Do you struggle to come up with content for your small business blog or website? Are you having trouble deciding what kinds of content your target audience is hungry for?
Yahoo! Answers offers a great solution. It can provide you with direct insight into the exact questions that potential customers might be asking about your products or services. To get started you’d simply visit Yahoo! Answers and run a search for one of your target keywords.
For example, a roofing contractor might be targeting the keyword “roof leaks” since that’s one of the reasons why many people call a roofing contractor in the first place.
Make sure you choose “Search Y! Answers” below the green bar, and not “Search Web” above the green bar. The “Search Web” bar will kick you into a Yahoo! search engine query.
You will typically get thousands of results, and for once the large number of search results is great news! That’s because a large percentage of these questions represent questions that could be turned into useful, relevant blog posts for your site.
For example, the “roof leaks” query brings up some of the examples below:
Granted, many of these examples aren’t exactly grammatically correct or even very coherent, but you can get the gist of most of the questions. Some of these examples won’t necessarily be helpful to you, either. Asking about landlord-tenant disputes when the roof leaks would be a great blog post for the appropriate kind of lawyer, of course, but not for a roofing contractor.
However, the very short list above offers at least three blog posts if you look closely:
- How to Detect Roof Leaks
- How to Fix Roof Leak Stains
- How to Fix Minor Roof Leaks
You know your business, so you might be able to pick out even more. For example, you might be able to tell what the user “ghassan” is trying to get at when he’s talking about his shingles, because it might relate to one of the very common questions that you get from your customers every single day.
Now that you know real customers are asking these questions you can simply answer them on your website. Share the content on your social networks and know that you’ve already given your website a better chance of being found because you’ve taken the time to give customers exactly what they want.
However, you can take it a step further.
If you want to take this method a step further then you will need to create a Yahoo! account. Then, you can come back to Yahoo! Answers, where you can call up each of the questions you used to develop your blog posts.
Now you can write an answer that looks something like this:
“I am a professional roofer in Minneapolis and I’ve answered your question in great detail on my blog.” Then, simply add a link back to the appropriate post to generate some immediate traffic.
Yahoo! Answers rank well in the search engines too (and not just Yahoo!’s search engine). This means you increase your chances of being found, either directly or indirectly.
If your target market is another business you can work a similar process by using LinkedIn Answers. This will put you in touch with higher-end customers and markets.
As you can see, even B2B customers have roofing questions. Don’t neglect this avenue even if you’ve traditionally sold to consumers. Businesses have deeper pockets, after all, and this might offer you some insight on targeting higher-end customers on your website.
Mining people’s questions for content ideas ensures that you will never have to struggle to find something to write about. Yahoo! Answers and LinkedIn Answers constantly receive hundreds of new questions every single day.
Today’s Action Items
- Search for relevant key phrases on Yahoo! Answers & LinkedIn Answers.
- Develop at least one blog post from this search.
- Write your post and post a link back to the post on Yahoo! Answers or LinkedIn.
