Q&A: What advice can anyone give for marketing on Yahoo Answers?

by hongxing128

Question by chbrown: What advice can anyone give for marketing on Yahoo Answers?
I’m looking for ideas, advice and success stories from anyone who has used Yahoo Answers as a marketing tool? Please note, I am writing an article on this topic and later a book, so your answers may be published. Please let me know if you don’t want your answers used in my writings.

Best answer:

Answer by Doran P
I use Yahoo Answers to direct people to my services. The key is to give real value to the asker in your answer to their question. If you are a problem solver for them, they will seek you out for more of what you gave them. You don’t necessarily have to even place a link in the answer, as long as you can be contacted through IM or email.

If you are too aggressive and have an obvious agenda….ie: short answer and placing a link for them to click….that’s not so effective….if at all…especially when the link is not really relevant.

In fact I realized the potential of this forum very quickly when 3 weeks into it …it occurred to me to look at my site statistics….just over 600 unique visits…so I realized my answers were effecting or influencing people.
So what started out as just a place to throw my opinions and expertise out there, became a unique tool in my business process.

Direct Mail and marketing are my thing, and part of my overall strategy is to use this forum to help educate people about the effectiveness of direct mail, and that marketing is a businesses top priority. This forum also allows me to “practice” my knowledge. It allows me to perfect my thoughts on a given subject. This makes me that much more effective when I am sitting in front of a live client.

It is also a great way to stay sharp creatively. There are often questions that allow me to craft a unique solution to the question at hand.

As far as the effectiveness of Yahoo Answers, I can see a direct correlation between a batch of unique visitors to my websites to when I may have spent a chunk of a few hours on Yahoo Answers.

Several hits have translated into an actual contact, and this excersize allows me to also tweak web content so that more of those visits turn into contacts.

Add your own answer in the comments!