Yahoo Answers is as the name suggests, a website created by Yahoo to enable people to ask a question and get a multitude of different answers from other people. The questions can range from ‘How do I convert 6 kilograms into pounds?’ to ’How can I make money online?’
Apart from the fact that Yahoo Answers is useful in that someone can get a question answered in super quick time (often within minutes) it is also useful for internet marketers to drive traffic to their blogs or websites. I actually use it to send traffic to one of my Squidoo lenses and also straight to a merchant using an affiliate link. Yes, that’s right, you heard correctly, you can in fact add affiliate links. Now you’re probably all going to rush on over there right now and starting answering questions but stay with me here as you will have more success if you go about it in the right way.
What Not To Do:
First of all, we are not here to spam Yahoo Answers. The site has been created to help people out by answering their questions so by just spamming them you are missing the whole point of the site. Only leave a response if it is valid and related to the question.
I see time and time again where someone has asked a question and the person answering either provides a totally unrelated response just to promote a product or they don’t provide a response at all and just include an affiliate link or a link to their website. This is not going to get them anywhere. You need to give a little in order to get.
You will also get a ‘thumbs down’ response from other users if you leave a response that is considered to be just spam. I learnt early in the piece after I had left a response that someone considered to be just a bit too close to being spammy and it got the thumbs down real quick, so keep this in mind.
Another common problem with Yahoo Answers is where spammers actually ask the questions themselves. They may do this for two reasons.
Firstly, they want to advertise their website in the question – now that’s okay if you have a legitimate question about your website but many just do it to get traffic to their site and nothing more.
Secondly, they may have two logins for Yahoo Answers so they ask the question under one login and then answer the question using their second login. This enables them to promote their product or website in the answer without having to wait for a relevant question to come up.
We want to avoid these techniques and focus on providing value. In the long run you will have much better success. So in order to use Yahoo Answers effectively and to drive traffic to your site you need to do the following:
Find relevant questions:
If you want to promote your website you need to find questions that relate to your website topic. There is no point answering a question about ‘how to train my dog’ if your website is about ‘making money online’. Use the category menu to find topics that relate. Of course if you have a valid answer and are also a dog lover then there is no reason why you can’t participate in answering a dog training question. I am just pointing out that if the purpose is to promote your money making website, then you want to reach the people that are interested in your topic.
Provide relevant answers:
Your answers don’t have to be long but they need to be relevant to the question asked. Don’t just provide an answer that focuses on your website or a product. Focus on the question being asked and answer it to the best of your ability.
Provide useful answers:
Ensure that the answer you provide is going to help the person asking the question. If it isn’t going to help them in any way then don’t bother answering. Go for quality rather than quantity. You will have much more success this way.
Add Your Link:
Yahoo allows you to add a link and you can even get away with adding an affiliate link but ensure it is relevant to the answer. The content that the person will see when they click on that link should be highly relevant to their question. In other words, it must help them in some way.
For instance, if someone asked a question about how to teach their dog to sit you could answer as follows:
I find that the best way to teach a dog to sit is by using food rewards. I taught my dog to sit in about 5 minutes using this technique. Basically you hold the dog treat in your right hand just above the dog’s nose and then move your hand back behind its head. Your dog will automatically sit when you do this right.I have created a video on my website that demonstrates how this works if it will help. The link is here:- http://www.a1-videodogtraining.com
(Note: this link is just one I made up to give you and idea on how to write a response).
Remember that your answer will not only be read by the person asking the question but potentially by hundreds of other readers as well. Yahoo Answers ranks well in Google so just one answer can bring you quite a bit of traffic over a period of time. So make it a relevant useful answer and you are more likely to get people clicking through to your website.
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Thanks for making a post about internet marketing. I will have to incorporate this into my next work. Thank you once again!
Remember to not overuse links; don’t post a link on each and every answer. This is because some knucklehead with nothing better to do will go into your profile and flag you as a spammer.
Yes we made that mistake and had an account banned because of it. The thing is we were providing really helpful answers too but Yahoo doesn’t seem to care about the quality of the answers when banning accounts.
Do you think that the Panda filter makes our job critical to a websites success?