Jump Start With Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Answers is a surprisingly useful resource to give a new or existing website a shot of adrenaline.  The community is full of legitimate people, who actually answer questions, and spammers, who are abusing it for traffic and backlinks.  Yahoo does a decent job suspending (aka banning) the accounts of these spammers, but it really is a futile effort as the spammers can just make new accounts.  Another method of deterring spamming is that links on Yahoo Answers appear clickable only if the user posting is level 2 or above.  On the plus side, this banning keeps Yahoo Answers from becoming a complete cesspool.  You can choose to be a full out spammer, borderline spammer, or a more genuine user.  All will have their respective pros and cons.

Full Out Spammer:

Write one or a couple (if you are felling particularly ambitious) answers including your link(s).  Copy and paste this answer to as many relevant questions as possible.  If you post this answer to unrelated topics, you will greatly increase you’ve chance of being suspended.  Try to achieve level 2 prior to getting suspended, so that the links you leave behind are clickable.  You can do this by voting for questions to gain points (prior to your massive spamming), posting questions on another account and choosing your own answer as the best answer, or by being more conservative regarding what questions you answer.  Have multiple accounts, so suspensions don’t halt you spamming.

Borderline Spammer:

The same concept as being a full out spammer, except you are much more selective with the questions that you pick to answer.  You only answer questions that your prewritten answers match quite well with.  The likelihood of getting banned is slim, but you might as well have multiple accounts just in case.

Genuine User:

You write a custom answer to each question and include your link when appropriate.  One might even include the links of other websites to give an answer more depth and validity is necessary.  The likelihood of getting banned is extremely slim, but it still does happen; luckily, you can appeal all suspensions.

Whichever method you choose to (ab)use, remember that you are creating and defining a reputation for the website that you link to.  I view Yahoo Answers mainly as a traffic promotion source rather than as a means of improving serps.  Granted the links are nofollow, they still provide some benefit when it comes to search engine optimization.

Above is a graph of what Yahoo Answers did for a website of mine; the posting method used would fit into the borderline spammer category.  I started to post ~250 answers over the period of 2 weeks starting on November 13th.  After posting was stopped on November 27th, traffic from Yahoo Answers asymptotes down to ~50 visitors per day.  As January continues though, you can see that traffic rebounds to ~150 visitors per day.  I am not quite sure what caused this slight rebound, but I believe that the questions started to rank for long tail search terms.

In terms of revenue generated regarding time spent, Yahoo Answers has done quite well so far.  The niche promoted earns $10 CPM, which means that approximately $150 was generated from Yahoo Answers traffic thus far.  Estimated time to post an answer is 1 minute, which means that this earned $36 / hour.  Not too shabby considering the fact that minimum wage is only $7.25 / hour.  This may just be mindless copying and pasting, but aren’t all minimum wage jobs exactly that?

~ by admin on January 20, 2010.

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