Get an Answer to Everything

I’ve been asked about Yahoo! Answers recently, and I have to get my head back into this ever changing aspect of our industry. Like StumbleUpon and Digg and Reddit etc. Yahoo provides its own army of followers and regular visitors. A friend of mine was genuinely surprised when they asked a question recently, and it was answered within the hour. They weren’t expecting the Yahoo audience and community to be so fluid and so fast.

From past experience, the community is absolutely awesome for both traffic  and research. If you have never used Yahoo, then you are in luck. For the beginner in marketing, Yahoo forms the perfect base to cut your teeth as a newbie, with easy to follow rules and terms for marketers. Basically, they hate spam of any kind, and to be honest they are not too fond of marketers in the first place – so you will have to get creative in your approach.

This shouldn’t put you off, because you don’t have to be a Blackhatter to take advantage of the tornado of traffic Yahoo can deliver – you just have to be thoughtful, and respect your audience. Rather than simply delivering a load of links to the community, you should build up the trust of Yahoo and send out a lot of good information without asking anything in return. The first 50 or so posts you make should not be linked (you don’t get live links until you are a level 2 member anyway. At level 1 your links are plain text. To get to level 2, you need to post a certain amount of answers and jump through some easy hoops. http://answers.yahoo.com/info/scoring_system

So with all that said, you can genuinely get some great targeted traffic by finding related questions to answer, and set up your links on those answers. Remember at all times that Yahoo will be watching and they are expecting QUALITY from you with every answer – and you will not go far wrong.