Answer Questions on Yahoo!

Building internet traffic to your website is a fairly simple process.  The only thing you need to do is demonstrate your value in front of your target audience.  In other words, you need to look for places where your target market spends time while online and then find a way to put a little sample of your expertise right in that spot, along with a link back to your website.

Of course, there are lots of strategies to get traffic to your website but most of them cost a lot of money.  Posting advertisements is not what this article is about.  Rather, it’s about inexpensive and/or free strategies to allow your target market to discover your value along with an easy way to link through to your website.

One of the best ways to do this is to post valuable comments on blogs and forums.  Many of the popular ones get tens of thousands of visitors each month and a few well-placed comments can drive significant traffic your way.  And as it turns out, one of the very best forums for attracting new and highly targeted visitors to your website is Answers on Yahoo!

Answers (http://answers.yahoo.com) is a forum where you can post a question you need answered.  You can also provide answers for those questions you have answers to.  The beauty of this forum is that you can set up your account with a link to your own website, allowing readers of your answers to click through to your website for more information.

Answers is a great way to get highly targeted traffic to your website because you can select only those questions whose answers you specialize in.  You can select the exact questions where you can provide the most value.  And when you leave that value on the forum, the precise people you want will be the ones who read it.

Think about this for a second.  Who do you think will be reading the questions you’re providing answers to?  Well, it will be exactly those people who don’t yet know the answer and those who actually WANT the answer.  In other words, they are exactly the people you want to find.  In fact, I would say it’s the most direct way to find your ideal customer online.

Posting on forums like Answers only becomes successful when you’ve posted a number of responses already.  There are literally thousands of questions on Answers and a single contribution will do little to increase your website’s traffic statistics.  But if you dedicate an hour each day to post answers, you’ll be amazed how quickly it builds up and soon, you’ll be getting a steady stream of traffic on your front door.

Yahoo also awards contributors with points, earned through continued contributions and positive feedback from other users.  Once you’ve accumulated a lot of points, the confidence factor starts to rise and other users will realize you’re an authority.  That will only increase the percentage of users who click through to your profile and then on to your website.

Building website traffic isn’t difficult.  It doesn’t even cost a lot of money.  It just takes time and a little know-how.  Yahoo Answers is a perfect example and I hope you take advantage of that resource and start building an identity for yourself and letting the internet take care of the rest.  You’ll be amazed at the benefits you can receive by giving away your expertise for free.