How to use Yahoo Answers for content ideas and links

Yahoo Answers is an underutilized resource that can be mined for content ideas and drive targeted traffic and possibly links to your site. The easiest way to begin is to type in your highest level queries that you’re targeting on your home page to see what kind of questions people are asking. Using the advanced search queries, you can filter to see what people have been asking recently, however I generally like to see what people have been searching for consistently over time so I leave it unfiltered. Once you have a general idea of some of the questions people have about your industry/product/service, go and write an article or blog post on your site about it. Yahoo Answers gives you 5 days from the day question is published to submit an answer, so keep that in mind when writing your post. Once this step is completed, you can go and post your answer on Yahoo Answers, but in the answer you should summarize your blog post and insert a link to it, instead of answering it outright. This accomplishes many things.

• Provides content ideas to your site that are relevant and for which there is current demand
• Attracts highly targeted traffic which could turn into customers/subscribers
• Allows you to teach people in your industry, which is the easiest way to build trust with your audience
• Depending on how competitive your industry is, the Yahoo Answers entry can rank for certain terms.
• I’ve seen sites move up in the rankings for mildly competitive terms after links were dropped in relevant Yahoo Answers queries. Even though the links are nofollowed, what I’ve seen makes it seem slightly more plausible in my opinion that we’re being lied to about nofollow.

A similar strategy can be used for forums as well. Research and see what questions are consistently being asked in your industry and create content to answer the question. Then come back, summarize your article and put a link to it in the forums. Assuming you adequately answer the questions on your blog, your link drops will be welcome, on topic, and provide relevant traffic to your site.