Lately some of the old school traffic generating systems have fallen back into my favor, and Yahoo Answers is one of those. I’ve been off their radar for a while, busy with other Web 2.0 sites, but in the process of building a new ecommerce store I decided it was time to revisit Yahoo Answers and see if it was still a viable method of traffic generation.

What Is Yahoo Answers?

In a nutshell, Yahoo Answers is a Q&A website where people can ask a questions about anything they want, and other members can answer those questions.  It’s very similar to a forum except that most forums are for a specific niche or a specific group of people and Yahoo Answers is for everyone in every niche and every walk of life.

How To Sign Up For Yahoo Answers

If you don’t already have an account with Yahoo, go to http://answers.yahoo.com and set one up.  I suggest that you set up an account name (ID) that relates to your business.  For example:  the name of my new toy store is All Child’s Play so I set up a new Yahoo account of allchildsplay@yahoo.com.

You can have more than one account with Yahoo, so if you already have an account and want to set up a new one that is more relative to your business..it’s OKAY!  It’s kind of like gmail…you can have several accounts for different businesses.

Generating Traffic With Yahoo Answers

Once you’ve set up your account you can main page at Yahoo Answers.  You can either do a search to see what questions people are asking that you may be able to answer, or you can scroll down and look for a category that’s relative to your business or niche.

Go to “Answer..Open Questions” in your category and find a question that you can answer.  For example:  if you’re selling a a dog training book you would click on “Answer” and then type in something like “barking dogs” in the Search For Questions box.  Several questions will come up that you can now click on and answer.

You could also click on the “Pets” category in the left category bar and see what kinds of questions are being asked in the pets category that you may be able to answer.

After you answer the question you can drop a link to your website or an affiliate link at the end of your post.  The crazy thing is that on Yahoo Answers there are lot of people answering questions that don’t leave links at all, so it’s a fantastic way for you to get some good targeted traffic from your links.

Yahoo Answers does carry a “No Follow” tag, which means that supposedly your anchor text and backlinks aren’t used for rankings…but everyone knows that Google still places a lot of emphasis on Yahoo Answers and the links really do count.

More importantly than the backlinks,  just like any other Web 2.0 marketing you build relationships and become known as an expert in your niche by answering questions and giving good advice.  You need to “own” your niche and “own” your market and Yahoo Answers is just one more way of letting people know that you’re the best at what you do!

And just like any other free marketing methods, getting targeted traffic from Yahoo Answers takes time and patience.  The more questions you answer and the more you show yourself to be an expert in your niche, the more traffic you’ll get.  The traffic you get from Yahoo Answers will also be extremely targeted resulting in more sales.

To get more traffic generation methods you can check out Traffic Explosion!

Leave a comment and let us know what your experience with Yahoo Answers has been. Remember..we use “Comment Luv” and we are “Do Follow” so you’ll get some link juice with your comments.