How to Use Question and Answer Sites to Get Traffic

Traffic can be generated from a lot of site that most people never thought of, although depending on the nature of your business knowing fully well that environment is superior to potentials.

So if your business is still growing or the medium size you can use this platform to generate traffic to your site or offer.

Using sites that are solely for question and answer can be very resourceful.

On these sites users ask questions while other gives answers.  And because of the nature of the activities on these sites it gather a lot of traffic from search engines apart from the user base traffic due to it long tail keyword usage nature.

Some these sites are:

 Quora: A Q&A site and blogging platform.

Stack Exchange Network: A network of many specialized question and answer sites

AskReddit:  A Q&A section on Reddit.

ChaCha: Questions are answered by independent contractors known as Guides.

Mahalo Answers : The questions and answers section of Mahalo, a site which also has how-to guides.

Askville : A Q&A site by Amazon.com

Knowing “How to Use Question and Answer Sites to Get Traffic” is great and cost effective.

We shall be using Quora and Stack Exchange Network as a guide because of

1: Quality questions and answers nature

2: Marketer friendly nature

Quora is a very good resource due to the wide range of questions and answer nature which are also in segmented format.

Using this resource to generate traffic require strategies which is what shall be focusing on.

As I said earlier environment is superior to potentials. The nature of your business and the traffic you want to generate is what determine the type of Question & Answer site that you will be using.

How to Use Question and Answer Sites to Get Traffic

Let’s quickly dive into how the traffic can be generated from these sites:

Step 1: Identify topics, categories, and search phrases

First, know that you won’t be answering the first questions you see—that would be a waste of your time.

Everything you do on these Q&A sites should be to maximize your visitors/time spent ratio.

If you’re answering questions no one cares about, you won’t get many visitors, and that ratio is going to suck.

The ideal questions to answer have a few common factors:

They’re not very old – on Quora, the best questions aren’t more than a few hours old. The older the question is, the more other answers you will be competing against.
They have a relatively high number of views – if they get more views than other questions, many people must be interested.
They have a low number of other answers – the more answers there are, the more likely your answer will get buried at the bottom.

There’s one attribute that ties the 2nd and 3rd factors together.

If many people are interested in a question, why aren’t there many answers?

Because the question is difficult to answer.

It’s important to understand this because you will be tempted to dodge these questions, thinking it’s easier to do a quick answer to a simple question.

But simple questions get tons of answers.

Expect to put some serious work into your answers to these difficult questions. It might take you 15-30 minutes sometimes to answer them, but if you get a few hundred visitors (or thousand), it can be worth it.

I’ll walk you through the steps of finding these questions on both sites.

Finding great questions on Quora: To start, go to your profile. There will be a section called “knows about,” where you can describe your areas of expertise.

In the text area, start typing major keywords (e.g., “marketing”, “SEO”, “jewelry”, etc.) that reflect your niche.

Quora will suggest relevant and popular topics. Choose them, and press “add.”

The more topics you add, the more potential questions there will be to answer, but keep the topics relevant.

Once you’ve done that, click the “Answer” link on the top toolbar.

That generates a list of questions that fit the topics you just chose.

The annoying part about Quora is that you can’t sort the questions.

By default (the only option), the questions are sorted based on an algorithm that considers the posting date and the number of other comments and views.

Your only real option is to scroll through them.

Take a look at the above picture to see what information is available for each question.

As you can see, it’s not perfect, but it’s a good start. For each question, we can determine:

    * The number of answers
* When the question was asked
    * The number of people following

You can find more useful data inside each question. If you click on any of those titles to go to the question page (with all the answers), you’ll see a “Question Stats” box in the right sidebar.

That box will show you the most important stat we’re looking for: views.

Typically, the views will correspond to the number of followers, but not always, so you should check both.

Now that you know what we’re looking for and where to find it, you just need an efficient process to identify which questions are good.

Here’s a good start:

* Screen out questions that were asked over a day ago
* Screen out questions that have zero followers or fewer than 100 views (this does not apply to very recent    questions, of course)
* Screen out questions that already have over 10 answers (you could go lower)

This will leave you with a few good questions to answer. These questions will:

  * Be recent
   * Have a good amount of interest
   * Have little competition (more on this later)

Leveraging the strategy on How to Use Question and Answer Sites to Get Traffic can be effective if done right.

Most Q&A sites are similar: Some Q&A sites, like Stack Exchange, are easier to use for this purpose.
Like I said before, Stack Exchange consists of a ton of mini-Q&A sites divided by topic.
You can find one that’s relevant to your niche using the dropdown menu at the top:

All sites on Stack Exchange can be sorted by tags.

If you click on a tag, you’ll get a list of questions that have been marked with that tag.

That’s not very different from the process we used above. However, you now have the ability to sort these questions by a few different filters:

You can see the filters on the top menu above.

Additionally, Stack Exchange sites show you the number of views right on this page.

You should mainly use the “votes,” “newest,” and “unanswered” filters.

The “votes” filter will sort all posts with your tags according to the number of votes those posts received (indicating interest).

If you see a post with thousands of views but very few answers, you may want to add one. Even if a post is old, it’s likely still getting views from search traffic if it’s this popular.

You’ll want to spend most of your time sorting by “newest.”

You can either jump on questions with no answers yet that you think might get more popular or stick to questions that are a few hours old that already have a good number of views.

It depends on how much time you have available to answer questions.

Step 2: Here’s how to structure answers for maximum effectiveness

Now that you know how to find good questions to answer, the hard work begins.

On most Q&A sites, including Quora and Stack Exchange, answers are ordered by the number of “upvotes” you get.

In theory, the best answer should rise to the top.

This means that your answers have to be the best.

However, you also want to be able to drive traffic to your website.

There are three main methods to do this, but they all hinge on one key criterion of question selection:

Only answer questions related to content you’ve already written about.

Otherwise, there won’t be a natural way to drive traffic back to your site.

Method 1 – A brief answer with a link to a post: Once in awhile, you’ll get lucky and come across a question that you’ve addressed almost perfectly in a past post.

For example, when someone on Quora asked whether content marketing was effective and whether it was worth spending time on over SEO, I had to answer it.

Method 2 – Reference posts in your answer: Most of the time, questions will be on related to your past content issues.

In this case, you’ll have to provide a detailed answer on Quora itself.

It takes a lot more work, but if it gets you a few thousand views, it’s worth it.

As far as the linking goes, just put in 1-3 links to your closely related content whenever it makes sense. You won’t get an amazing click-through rate, but you’ll still drive a good amount of traffic.

Method 3 – Recommend your product directly: You need to be careful not to spam these sites with promotional links and answers, but if you sell a product, you’ll occasionally get the chance to recommend it directly.

The key is to do it in a transparent and authentic way.

If you wish to know “How to Use Question and Answer Sites to Get Traffic” and get it the free way this methods are asset.

Step 3: Track and modify your approach

The final thing you need to do is track your results to determine whether answering questions is worth your time.

Overall, this is a simple 2-step process.

Fair warning: your first 5-10 answers probably won’t do very well. You’ll quickly learn what does and doesn’t work on the Q&A site you chose to start with.

Track (1) the time you spend on each answer and (2) the number of visitors you get from that time (even better—conversions).

You can track views directly on the Q&A site, but views to your actual website are more important.

Give each post at least a week to see what kind of traffic it is driving (both immediately and on a consistent basis).

Once you have a sample size of at least 20-30 questions, you have enough information to determine whether using Q&A sites is an effective traffic generation strategy for your business.

It usually will be if you’re good at picking questions and getting top answers, but in some industries it will be harder than others. That’s why you need to measure and evaluate your results. – Neil Patel

If you’re looking for an opportunity to grow your traffic Q&A site is a very good. The above guides are simple step to follow and get result.

To know How to Use Question and Answer Sites to Get Traffic I advise you start using them and after getting good  result you can scale by answering more question.

Remember the seed sow today generate the fruit for the future.

Please share with your friend s and let me know in your comment below if you’re using this method.