Posted by Gil Reich
This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Q&A sites are a great way to get your message across and to build your brand and reputation.
How many people use Q&A sites?
- In a recent Business.com study, 49% of companies that use social media said they ask questions on Q&A sites. Only 29% said they use Twitter to find business-related information. The 49% doesn’t even include the many who get info from Q&A sites by Googling or Binging.
- Answers.com (where I work) is now ranked (by comScore) as the 17th most visited site in the US. The vast majority of Answers.com’s traffic is to user generated Q&A pages. Yahoo! Answers gets even more traffic. Much of your potential market is already getting their answers from these sites.
Source: Social Media Best Practices: Question & Answer Forums. Business.com, December 14, 2009, http://www.business.com/info/social-media-best-practices-q-and-a
What’s in it for me?
Providing quality answers and links to relevant pages can help you in the following ways:
- Direct your customers (and potential customers) to accurate information about your product.
- Connect with people in your market, build your reputation, and generate leads.
- Provide links back to your site. Some of these links are Follow links, and thus also provide SEO value.
How do I use these sites?
The general rules of social media apply here too:
- Help others
- Build relationships
- Push your products and services when they answer somebody’s question or request.
Q&A sites work great for this, because people are already asking the questions. When I blog I hope my posts address questions that my readers want answered, but they may not. In Q&A sites, your starting point is that somebody asked the queston that you’re answering.
Specifically:
- Search the Q&A sites for questions about your subject, and browse the relevant categories.
- Answer questions fairly and accurately. If appropriate, mention your product or service, and / or link to a relevant page on your site.
- Follow up & interact where appropriate. Use these sites’ message boards to see if you can be of further help, or to congratulate another contributor for a great answer.
- Fill in your User Profile, showing why people should like and trust you. You can also usually link to your site from your User Profile.
In the example below, notice how the user provided a quality answer (much of which follows a template he uses in other answers as well) and adds a relevant link to his site.
What are the leading sites and how do they differ?
- Yahoo! Answers: The biggest site in the industry, with 47 million US visits in November according to comScore (and that’s probably a very conservative estimate). It’s a broad horizontal site. Questions are open for 4 days. Users answer the question, and vote on the best answer. The best answer is selected by either the asker or by the community.
- Answers.com / WikiAnswers: Answers.com has 41 million monthly US visitors according to comScore, making it second to Yahoo! but far larger than the other Q&A sites. It’s also a broad horizontal site. It’s key differentiators are:
- It’s connectd to a reference site, so if you ask "What is the abstention doctrine?" your answer will come from West’s Law and the Oxford University Press.
- It’s a wiki, so instead of multiple users providing multiple answers, users collaborate on one answer.
- In most cases Answers don’t get closed, so you can find questions asked more than 4 days ago and still contribute to the answer.
- LinkedIn Answers & Business.com Answers: These sites are great for more targeted communication, lead generation, and reputation building. Think of Yahoo! Answers and Answers.com as more B2C, and these sites as more B2B. This is Q&A in the context of advanced professional networking sites.
- Stack Overflow and its siblings: Stack Overflow is a great Q&A site for programmers. If you’re a software developer and you want to establish yourself as an expert and to network with your peers, this site’s perfect. The same technology is now powering other niche sites, most notably serverfault.com (for system administrators) and Answers on Startups, which Rand Fishkin just named one of the 10 Sources I’ve Come to Love.
- Aardvark: Aardvark is more of a closed system where you ask questions to people in your network. This is great for well connected journalists and bloggers to get answers from their network, but may not be ideal for spreading your message beyond your social circle.
How is using them like doing a guest post on SEOmoz?
Answering questions on Q&A sites is exactly like doing a guest post on SEOmoz:
- Find the sites where the people you need are getting their information.
- Give them quality information that will benefit them.
- Get your own message across, with full disclosure of who you are. You can be self-serving, but not too self-serving.
- Build relationships, and establish your expertise.
Ultimately you need a win-win here. You need to serve the needs of the community with whom you’re interacting, in a way that also builds your business and reputation.
Where can I get more information on Q&A sites?
See the following excellent articles:
Or contact me (Answers.com user: Gilr)
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How to Break Into the SEO Clique
If you are in the search engine optimization industry or you are trying to break into this incredibly saturated industry to make a name for yourself you might have a difficult time getting excepted into the circle of friends at the top of the food chain. The “elite” group that has been in the industry [...]
If you are in the search engine optimization industry or you are trying to break into this incredibly saturated industry to make a name for yourself you might have a difficult time getting excepted into the circle of friends at the top of the food chain. The “elite” group that has been in the industry since day one and think they are the all mighty of the industry. The SEO industry leaders have become a tough group of individuals to become friendly with and it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier. All the “gurus” at the top that think they know every about everything seem to feel that they run this industry like they own it. The SEO industry is kind of like an open source program that should be treated like a group effort. There is plenty of business to go around. Lots of businesses out there that need help promoting themselves in the online space. People need to participate, communicate and get involved to make it a better place for everyone. One person tries something that works well they write about and things spread leading to better online marketing efforts.

I have been actively working in the internet marketing industry for over 12 years, have built Brick Marketing for 5 years successfully and have helped hundreds of clients in the field of SEO yet my educational comments that I leave on certain search engine marketing blogs get deleted, why do you think this happens? Leaving all names aside a certain someone contacted me not too long ago and asked me to stop commenting on a certain blog. Yes, I left a comment on each blog very frequently but isn’t that the whole purpose of starting a blog. These where all well written comments that where generated with real thought process adding to the overall message the blog post was trying to convey. Isn’t the whole idea of a blog to get the community interacting in your conversation? Since when is it bad to leave an educated comment on someone’s blog? Even if the frequency was high it shouldn’t really matter. I have seen this occur with other websites as well. I have seen the tone of this click with others trying to make a name for themselves in the industry and I often see a certain nastiness resonating in the tone of a variety of online discussions. Don’t get me wrong I understand this is a tough industry and if you spend some time in it you get beat up a little but that doesn’t mean you have to be nasty to your colleagues and peers around you especially if they own and operate a successful search engine marketing firm. I apologize if I have not visited you at the trade shows and stroked your ego like many people do. Is it that I don’t kiss the asses of every individual in the “cool group”?
There is plenty of room in the school yard for everyone to get along. Is it because I am a threat to them or the industry? Sometimes I feel like this industry is a lot like high school all over again. You got your cool kids that think they are too good for everyone else and you got everyone else trying to shine in front of their eyes. I by no means want to break into the “cool” click and become one of those has to have their ass kissed by everyone else.
Why is it so hard for people in this industry to come together and work as a team? I understand that everyone is trying to grow their own business but there is no reason why so many internet marketing professionals have to have such a cold shoulder towards each other. We are all in the same game and we do the best we can to provide our clients with great service.
If you are an internet marketer or SEO person do you feel like our industry is heading in this direction as well? Please leave your comments and any related experiences or stories below!
http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com