One of the ways you can get some traffic to your site is with Yahoo Answers.
If you haven’t seen the site before, it’s a place where people post questions, and other people post answers. The person who posted the question can pick the best answer, or if they don’t do it then others can vote on the best answer. There are questions there on pretty much any topic imaginable, from SEO to getting paid to read surveys to making doll houses, to the issue of world peace.
The best part about Yahoo Answers is that a lot of web traffic flows through the site, both from members and search engines. This can mean more visitors to your site. And all the traffic is pretty well qualified, since you’re answering related questions.
Plus, you get to brand yourself as an expert, as the number of questions for which your answer is picked as best increases.
So how do you use Yahoo Answers best? Here’s my list of tips.
Don’t Spam
Answer only questions for which a page on your site is extremely relevant. There’s nothing worse than a totally irrelevant answer that’s an obvious advertisement. Plus, answering relevant questions ensures your traffic is qualified.
Be Informative and Honest
Provide a good amount of information in the answer itself, and then link out to a page of yours that provides more information. An answer is not the place for hype. Hype gets you unqualified traffic, honesty gets you qualified traffic.
Be One Of The First To Answer
The original poster doesn’t have to wait until the question expires to pick a best answer. If you’re one of the first, and give a good enough answer, they might pick yours early. At the very least, everyone else who comes to answer the question after you will see your answer and perhaps visit your site.
Vote For Yourself
If the original poster doesn’t pick a best answer, then the answers go into community voting. Sometimes nobody votes. So vote for your own answer! You’ll need to wait for the question to be placed in voting status, but at that point your single vote might be enough to pick your answer as the best one. Being the best answer means that it’s the only answer that appears in the archive pages.
Keep Answering
You get the best results when your answers are fresh. You will get some residual traffic from archived answers when yours was the best answer, but you get more from answers to questions that have not been resolved yet.
Search for Open Questions
If you click on Advanced next to the search box, you can specify that you only want to search for open questions. This allows you to find questions on suitable topics to answer.
Over the past few months I’ve received about 150 visitors from Yahoo Answers. 40 of those signed up to Inbox Dollars, and one purchased the most excellent SEO Book. This is an excellent example of how qualified visitors do more for your site than bulk traffic.
So go over to Yahoo Answers and help out a few people today, and get some extra traffic to your site.
This is definately a great to get traffic. I still get visitors from questions I answered ages ago. You layed everything out perfectly. Those are exactly the things people should and shouldn’t do. Great post Jay!
I actually loved yahoo answers when I was pregnant. Every question I could think of was answered. It was always comforting to know that other people were having the same concerns as myself and that they were usually no big deal.
Love the site!
Yahoo Answers is surely addictive! It’s a great antidote to feeling like an amateur!
I haven’t had much opportunity to send links to my posts, though. Mostly I’ve answered kids’ homework questions. I guess that’s why I haven’t seen much traffic (yet?) from it — those grade schoolers aren’t exactly my ‘target market’ (not that I know what my target market IS, just that it ISN’T 12 year olds flunking algebra!)
I’ve seen some doll house questions, so those would be some questions that’d be nicely relevant to a subset of your posts.
It definitely is addictive…I have to limit the time I spend on it, so I actually get other things done, too.