Using Yahoo Answers for Free Advertising and Backlinks

One of the main activities of any blog or website is, wherever possible, to take advantage of free targeted traffic; this is why webmasters spend so much time trying to find ways of improving their position in the Google search results. However, there is one very simple method of getting free traffic which is often overlooked by webmasters: Yahoo Answers. The bottom line is that Yahoo Answers is the largest community of knowledge sharing on the Web and getting some of this huge audience interested in your products or services can yield huge benefits.

Not only is Yahoo Answers a great method of generating targeted traffic, it is also a terrific source of free advertising. If you add this free publicity technique to your marketing strategies, you will soon discover how incredibly powerful it is.

One of the key aspects of this strategy is that it is all about participation; so, the first step you need to take is to sign up (by visiting answers.yahoo.com) and to complete your profile, adding as much information to it as you are happy to share. It is also a good idea to upload an avatar; probably not your logo; perhaps your photo; or some other friendly graphic associated with your brand.

Next, you need to familiarize yourself with the Yahoo Answers platform: browse through the categories of question which are relevant to your niche; and decide which types of question you are interested in answering.

Before you begin to answer any questions, however, you should have a clear idea of what you want to promote. This way you can home in on those topics that will be relevant to the site you want to promote via Yahoo Answers.

Your first public activity will be to answer lots and lots of questions; try and aim for the maximum allowed, which is twenty questions per day. The reason for this is that Yahoo operate a system of points and levels: when you sign up, you are a level one user and Yahoo allocates you 100 points; in order to reach level 2, you need 250 points; and, until you reach level 2, you will not be able to include backlinks in your answers.

You are assigned 2 points for every question you answer; so, if you answer the maximum of 20 questions, you will earn 40 points daily; and, in four days, you will have reached level 2 status. However, if any of your answers is picked as the best answer, you are awarded an extra 10 points; and also, every time you yourself vote for answer, you are awarded an extra point. So, as you can see, achieving level 2 status is not a tall order, and it is definitely worth the effort.

Once you have reached level 2, whenever you reply to a question, you have the possibility of including a website link in the "Source" box accompanying your answer. This is an easy way to get some free advertising and to encourage visitors to find more information on the subject discussed in the question.

Even after you have reached the coveted level 2, it is still beneficial to supply the best answers you can. Answers which are picked as best answers will achieve a higher rating in the Yahoo search results and will inevitably bring more traffic to your website or to your affiliate offer. So spend some time studying those answers, which have been picked as best answers and try to analyze what made them appeal to the person asking the question.

Due to the large number of people who may reply to questions, it is also important to be the quickest to respond to questions, which are still open for answer. You should also do your best to answer each question as thoroughly as possible and be sure to address the person who sent the question by his or her first name (if possible). This will increase your chances of being chosen as provider of the best answer.

Yahoo Answers includes a spell checker; so be sure to use it whenever possible to minimize errors; or type your answer in Microsoft Word, check the grammar there and copy and paste into Yahoo Answers when you are happy with it. Take your time to get it right; do not forget that your ultimate goal is to be selected as the best answer.

Once you are up and running with Yahoo Answers, it simply becomes a question of optimizing your efforts to ensure you get the best results possible.  Here are the key points you should keep in mind.

• When choosing which questions to answer, look for recently posted questions with either no answers or only one or two.
• Ensure that the URL you post in the source box contains the topic mentioned in the question: for example, if the question was about "acne cures", your URL might be something like "mysite.com/acne-cures.html".
• Try to include your niche keyword within the body of your answer; this is useful for search engine optimization.
• You can even include a backlink within the body of the answer (using an HTML a tag with an href attribute); but do this sparingly and make sure that it appears totally relevant to the topic being discussed.

Compared with many advertising techniques, using Yahoo Answers may seem like hard work. However, the rewards can be huge: it is not only the Yahoo search engine, which will pick up your answers (and links). Google can also index your answers; so be sure to answer as many questions as you can every day.

How to Use Buzzworthy Guerrilla Marketing: Take it from a Rock Band.

It was a couple years ago that I read of Canadian indie rock band Arcade Fire’s approach to launching their album and stumbling across the article again, I feel it’s worth another look at what businesses can learn and benefit from a more guerrilla tact to marketing and advertising. Indie rock bands are not often thought to be the fodder of Bloomberg Business Week articles, but such is the case with the Canadian natives in Arcade Fire. The band, in the process of preparing to release its latest record -- a double-disc project titled Reflektor – was hailed “experts of guerilla marketing craft.”

Arcade Fire isn’t exactly the type of band that needs an aggressive and mysterious street marketing plan to be successful. After all, the band, who arrived on the scene with 2004’s critically-beloved Funeral and won a surprise Grammy for Album of the Year with 2010’s The Suburbs, is arguably the biggest and most buzzworthy band in the so-called “indie rock” scene.

Indeed, the members of Arcade Fire, which include husband-and-wife vocalists Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, as well as a seemingly ever-shifting group of versatile instrumentalists, could easily have rested on its laurels and depended on the success of their previous album and the marketing sweep of their record label—North Carolina’s Merge Records—to help the upcoming Reflektor toward a hopeful (and highly likely) number one berth atop the Billboard charts. Instead, Arcade Fire took to a marketing route for this album that was anything but run-of-the-mill, using an inspired set of guerilla marketing tactics other bands and record labels—or even major businesses outside of the entertainment industry—could learn a little something from.

Arcade Fire’s innovative marketing campaign began suddenly and unexpectedly in July 2013, when one of the band’s Twitter followers sent them a tweet with the simplistic words of “you’re my favorite.” The band responded to the compliment with a tweet of their own, thanking the fan for his support and then tossing off a seemingly nonchalant comment that would function as the band’s announcement of their return: “Our new album will be out on October 29th.”

From there, the marketing campaign for Reflektor was executed largely from the shadows and almost entirely at the street level. Sidewalk chalk and mysterious posters gave way to secret shows, with small pieces of information gradually making their way to the press. First, the title was unveiled through the cryptographic symbol that the band continuously emblazoned on their posters or in their chalking campaigns; later, pre-order bundles on the band’s website revealed that the new record would be a double-album release; and eventually, song titles and lengths—most of them long—were revealed on iTunes and other digital music vendors.

There was also a single—the dance-oriented title track, which “leaked” to YouTube and began collecting buzz before the band even mentioned that iconic glam rock superstar David Bowie had contributed back-up vocals—as well as advance listening parties and reviews from major music publications that only fed the flames further. A euphoric write-up of the new album was published on Rolling Stone’s website a month prior to the album’s release, with the writer, veteran music journalist David Fricke, calling Reflektor “the best album Arcade Fire have ever made.”

The band’s marketing campaign managed to generate a huge amount of attention and anticipation for their new album, even though they have never had much of a presence on mainstream pop music radio.

So what’s the big takeaway? 

The most ingenious part of the campaign for Reflektor is that Arcade Fire managed to maintain the mystery of guerilla marketing forms while still sticking to the same advertising calendar that most major music releases follow. The band released a radio single, but did so in an unorthodox way; they also sent out promotional advances to key music publications to stir up anticipation, but have thus far done so without the album leaking to the public ahead of its highly-publicized release date.

Arcade Fire appeared on Saturday Night Live, taking over NBC’s late-night programming slot for a half hour after the popular sketch TV show’s 39th season premiere to unveil a batch of news songs. However, even the SNL concert special was far from commonplace. The special, which was directed by filmmaker Roman Coppola and which featured cameos from the likes of Ben Stiller, James Franco, Bill Hader, Zach Galifianakis, and U2 front man Bono—as well as pseudo “host” work from Michael Cera, a fellow Canadian—balanced oddball comedy and a near-nightmarish visual aesthetic with the obviously-promotional premiere of several new songs from Arcade Fire’s new album.

The whole marketing campaign ultimately boils down to one thing: Arcade Fire was able to keep their album in the public eye without resorting to invasive advertising. Instead of irritating pop-up web browser ads or repetitive television commercials, the band has built up a perfect storm of anticipation for Reflektor by disguising their true motives—ostensibly, to sell their product—in layers of performance art, self-mockery, and shadowy guerilla marketing. The band managed to forge a calculated marketing path while simultaneously making the whole thing look like an accidental mess, and that same kind of guerilla marketing model could be a refreshing substitute for the more in-your-face advertising strategies that most businesses use today.