Business Development and Reputation: Using Question-Answer Websites

A Q & A website is a question / answer type website, where a person seeking information asks a question and is answered by experts or the same users as him. Sites of this type are a great tool for creating the reputation and recognition of your brand.

How many people use Question-Answer sites?

• A recent Business.com survey found that 49% of companies ask questions on Q & A sites. Only 29% use Twitter to search for information related to their company. Those of 49% did not even include those who receive information from Q & A sites after finding it in Google or Bing.
• Answers.com is now at the 17th position in the most visited US sites. Moreover, most of the traffic comes from the pages of Q & A sites. Answers.yahoo.com has even more traffic. Most of your potential market already get answers to questions through such sites.

Schedule of Q & A use by users - the usefulness of using Q & A sites

1 - Not at all useful 3 - There is something useful 5 - Very useful

Source: Social Media Best Practices: Question & Answer Forums. Business.com, December 14, 2009.

What is useful for me?

Leaving quality answers and links to relevant pages, you help yourself with the following:

• Direct your potential customers to your product information.
• Development of connections with people in your market, increase of reputation, leading position.
• Backlinks Some of these links are in follow and therefore are just as important from a SEO point of view.

How to use question-answer sites?

General rules that are suitable for social networks, and work here:

• Help others.
• Expansion of connections.
• Offer your services or products that meet the requirements of users.

Q & A sites are great for this, because people are already asking questions. When I write posts, I want them to be useful to users - to answer their questions. And in the Q & A sites the main thing is that people ask questions themselves, and you answer them.

Recommendations:

• Look for questions on your subject on Q & A sites.
• Answer the questions honestly and accurately. Point out your services and products, leave links to suitable pages where possible.
• Follow the conversation and keep the conversation where appropriate. Constantly monitor such sites and offer your help where possible, or praise others for good answers, etc.
• Completely fill out your user profile, which will force users to trust you. Usually, you can also put a link to your site in the profile.

The example below shows how a person left a qualitative answer (in most of his other answers he used the same template answer) and a link to his site.

What are the most popular Q & A sites and how are they different?

• Yahoo! Answers: Is the largest niche site. According to comScore, around 47 million people from the United States visited the site in November. This is a very large and fast-growing site. The asked question is valid for 4 days. Users answer questions and vote for the best answer. The best answer is chosen by those who asked the question or the community.
• Answers.com / WikiAnswers: Answers.com is visited monthly by about 41 million users from the USA, which makes it the second after Yahoo !, but much more than all other sites. The same site is actively developing. The main differences of the site:
  - Linking to a source site, for example, if you ask a question related to a trial, you will receive an answer from the print edition of “West’s Law and the Oxford University”.
  - It works on the wiki and therefore, instead of a large number of answers from different users - one joint.
  - In most cases, questions are not closed, so you can see questions that are more than 4 days old and are still open for answers.
• LinkedIn Answers & Business.com Answers: These sites are great for a narrower community leading to promotion and reputation. Yahoo! Sites Answers and Answers.com are built on the type of B2C (business for the client), and these are B2B (business for business). Here is communication among professionals of a particular profession.
• Stack Overflow and its derivative sites: this is a great site for programmers. If you are a software developer and you want to establish yourself as a real expert, then this site is perfect for you. The developers of this site are now working on similar ones, but in other niches: serverfault.com (for system administrators) and Annswers on Startups.
• Aardvark: A more closed system where you ask questions on your network. This site is perfect for journalists, bloggers to get answers from their network (circle of friends), but maybe it will not work for a wider social circle.

Is it possible to leave on such sites, something like guest posts?

• Find sites where there is an audience that is completely suitable for you.
• Provide people with the quality information they seek.
• Leave a message with full information about you. You may be a little self-serving, but don't get carried away with it.
• Make friends.

It should be a win-win for you. You must respond to all the needs of the community and those with whom you work closely in order to strengthen your connections and your reputation.

with regard to Runet, there are quite a lot of question-answer services, but they are all niche or marginal. Although 3 projects are distinguished from all this mass. I highlight the services: Mail.ru Answers, Google Questions and Answers, as well as fresh Yandex Answers. They are arranged exactly in the sequence in which they need to be used.

At the moment, I am not very interested in these services as sources of links, I consider them only as a source of targeted traffic . The mechanism of use is described, it is quite simple: the person who asks the question must receive a high-quality, detailed answer. Excellent - if you managed to put a link to the topic, but not always it can be done so that the message is not considered advertising.

At the same time, you can delve into the "reasoning" or "comparison" with the name of the company or phone. Yes, we will not receive direct traffic to the site, which is understandable - there will be no transitions without a link, but even this approach will have its advantages.

answers are ranked perfectly in Yandex. Google answers - respectively in Google. These are authoritative, trust, resources. If you competently provoke a discussion , or make it an imitation (just not stupid, I repeat - competent!), Then this question can be answered and it can be easily pushed into the TOP of search engines, it will be really easy. In this case, both the link, if it is in the subject, and the name or phone number of the company will work (it will simply be scored into the search and the site will be found).

Unfortunately, according to Yandex. I can't say anything , the service is relatively new and has not been tested in any way by me I came up with niche projects only partially, on medical topics, I can not say that there was a lot of traffic, but several calls were received. Still, I recommend using the above services, because of their mass character, as well as their authority in the eyes of search engines.