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Content is the commerce of social media. But, relevant content, the stuff your customers and prospects actually want to know is the gold. Constantly cranking out this gold can sometimes present creative challenges.
So how do you know what to write about, how do you keep the ideas flowing, how do you keep the content relevant and popular.
There a number of ways to address these important questions, not the least of which is simply paying attention to what your prospects and customers ask on the daily basis. There’s another tool that not many small business know much about, but is a wealth of great content ideas.
The service is called Yahoo Answers. Millions of people go to Yahoo Answers to get answers to questions on just about every topic known to man. Yahoo members are free to answer these questions and then even earn points for participation and developing a reputation for good answers. I’m not sure working your tail off answering all kinds of questions is the best use of your time (although you may actually come across opportunities to interact with people looking to buy what you sell) but, I have found that the questions posed on your particular subject of expertise can provide some tremendous research for blog topics. If a number of people are asking the same questions, and they are, then maybe the market is ripe for your blog post addressing the question.
The questions are broken down into many searchable categories. In addition, if you find the occasional question that you have already thoroughly addressed on your blog you can step up and provide an answer on the Yahoo Answer page and cite your blog post as the resource for your answer. If your answer is considered particularly helpful, this can send some additional traffic (no link juice though) your way.
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This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at May 05, 08 | 9:42 am and is filed under Marketing research, Search Engines, Yahoo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
Nice job - exactly what many of us are doing over on Linked In.
Q and A is one of the best ways to use Linked In and a great way to do all that you mention above.
I will have to take a look into Yahoo! Answers as well.
Mark
Yahoo! Answers doesn’t supply and link luurve, but contributing in fields related to your line of business will go towards establishing your credentials as an authority in your industry. This sort of reputation management is starting to evolve into a seperate online endeavour all of its own.
Another good tool - thanks again!
I’m always looking for good content!
First off, I want to thank John for writing a very informative article on how to find informative people. Finding informative people to do business with was one of the main ideals that created WOWzzy.com.
Like Yahoo, and other informative sites, we have a forum where people can post questions, and the answers for them. The difference between us and them though is the fact that your participation in these forums, directly effects your page ranking in our search. Meaning that the most informative, interactive people will be at the top of the page.
Get ranked by credibility, not credit.
If you have any questions, please email them to me at Jon@WOWzzy.com, and I would be more than happy to answer them.
I have used Yahoo Answers to find enough questions to answer… that I can not only create blog posts but entire products!
I do also get some traffic from my answers with live links.
And some answers even rank on Google. It all depends on the niche.
Hi John,
I have actually found the linkedin q&a to be extremely useful, especially after I spread the link via twitter/blog/etc. I recently asked “how much say should companies have in regulating internal social media usage.” that received quite a lot of responses. I would also love to hear your 2 cents.
http://www.linkedin.com/answers/business-operations/project-management/OPS_PRJ/219460-9548162?browseIdx=0&sik=1210057609134&goback=%2Eamq
I’d stick Yahoo! answers there with things to do on a rainy sunday afternoon when you can’t think of anything else constructive… It can be a veritable wealth of information but the time you put in to get something useful out isn’t all that well spent.
John, I started doing exactly that yesterday (GMTA), except in my case, I used my responses to questions on marketingprofs.com. It’s not as popular as Yahoo, but it’s more focused on my target audience (small businesses who need marketing help). Plus, your posts have a link to your profile (and Web site).
Also keep in mind Google Alerts. I set up to follow about 8 keyword phrases that relate to my business. I get 8 emails a day (more than I can really keep up with) but lots of great content ideas.
It’s also a great way to find relevant blogs to post comments on when they are talking about things that might relate to your business.
Uhhh…case in point here
Best,
Chris Baggott
CEO/Co-founder
Compendium Blogware
http://www.compendiumblogware.com
The answers are useful information when the question is one I am asking too. The repondents seem to aim for responsible answering.
I’ve begun doing my searching at any SE using a question or a phrase rather than a word. Maybe it is my imagination, but I think I get the information I want earlier in the research.
I agree both Yahoo! Answers and LinkedIn Q&A’s are good sources. I also think looking at your web log referrer strings or if you use Google Custom Search on your site can be better sources. These both show people that have come to your site looking for something which you may not have yet.
Yahoo Answers is a great tool for quality content, thank you for that nice post. It was very helpful!
Another good place for ideas would be just to check out the comments on the blogs you read regularly. It means checking into the website instead of sticking to an RSS reader, but it doesn’t take much time to scroll through the page to see if there’s anything valuable.
@Sarah - Don’t forget that most blogs - this one included allow you to subscribe to the comments as feed or if you scroll down to the bottom of this page you have the option to subscribe just to this comment thread so that when someone else comments you get a notification.
Here’s the comment RSS feed address
http//www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog/comments/feed/
I wish I got some link juice, but I think answering yahoo answers has been pretty productive for me. I get a decent amount of visits to my site by putting my web address as a source in the answer.
here’s my yahoo answers profile
http://tinyurl.com/4h9bkj
I have found that if you want to talk to experts on a topic LinkedIn is the place to go… but if you are trying to expose your blog to new people hungry to learn Yahoo Answers can’t be beat. I get a TON of traffic from Yahoo. It’s been a few weeks since I have been there though. Maybe I should make another visit!
It’s interesting that when we speak of “content” today we mean just as much the idea of filtering out what is unwanted as we mean finding those few, essential facts that seem to turn the brightness up a notch on your day. One way to find that key content and get rid of the dross is to subscribe to a wide range of RSS feeds. If you subscribe to 20 newspaper RSS feeds from all over the world, there are always a few items that are quirky and interesting. I’ve developed a tool, Xenos, that enables you to look through a lot of RSS feeds then make your own feed up by simply dragging and dropping. Once you’ve made that feed, you can distribute it as an RSS feed, or as an email newsletter. You can check out the beta of the software at http://www.metanews.biz.
This post points you in the right direction and generally speaking is a good idea, but I’m not sure I would use YA for content. Maybe the post should have been title “Trolling for Topics” as you could use YA for gaining a perspective on what people are seeking answers to. After all, we provide the content in our blogs.
Good Hunting