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By: Jeremy Rivera
My friend has a young daughter who just learned the most important thing in the English language... How to ask a question. In our day to day lives, we simply couldn't exist without this fundamental tool that allows us to access more information about something that we need or want. That same tool is now becoming more of reality on the internet.
While search engines base their results off of keywords, it is sometime difficult to plug in just the right word to find what you want. You can't ask a long winded or complicated question; that need has not been filled. Well, there are now niche websites that aim to fill that particular need, by utilizing users to answer the questions. At the recent SMX conference panel on "Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers & Answer Sharing", Matt McGee of Marchex, stated that over the past year, US traffic to Question and Answer websites is up 118%!
With this in mind, as a website owner, it is more and more simple to harness the power of these types of sites to get inbound links. According to McGee, Yahoo! Answers has a 74% market share, so it should be your first adventure. Setup a Yahoo! profile, and be sure to equip it with all your details, photos and links to your site before you proceed. Simply find a topic you are comfortable with and start answering questions. After a while, you might find a question here or that your site legitimately addresses. For the love of pete, don't spam your website into every answer, as there is peer review. In fact, that is the best way for you to earn "points" on Yahoo! answers, is to judge which answer was best for a particular subject. The key is to participate and over time slip your relevant links into your answers.
There are other answer sites, but they tend to be more niche specific. For example Trulia, an online real estate search, recently opened their platform up to allow users to post questions, and Realtors to post answers, along with their URL. Excellent exposure plus inbound links!
To sum up the best strategy in two words, be patient. It takes time to develop these profiles, and you don't want to be kicked out for spamming. Now go forth and answer the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe and Everything!
Author Bio:
Jeremy Rivera is the author of his Content Writing Advice blog where he focuses on providing quality tips and guidance for generating unique content that generates search engine traffic and converts visitors to customers.
I have noticed myself the ongoing trend of asking questions. I might say that one out of ten queries I pun into G is in form of question.
Somehow Ask Jevees comes to mind… 🙂
Sasha T.
I think that it is ironic that as a search engine, ask was trying to do just that, answer real questions that humans would ask. I think it just goes to say that computers aren’t yet human( We’re not quite making Cylons yet).