Yahoo Answers is a great place to generate traffic to your sites, because no matter what niche or topic your website is about, there are probably people asking questions about it. If you can answer them effectively, it will help you get both direct traffic and long-term backlinks to your website. Let’s look at how to use it effectively.
The first thing to keep in mind is that you need to be able to provide some value. It’s a give-and-take situation – you’re giving useful information and in turn you’re “taking” traffic and backlinks.
If you approach it from a purely selfish point of view, it’s not going to work as well, and chances are your Yahoo Answers account will get suspended sooner or later (probably sooner!)
That means that you’re not going to include a link to your website in every single answer you post. You might include a link to other sites in some answers, or no link at all in others. You want your account to grow naturally. In other words, if someone from Yahoo was to review your answers, you don’t want every single one of them pointing back to your own website.
The most effective way to use Yahoo Answers is to spend some time on it every day. Search for questions in your market and find some that you can answer. Ideally, find the newest ones so you can be the first, or close to the first person to respond. The higher you are in the list of responses, the more traffic you’re going to get.
And ultimately, you want to have as many of your answers as possible chosen as the “best answer” because it will be shown right underneath the question from that point on.
When you answer a question today, if it’s chosen as the best one, it could generate traffic to your site for years to come.
When you answer a question, there’s a spot where you can enter a link to a website that provides more information about it. That is where you can include a link to your own site in some of the answers – not in the answer itself.
One good way to approach this is when you find a relevant question that you don’t already cover on your site, write a new blog post or article explaining the answer in some detail. Then provide a shorter summary on Yahoo Answers with a link to your new article.
This kills two birds with one stone – coming up with ideas for new content on your site and answering questions on Yahoo.
