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On one of my latest posts ‘15 Ways To Increase Traffic To Your Blog‘ I introduced the idea of answering questions on Yahoo Answers as a way of increasing traffic to your blog. The post received some comments from people who had not tried using Yahoo Answers and others were not sure how it worked.

Some comments received can be seen below:

Indeed those are really helpful, I want to read more..
anyway about the yahoo answer, how can I put my links on it, without putting it on the resource box of my answer?

by Keira

I haven’t tried Yahoo Answers yet, hadn’t even thought of that route, but it’s a good idea

by Muscle Post

The one that caught my attention was Yahoo answers.

by Gerri

For those of you who are not familiar with Yahoo Answers it is a website where users can ask questions relating to many preset categories, people can then answer the questions, with the user that originally posted the question then choosing the best answer from the ones supplied. Yahoo Answers covers a number of niches, so it is a viable option for many bloggers.

There are a few ways you can use Yahoo Answers, the first being, directly answering questions which you have covered in your blog, you can then answer the the question and link back to your blog post, this has worked well for me on posts such as my ‘PHP Login Script Tutorial‘ where I answer the users question then sent them to my blog for more info. You can add a link by simply copying the URL into the answer box. This tactic can work effectively, you will also find that the same questions get asked alot so you can generate alot of links. This tactic helps to improve traffic to your blog.

The second way you can use Yahoo Answers is to look for trends in the questions being asked, as these can be used as ideas for future blog posts. I found the idea for my ‘PHP: Be Notified When Google Crawls Your Site‘ post when I noticed alot of people where asking ‘How do I know when Google crawls my website?’. These are questions that people are looking to be answered, so chances are there are many others looking for the answer to these questions, but can’t find the information online already.

A few words of advice that I would give are:

1. Stick To Your Niche - Dont go off answering questions and linking back to your site/blog if it is not relevant.
2. Dont spam - Dont just answer question with a load of links.
3. Give accurate and informative answers - If you stick to your niche and give accurate and informative answers then you can gain a reputation in that niche that can help draw traffic to your blog.

The main advantage of Yahoo Answers is that the traffic you receive is targeted traffic and as people have asked questions over at Yahoo Answers, there is a good chance that they could comment on your blog as well.

I want to know about your experiences with Yahoo Answers? Keep us all updated on how you get on by commenting below.