Can Assisting Others With Their Questions Really Improve Website Traffic?
June 6, 2009 by Anthony Buchalka
Filed under Link Building
There are websites that provide questions and answers for a huge variety of subjects. It’s a gold mine of information waiting to be used.
A user on one of these Question and Answer web sites can ask a “question” on a particular subject and other users of the site can put forward answers to it and the answers can be voted on (and then sorted by) relevance (more votes meaning more relevance). All of the responses can be seen online.
These Question and Answer web sites can generate you great amounts of traffic if you can answer questions in your area of expertise (it goes without saying that you need to ensure that your answering Questions that are related to your particular niche on the Internet).
Yahoo have a Question and Answer website that offers a complete question and answer service and it’s very helpful to get your name out there and on peoples lips.
You do certainly need to be careful about what you post. Don’t expect to be able to just post a URL and get masses of traffic, you will find your “answer” voted down or even removed if you do this.
As I have mentioned numerous times, providing great quality and relevant content will be far more valuable. Actually helping people out (by answering their question) will show you to be an “expert” in your market in almost no time.
The rules generally specify no “soliciting”, so answer the question and help someone out, with a detailed answer and then add a reference to your website for people to follow up for more information.
The other great reason to use Question and Answer sites (particularly Yahoo given that Google is not accepting new questions and answers) is that lots of websites syndicate the questions and answers for content on their website.
Because of this an increase in web site traffic occurs.
As I mentioned above, Questions and Answers can also appear in search engine results. Of course the other benefit is that users of the question and answer sites themselves will get to your website from reading your responses.
Personally in my experience I treat the answering of questions as building up a presence on the Internet rather than a source of huge traffic to my websites, however it is certainly something that should not be ignored.
With that said, I believe it can be a great “return on investment” where for a relatively small amount of time invested (to answer questions) you can get a steady trickle of web traffic.
SEO or search engine optimization is a word used today that prepares your online website properly so you have a fighting chance with online commerce. Getting a optimized website for your business is a good first step in any online business.