Yahoo has the Answers
Content Marketing

Yahoo has the Answers

8th October 2012

Today I have a nice simple post, with all the hype about content marketing I’m going to show you an often under looked tactic which can help not only with ideas for content generation but also will help if your testing how to increase the conversion rate of your website.

Lets introduce Yahoo Answers  there’s a number of websites similar to this Quora is a popular choice but today I’m going to talk about how to use Yahoo Answers.

Sales Objections

There is a definite overlap between some content ideas and conversion, if you speak to someone who specialises in Conversion rate optimisation they will often talk about Sales Objections. These objections are the real life questions people ask  before they make the decision to purchase. There are ways to find out sales objections such as:

  • Ask off line members of staff what questions they have (And how they overcome them)
  • Use services like Qualaroo (Formerly KISSinsights) to ask questions to your website visitors
  • Use polls, surveys through Facebook, twitter or via Email Campaigns
  • Create a focus group (Off line / Or Online)
  • Etc.

Answering Sales objections is Great Content! Why because this is what customers really want to know, its also great for conversion, why? because your mimicking questions which could be answered over the phone or face to face into an on-line environment.

Step in Yahoo Answers!

For many a content marketer Yahoo Answers has been associated with “Evergreen content”  however personally I think you can utilise the benefits of it to produce real answers to real questions.

Step 1:

What ever the product/service you want to promote is, simply type an associated keyword into the answers search box. In this example I’m going to use “Fat Burners”.

  • A quick tip: You can refine your search to view just “Answers” or “Questions”, in this example I’m only interested in the Questions.

Step 2:

Copy and Paste a good volume of questions into an Excel sheet i.e. 20 – 200. Ok this next part requires some manual time to get the good information out but it will be worth it.

Side Step:

Content Ideas, you will see after your initial search that straight away there are some ideas for you to write content about i.e.

Q: “Best fat burners for men and what cardio to do?” That sounds like a useful blog post, after you have written it you can even then post it as an answer to the original question, which may potentially help drive some traffic towards the post and start a potential snowball of tweets etc.

Step 3:

We now have a list of questions in our excel sheet, in short review them and carry out the following.

  1. Remove non relevant questions
  2. Categorise

You will generally find that you can categorise all the questions you down load into Groups / OK this is a manual task but in my example I’ve ended up with a list of 40 real questions.

Step 4:

Everyone loves a pivot table 🙂 So we take the data and pivot it accordingly, this now shows me that the main questions people ask regarding “Fat Burners” are:

  • What the best?
  • What exercises should I do?
  • Which are Good for Men
  • Which are Good for Women
  • etc.
  • etc.

Side Step:

If your already receiving a good level of traffic you can cross reference the information using analytics.

  • Download a list of referring keywords
  • Also look at site search
  • Categorise
You will probably find that it will match very similar to the information you get from one of the answer websites.
Your Visitors are actively trying to tell you what they want to know.

Step 5:

Making use of the data:

Content Generation

In my head  I can already see a white paper about the “Top 10 best Fat Burners”, White Paper you say? The reason is after studying this market there are a huge number of pages that already discuss the “best fat burner” so personally I would build upon what they have done to create a piece of content which can stand out from the rest.  Use the Social Crawlytics Tool for some ideas of pages that have worked really well, find out who tweeted it and make your content more compelling.

Conversion

In terms of conversion this is based on how you categorise your questions, in my example I picked up on:

  • Which are Good for Men
  • Which are Good for Women

So tailoring some of your conversion pages to clearly identify parts to show the product works for men or women respectively and why.

That’s it, this is not a tactic which is new or profound, but it is really underused and underrated.

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Written By
Neil Walker started working as an SEO in 2002 and rose to become Group CTO for Swedish Marketing Agency “Online Group” in 2010 he moved to consulting with agencies, in-house teams and PR companies. In 2014 he formalised this work and founded Made Notable Ltd a boutique digital consultancy based...
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