticed weeds that started to form. I usually do a pretty good job of either pulling those out or spraying those. I have to keep up my nice polished appearance for my neighbors and my wife.

However, around the side of my house in one particular area no one ever sees and we don’t really go over there very much. I’m afraid to look there because I know when I do I’ll have a bunch of weeds that I need to pull.

I know you would love to hear me talk about weeds all day but the show must go on here. Actually, the reason I was thinking about weeds and why some areas of my yard perform so well versus other areas, has to do with my websites.

When you monitor and track certain aspects of your website on a regular basis, it tends to get cleared of any mistakes or weeds, as you might call it. It’s important to track and monitor those areas of your site that you want to grow.

However, I’ve sometimes found it difficult to track the progress of new content that I publish. I don’t just mean one or two articles. Pulling up one or two new articles is easy to see how much traffic they’re getting in Google Analytics.

Learn How I Create and Track Content Groups in Google Analytics:

(Be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel right here to get notified of my next video!)

What if you want to pull up the last 10 articles or even 20 articles that you’ve published on Google Analytics and see how much traffic you are getting to just those 10 articles. It’s because it becomes either extremely difficult or extremely time consuming. Who wants to sit around and view the stats of 20 different articles one at a time in Google Analytics? That’s really not the best use of time.

Why You Should Create Content Groups in Google Analytics

First, let me give you the reason you might want to track a group of say 10, 15, or 20 articles separately from all your other content, then I’ll share the solution for doing it easily in Google Analytics.

There might be a few reasons why you might want to track a group of articles that you’ve published. One reason might be to track specific authors.

Let’s say that you have three or four different authors writing for your website and you want to track how much Bill, or Susan, or Nathan are doing. How well are there specific articles doing and so without jumping through some hoops, it can be really time consuming, right?

You might have to spend five or ten minutes figuring out, okay, here’s how much traffic the articles written by author one are getting.

Here’s how much traffic the articles from author two are getting et cetera, et cetera. One reason might be to track different authors. That’s the reason that I’ve done it, but there could be other reasons that you could do it as well.

You might want to track a new strategy.

For example, I recently created a video on doing question based keywords, and I shared that question based keywords are performing really well on Own The Yard. Maybe I want to track, okay, I’m going to try doing 20 question based articles and see how they perform.

Within Google Analytics, the old way would be you have to pull up those articles one at a time or remember all 20 articles and click on those and say, okay, that’s getting 10 visitors, or 20 visitors, etcetera, and add all those articles up. Well, there’s an easier way.

You might have other strategies that you’re following, different on page optimization, or different types of keywords. You maybe want to track just all your review articles, or you want to track just your group of buying guides, or you want to track just your informational articles. There might be a lot of different strategies that you’re trying, but you want to track those individually.

Another reason you might do this is to track link building strategies. Maybe you’ve got a group of five articles, and you’re doing a specific type of outreach, or other link building and you want to see how the performance is. What traffic are you getting, how well are they doing?

As I mentioned, my initial reason for really wanting to figure out how I can track a group of articles was because I had a new author. I wanted to figure out how much traffic this new author was driving to my website through his content.

I did a ton of research on Google and I figured there’s got to be a way to do this in Google Analytics that makes it really easy. It took me quite a while, asked several people, and they didn’t really know how to do this. After doing a lot of googling and watching videos, I figured out how to do it.

There’s actually something called content groups in Google Analytics.

What these content groups allow you to do is exactly what I just mentioned, you can create a group of up to 20, there is a maximum limit that Google has set, I don’t know why, of 20 articles. You can track up to 20 articles, and then there’s a view in Google Analytics that you can look at and see, okay, these 20 articles have generated 100 visitors today, or 200 visitors, or whatever you want to look at.

how to create content groups

Let me tell you how you can set this up, and then we’ll look at some of the stats, how you can use it a little bit more.

Within Google Analytics, all you do is down at the bottom, there’s the little settings menu, the admin menu at the bottom. You click admin, and then you go under the views, you have the three columns, the account, the property, and the view, and then there is something called content grouping. It’s as easy as that, but from what I’ve heard, not a lot of people knew about this, and so then you can create a new content group, and you can actually call it whatever you want.

I named it after my author, right? I know it’s this author, this is his group of articles. You can do a lot of different things. You actually could create a tracking code, and you could add a tracking code to each individual article, or individual page, and that’s one interesting thing that you could do that could really come in handy is using a tracking code. There might be a lot of different reasons that you could do that.

You can set up an extraction group using extraction, and that could be a category, and so you can set a subfolder. Everything that’s in this sub folder will go to this particular content group. That doesn’t work particularly well for my use case, but what did work well is group using rule definitions. There’s lots of different rules that you can set. I set them as a page that contains, and you can do lots of different matching things. I set up a rule that contains and then I’m able to paste in the exact URL that I want to track.

You can just paste in the URL and you can do up to 20 of those. You click done and save, and then you’ve got a nice content group that you can view in Google Analytics and other areas. Once you’ve got that set up, it will only track the future stats for you. It’s not going to track in a group, the historical. You have to get it set up first, and then every day moving forward, it will show you all the traffic stats just like Google Analytics.

I come in here, you go to behavior, site content, then all pages. Under your standard graph, you’ll have a little content group that you can select, click on, and then it will populate. That group of articles that you have, it’s going to show the graph, it’s going to show you all the stats, the number of pageviews, average time on page, bounce rate, exit percent, page value, all of that. For me this was a huge time saver, a huge benefit to my business. Now, I can quickly go in and see my new author right now. I’m looking at the last 10 articles that this person has generated anywhere between 70 and 100 visitors per day, in the last week. I can just quickly see that. I’m not having to click on any individual articles. I’ve got that content group total.

Enjoy the Stats!

There’s a lot of different things that you can dive into, but that is pretty much it. I just wanted to let you know that the ability to set up a content group is there. It’s quite easy to do and it can really come in handy. It can allow you to see a variety of different things that you might be experimenting on, to give you a better idea of what you’re working on is working.

Are you getting the results?

It gives you the ability to monitor and better check your processes and your procedures. Those little weeds, those little problems that might have crept up if you weren’t able to monitor, those things don’t happen.

There you have it. There is a quick tip from me. I hope that you have enjoyed this episode of the Niche Pursuits Podcast, and if you have, please go ahead and subscribe wherever you like to subscribe to podcasts, and give a rating or a review.

Thank you so much for listening, and I hope that you continue to grow your business.

By Spencer Haws

 

Meteora Automation Tool to Boost Instagram Engagement and Sales

Meteora Automation Tool to Boost Instagram Engagement and Sales

by | Oct 9, 2020

By now, it’s been clearly proved that Instagram isn’t something of a wet squib. It has exploded on the social media scene like a big bomb, and gone on to become one of the fastest growing social networks. All kinds of product-based businesses and influencers from...

Instagram 5xx Server Error – What is that mean? [Explanation]

Instagram 5xx Server Error – What is that mean? [Explanation]

by | Oct 7, 2020

No website can avoid running into the occasional glitch and problem, and when you consider how vastly complicated many social media websites are, it’s not surprising that their users encounter lots of different errors and difficulties at various times. There are so...

Instagram Live Isn’t Working, Why? [Quick Fix – 2020]

Instagram Live Isn’t Working, Why? [Quick Fix – 2020]

by | Oct 7, 2020

What Is Instagram Live? Social media websites are always looking for new tools and features to appeal to their users, and Instagram is certainly no exception to that rule. Instagram Live panders to the trend of immediacy, and also creates a sense of urgency to be...

Instagram, Reporting A Problem (How can you report?)

by | Oct 7, 2020

Why You Might Need To Report A Problem Instagram is amongst the most popular of social media websites, and enjoys enormous amounts of traffic and users everyday. It has several different facets and functions available to its users, so it’s no surprise that sometimes...

Instagram Hashtags Not Working [Solution – 2020]

by | Oct 7, 2020

Why Use Hashtags? Hashtags are one of the biggest trends on the internet right now. They’re a very useful tool which allows people to collate related data, connecting it across different channels and cutting through some of the noise generated by social media’s...

Instagram Won’t Let Me Log In [How to fix it? – 2020]

by | Oct 7, 2020

Social media is becoming increasingly popular, and Instagram is amongst the top ones, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t run into issues occasionally. These can occur on the browser, the app, or both, but no matter what, they often lead to frustration and time wasted...

Instagram Keeps Crashing When I Open It [Solution – 2020]

by | Oct 7, 2020

If you, like most people, find yourself checking your phone compulsively for updates, new pictures, posts to favourite, and are generally a social media addict, you may find that you do run into the occasional frustrating glitch, even with your favourite programmes....

How to Recover deleted Facebook messages? [Solution – 2020]

by | Oct 7, 2020

If you use Facebook, you know that Messenger is a great way to communicate with friends or family, business associates, and others to send files and photos, videos, links, and other content. It’s a convenient way to share information with specific contacts without...

Subscribe