Can helping others out by answering simple questions really have marketing value for you, or are these answer sites (like Yahoo: Answers and AllExperts.com) just a place to waste your time giving something away for nothing? Will you really get visitors by posting your links in answers? Is it even appropriate? Can Q&A sites really help you build your reputation as an expert in a niche, or do so few people view the answers that it’s just not worth your time? Let’s cut to the chase… are Q&A sites another case of fad marketing, or is helping others a fab marketing idea?

How it Works:

It’s pretty simple: you register as a member on the site (or whatever title they choose to give you, like “expert” for example). People post questions to the site. If the question is within your area of expertise, or if you just feel like you have something particularly brilliant to say, you can post an answer to the question.

The idea is that by helping others out with free responses (assuming they’re high quality responses), you’ll brand yourself as an expert in the topic (at least if you do it often enough). The other marketing angle is to insert a link to one of your sites (or an article for further reading on the subject) into your answers (assuming it’s appropriate and not forbidden by the particular Q&A site) to drive traffic and increase your backlinks.

Fad or Fab?

FAB – Here’s why – This fad or fab call was my toughest yet. There’s no way I can call answering questions to help people out a “fad,” because it’s long been a great marketing tactic, not to mention just a nice thing to do. The fact is that giving something for nothing (if it has some quality behind it) has always been a good way to stand out in a customer’s mind when they’re considering giving you their business or repeat business.

While I can’t call marketing via Q&A sites an example of fad marketing, I also struggled to call it a fab marketing tactic. While I believe you can have limited success in demonstrating your expertise on answer sites, I don’t consider it an effective means of branding in that sense, because your ROI is simply very small in comparison to other methods, such as forum posting in your niche, maintaining a blog in your area of expertise, etc. So while it works, it would rarely be the best method.

The best part of Q&A sites (if you’re allowed to, and effectively do), is placing links in your answers. It puts your link directly in front of a targeted audience who has a genuine interest in the topic. Again though, you have to be sure not to break the site terms as far as coming across as a spammer, and your link should be very closely tied to the actual question to get the best results marketing-wise.