Inspired by a great post by Vaidhyanathan, I began answering questions on Yahoo! Answers near the beginning of this year. Since then I have answered over 50 questions, nearly always related to metal roofing. Nearly 12 months later I sat down and did a study to find out:
Was the time I was spending answering these questions resulting in a reasonable amount of usable leads?
On to the data:
From my 53 answers, I received 562 visits, with a bounce rate of 33.5%, spending an average of 3:03 per visit.
First I compared the conversion rates of Yahoo! Answers traffic with PPC rates from the same period:
(Conversions are either a customer filling out and submitting a form for more information, or clicking on a link to our contact page.)Data this chart was made from is available as an Excel spreadsheet here.
As you can see, the conversion rates from Yahoo! Answers are nowhere near those coming from our PPC campaigns. That being said, to accurately understand how much this traffic is worth, you need to find out the cost of this traffic per visitor.
This data is available as an interactive Excel spreadsheet here.
The conversion rates for traffic from Yahoo! Answers are lower than those of PPC traffic, but the cost per visit is less. So to accurately compare them, we do some more number crunching:
(For privacy reasons I unfortunately can't give you all the PPC data I would like to.)
So basically, for Best Buy Metals, it makes sense to continue spending time answering questions on Yahoo! Answers.
Important tip:
Don't rush out to Yahoo! Answers and answer every question with a link to your website at the end!
Answer relevant questions in a non-spammy relevant way. Then include your website as a source at the end. You are the source, as a representative of your company, so this is not deceptive, and people don't mind it. You can check out my Yahoo Answers profile here.
Coming soon... How to use Yahoo! Answers in a way that benefits your company and the Yahoo! Answers community - The complete guide.
Hey, great post. I've been preparing a similar post myself, but covering more of the Q&A market. Can I ask why you focused only on Yahoo! Answers? WikiAnswers (where I work) has roughly the same number of US visitors. The dynamics are different, mostly because it's a wiki, the traffic is more SEO based (and therefore comes in over time and not in a surge), etc. But the essentials are the same. Provide quality answers, add a related link to your site if applicable, fill out your bio page, build relationships, etc. Thanks again for the post, and if anybody would like help using WikiAnswers in this way (or in including WikiAnswers info in your next post), please get in touch.
Gil,
This looks like a great idea! I've personally only had experience with Yahoo! Answers in the past, but I'll definately try out WikiAnswers, and mention it in my next post.
Sounds like a great program all in all.
Great. Let me know if I can help in any way.
Well I'm heading over to check it out :)
(Edit: after registration)
Well all signed up and answered my 1st question. Would like to know if its possible to get a dofollow profile link - do you have to answer a certain amount of questions?
I've seen the same kind of results before. But please note that Yahoo is not backing up Answers anymore. I had a perfect account of 75% best answer, never spammed (serious on that), and one day my account got suspended. I have tried 6 times now to contact Yahoo to ask why, and all I ever get back is that they have reviewed my account and cannot turn it back on.
So just be careful.
It is a great place for leads and traffic as long as you don't tick someone off apparently.
Shoot. Where at Yahoo are the lights still on? Hopefully Flickr, Delicious, and Pipes don't fall into decline.
Ouch... Good to know.
I've never answered a question unless I thought I could really provide someone help they could use, so that is good to know.
You'd think that with that kind of amazing percentage they'd absolutely love you.
Yeah, I thought so too. I spent tons of time getting rid of spammers comments and bad answers as well. Apparently I pissed someone off. :(
Hi, Kate,
Same thing happened to me. See below. All I can figure is that some junior admin didn't like one of my off-topic answers.
I've contacted Yahoo a couple of times. They don't even respond!
I feel like "a poor drunk orphan with nowhere to go but the grave." - Dylan Thomas
Sorry for your loss of Yahoo karma. Actually, it's Yahoo's loss. We actually provide good advice unlike some of the cr@p I used to see posted.
So, do we open another account under a different name and start building authority again? Naw.
I've turned my attention to LinkedIn answers. So far so good.
Paul
From my experience:
1. Disabling your account is semi automatic, you need to get 2-3 reports from users with positive karma (deleted answers in short time span) or whatever.
2. On reenabling or checking account, Yahoo answers check you answers, or at least if there are links in there, and if they link to single source. If so, you are a spammer or bot. This process is manual, but they extract links from your answers or some other metrics. Also, they check your votes.
3. Like everywhere, there are niches and categories where everyone else answering questions is a spammer ;)
Hopefully the case is where Yahoo! looks carefully at the entire situation and account.
If a user is consistently offering relevant information, you would think that would be the most important thing.
Good to know they base at least some of it on how the other user's treat your answer.
Do you think a Yahoo Answers reader who complains can get an account suspended?
Hmmm, if that's the case, a black hat could do some serious damage to the competition by reporting "violations" to Yahoo's TOS.
Not good.
Nice analysis.
My only concern would be the time it takes to answer the questions. Is 7 minutes reasonable? (I have spent more than that just reading this post).
And of course the hourly rate... Finding someone qualified to answer questions for your company (if you are not doing it yourself) and call themselves an 'expert' may be more costly on an hourly basis.
These two factors alone could throw my numbers off and not make it worth our time.
However, I wont know until I try and your analysis is solid and inspiring. I thing I am going to add 'Answer Marketing' to my 2010 to do list.
Good question on the 7 minute time. I'm not sure. In reality often answers take 1-3 minutes to answer, but they can take more.
The good thing about the hourly rate is that if you have down time, you could always use it to answer the questions vs. answering them when you're busy, but obviously it is definately a factor that must be considered.
I made this a part of my SEO strategy, that was also a part of social and PR of course, but it was well worth the time. I spent about a half an hour a day answering new questions and voting on old ones. It paid off very well in revenue and traffic. (And links, but some think that is still debatable)
Okay this might be a dumb question, buuut how are you getting people to clickthrough to your site? Is it a link in your profile (I see nowhere that you can add one) or are you providing a link right in your answer? If you are providing a link right in your answer, then I have a hard time understanding how Yahoo! is not picking that up as comment spam.
To add a link to your profile, it's just under 'Contact Info'. You can add multiple websites.
Chances are that he has a link on his profile and is sticking a link to his site wherever he can. I'm sure if it's in the right context and doing what it says on the tin then Yahoo! won't complain too much about it :).
If the question is relating to metal roofing (which basically all of the ones I answer are) then I don't feel it's spammy to link to our website in the "Source" section.
As the producer of the answer, I am the source. Also since its related, it will be helpful to the person who asked the question.
If the question is something more detailed, I will often refer to an installation guide or other helpful page on our site.
Here are the official guidelines regarding including your website information on your answer.
From what I see:
So basically it apears to depend on what part of the guidelines you read. Some of it appears to say you can post your website if it is relevant, and some of it appears to question that same statement.
I think what they are really looking for is what the person that asked the question wants: relevancy.
Great question! Makes you think.
Awesome info. Thanks so much! I've been meaning to test the Yahoo! answers waters for some time now and you've just given me the extra motivation I needed.
If the question is relating to metal roofing (which basically all of the ones I answer are) then I don't feel it's spammy to link to our website in the "Source" section.
As the producer of the answer, I am the source. Also since its related, it will be helpful to the person who asked the question.
If the question is something more detailed, I will often refer to an installation guide or other helpful page on our site.
Here are the official guidelines regarding including your website information on your answer.
From what I see:
So basically it apears to depend on what part of the guidelines you read. Some of it appears to say you can post your website if it is relevant, and some of it appears to question that same statement.
I think what they are really looking for is what the person that asked the question wants: relevancy.
Great question! Makes you think.
Its been mention a little in this post but my word of caution is that just because it made sense from an ROI point of view for Drummerboy9000 doesn't mean its going to work for you.
In my opinion you should always be doing some type of Marketing ROI worksheet. I am sure Drummerboy9000 is likely to test out Wiki Anwsers and compare ROI directly to Yahoo!. Then as Dr. Pete suggested comparing that to another social media or marketing directive such as Twitter. I have found for some of our clients Twitter ROI is only matched by organic SEO results and for others its a complete waste of time and money.
Lastly, Drummberboy9000 I certainly follow your data; however, I am not sure you can fully know if this is profitable for your company until you can measure sales because you do know the quality of the leads in regards to Yahoo! Answers, which to mean makes it hard to determine ROI. When I say lead quality I am referring to the fact you my gain enough contact information to that Yahoo! Answers seems like a valuable marketing platform but if no one ever actually buys anything then your ROI is zero.
Great Post and look forward to your next.
Absolutely agree on all of this. Companies that have the ability to track all the way to the order process should definately do this.
Great food for thought, numbers-wise. We all have to look at time spent in a context that we can cross-compare activities. If I spend 2 hours/day on Twitter, there should be something backing that up, for example, and we all have to be more realistic about the value of our time.
Nice post! I've been noticing an abundance of Q&A sites popping up lately and wondering about how Answer Marketing is/could be beneficial as compared to Social avenues. Looking forward to you future post.
My estimation is that it will be mostly positive.
The reason I say mostly is because there will be a lot of companies heading to these Q&A site with the intention of marketing as opposed to helping people out.
traxor,
obviously not everyone will be abiding, ethical answer.... ers...? but, if people do as drummerboy suggests, and that is provide useful, non-spammy answers to questions that they can actually answer, then it would be beneficial to drop your link at the end, IN ADDITION to being useful to the person you're answering.
i feel that with an increase in spam due to non-relevant or helpful answers, and lots of link dropping, these q&a sites will die. fast.
let's hope for the sake of people in need and those who can fill it, it doesn't go that way.
Really sorry but when I posted my previous message it was incomplete. I had to rush out (nagged) and didn't complete my message!!!
I was going to write exactly what you were saying hence the reason why it seems that I'm contradicting myself.
Here is what I was planning on writing:
My estimation is that it will be mostly positive.
The reason I say mostly is because there will be a lot of companies heading to these Q&A site with the intention of marketing as opposed to helping people out. However, there will also be a lot of people offering good ideas, answers and so on and so forth. Plus, the increase in poor members will also help these Q&A sites figure out ways of removing these users and deterring them as much as possible.
I know what I'm saying may be a little flawed. But hopefully, just hopefully it will sort itself out if this does happen.
I really hope these sites don't go downhill. It's going to be a really good way to get useful information. I've used Yahoo! Answers and AskWIki to both answer and ask questions and my experience has been mostly positive.
Thank you! I'll try to make it useful and straightforward.
Nice analysis.
Did you try to calculate the cost per sale, in particular on completed forms?
I wonder if forms / contacts are more of informational or transactional type?
On many sites where you can complete the entire transaction online it is much easier to estimate cost per sale.
With our type of business, a person must call or email to get more information first.
The forms are a primary way our customers ask for pricing (mostly) and estimates.
If you had an online store it would be much easier to figure cost per sale vs. cost per lead.
"With our type of business, a person must call or email to get more information first.The forms are a primary way our customers ask for pricing (mostly) and estimates."
But did you try to track which of these forms / contacts were closed with deal?
When a customer submits the form, it sends us an email with all the information, but doesn't include any information like where the customer came from.
If there was a good way to do this (which there probably is and I don't know about it) it would definately be an extremely helpful thing.
The easiest way to do this (I can think of) would be to include additional line in the e-mail saying 'This visitor came from..' and the source info that is passed by the script (e.g. in PHP it's a global variable called HTTP_REFERER).
Alternatively, you can add unique id passed in the URL after completing the form and store the same ID in the email to track which IDs closed with a deal. Having a list of "goal completed" IDs you can check their source in Google Analytics afterwards.
Cool. I'll have to look into this. Thank you!
We use plain old HTML, so I'm not sure how it works with it.
mgalecki,
Thank you a million for the advice.
I first used the HTTP_REFERER (using javascript since I couldn't get the PHP to work with .html pages), then I found these two how-to posts: 1. 2.
With them I integrated my forms so that when it sends the form to me, it looks into Google Analytics and pulls out not only the referer, but also other data including the keyword they searched for as well as the type (referer, organic, ppc, etc..)
With this amazing data, I can see exactly how the person found us, and a little luck, RULE THE WORLD!!!
Good for you!
We are then waiting for a next post in couple of months! ;-)
Hi Drummerboy, That is absolutely true and I agree with you. I have also seen some positive results in case of traffic and leads through yahoo answers.There are many more similar Q&A sites like answerbag, allexperts, justanswer, knowbrainers, etc where I really learn more and gain better knowledge by both questioning and answering in these sites.
But spamming may not help here because yahoo answers will delete the account if it finds spam answers.
Thanks for sharing nice datas here.
Empowered, Thanks for the list of other Q&A sites. I'll definately check them out.
As far as spamming goes, I'm completely against it. Unless I believe I can provide a helpful answer, I won't do it.
That sound great Drummerboy. I could even give you some more Q&A sites that are really useful in spreading knowledge, if you are interested. Thanks for responding.
Very well written up. This is a great way of showing how being more "social" with your marketing and less salesie can generate some real traffic and ultimately leads.
I have found that Yahoo! answers from a personal perspective can be a great resource of information. Now to see if it will work from the other side. Thanks for the case-study.
I think more regionally specific sites are a better place to give answers. That's one reason why I haven't been active on the SEOMoz boards.
I can get a much better return by participating in the social communities that are geographically relevant to where I do business.
Yahoo Answers can be one way to build up your credibility. As you provide more interesting, helpful advice to the questions being asked on yahoo, people will tend to get curious of how you are and will check out your profile.
Hi Drummer Boy,
Thanks for your Inspiration!
Obviously Y! A is the best source of medium to generate business leads. Good analysis with PPC and excellent write-up. Looking forward to your next post. :) Soon you can find my next post here.
Meanwhile, check out my Yahoo! Answers Profile and do follow me on Twitter too
That's an excellent view point. I've never considered this approach, but do utilise answers from Yahoo! Answers frequently.
I'm quite keen to try this out, thank you for the information and as ever, a great blog.
As mentioned above, just be careful..
The amount of traffic I have generated for my sites in the last 6 months PALES in comparison to the amount of absolute BS I have had to deal with using Yahoo Answers. All with NO intervention from Yahoo WHATSOEVER.
Yahoo Answers is the wild west folks.. and if someone for any reason dislikes you and/or the answers you are giving, they have an absolute green light to make your life miserable.
I have had competing 'experts' grab my email from my profile and add it to porn spam lists, taken the time to go back and report dozens of my answers as spam even they were legit answers, add comments after my answers saying that I don't know what I'm talking about, etc.
Not. worth. the. time. at. all.
That's really unfortunate but I hope it doesn't deter people too much. Just try not to link to your own source unless it's completely necessary and non-spammy and hopefully you won't have any trouble.
Thanks for the word of warning, loudmarket.
That's really unfortunate but I hope it doesn't deter people too much. Just try not to link to your own source unless it's completely necessary and non-spammy and hopefully you won't have any trouble.
Thanks for the word of warning, loudmarket.
That's really unfortunate but I hope it doesn't deter people too much. Just try not to link to your own source unless it's completely necessary and non-spammy and hopefully you won't have any trouble.
Thanks for the word of warning, loudmarket.
Well deserved promotion to the main blog drummer boy! Now it's time to leverage your street cred here at the mozplex, and go to your family for a raise to $25/hour ;)
(Goes to other room)
"Isaac"
Provide Quality and conversions will happen. New kids in the market think about SEO and Google rather than about clients. This year I sold 3 sites each going over $90k each. I spent no more than $2000 on each. Not spamming directories, nor paying some big kid in the industry money to do SEO for us but rather providing quality content to the community. With yahoo answers in some categories we have guys that convert for us on daily basis. Not because we have hired them to spam Yahoo Answers with our link but rather to help people out. That is how I look at this business. Be a part of the community before you can leverage from it.
Hey mathematically,
What you are saying is very impressive. When you say that you spent no more than $2k on each, that would be in relation to site creation and design, not site marketing (ie. high quality content creation) right?
I liked this post
Such a great article! Just curious where you got your click through rate data from? I realize Google has Webmaster Tools but am not aware of the other search engines like Yahoo or Bing?
This is very valuable information for small business owners looking to improve their local search presence. For example, a search like "roofing omaha" is a fairly lucrative search term for local roofing companies that want to get to the top of Google.
There should be a home improvement category of Moz's blog to address these industry specific search efforts.
I know I'm... what, two years late here? But this is some great info -- particularly the numbers crunching (since the formulas could be replicated by anyone who has their own data). I'm glad I found it.
Ok so I trully believe that this is such a great resurce......I was thinking about going into Yahoo Answers on a large scale for my Golf Cart Business. We do a lot of marketing on CL, eBay and FB, Twitter and Yahoo Answers seemed like a great new avenue to generate more traffic to our website https://www.socalcarpetcleaners.com . I am really glad I came over yor website on a google search and glad to see some relavant data comparing Yahoo Answers to PPC. I gotta tell you, that you put it in very nice easy to follow format and I thank you for taking your time to write this great artilce.
Sincerely Kyle
Yahoo answers???They've delete all my post because I've received a 90% best answers, and they thought probably I was a cheater...Strange? You answer, then get rated as best answer, but if there is too many best answer, you might get all your post deleted.I was posting answers about movies sites & music sites using this site links www.wiibeez.com/movies.htm & .../music.htm ; as this site is a powerfull multiple sites search engines, peoples liked it and I've got 90% best answers... untill all my post was deleted?Isn't the issue to give good answer to peoples at yahoo answers???Can you be blamed to get 90% best answers rating???Strange...
yeah is true that Yahoo Answers does urges you to answer as many questions as you can (because they are all counted and you like big numbers ... lol) and when you do they bann your account for no reason and without any warning...just beware...
Looks like you can sieze some great opportunities through Yahoo Answers, very good post, thanks!
Congrats with move to main blog drummerboy!
Thank you! Yeah when I heard I was kinda like wow.
Thanks for the post - will give it a try.
This article has really given me something to think about on two fronts.
First, the importance of testing. Enough said, we all know how important that is to your business.
Secondly, how creating a position as an expert in your niche can generate traffic.
I've been contemplating answering questions in Yahoo Answers as away to establish myself in my niche, but now I have doubts.
Overall I really enjoyed the article and all the comments, but there are clearly many pitfalls associated with participating on Yahoo Answers - "The Wild West" I think someone called it.
Obviously "Yahoo Answers" is not the only answer for this strategy, and I will continue to pursue this.
Thanks for all the great info in the article and comments.
Works very well, every answer with a link gives many visitors, every time. Tested several times.
I think this could be a good tactic, but it scares me that your account can be suspended without good reason like Kate Morris' account. If they erase all your answers you could lose all your equity and hours of hard work. It might be better to see what questions people are asking and answer them on your blog.
Yahoo Answers may drive traffic but I strongly urge you to read the terms of service. After answering a few hundred SEO/M questions I had my "answering" privileges suspended after answering a financial investment question using basic strategies employed by any self-directed investor.
No spam. No push. No self-promo. Just out of my defined area of expertise. And all that good karma disappeared when my account was suspended.
Am I the only one to be banned from Yahoo Answers? Any suggestions why? I'm assuming the investment advice ticked off some admin, but it's pure speculation.
Thanks, in advance, for any insights.
Thanks for the comment. Kate Morris had a similar situation (see the comment above).
In my next post I'll definately mention the risk of this happening.
if you outsource yahoo answer to 3rd world then you get even better ROI :)
Great post. I was looking for additional sources of traffic and I think this would work great for my niche.
Thanks for putting this together. I have wondered how valuable it would be to spend time on Yahoo answers, and this gives me a good idea.
For me, I don't think it's worth it because I think I would have a hard time finding someone that I could trust enough to write for my clients in public for $16/hour.
Yeah I'd say it will definately depend on the industries involved as well as labor costs in different parts of the country.
Do you have social media sources that you've found as profitable/more worth it? I would love ideas of areas that might work.
Times are hard, you will be able find good writers cheaply.
I was previously paying $2 for a best answer.
Thanks for the post.
I bet this could also works well on LinkedIn.
This is what I was thinking...been playing around with Linkedin for a while. The problem is commiting the time...
But I think you are more likely to create leads with Linkedin.
So far my Linkedin statistics, for awnsering SEO related questions within the Netherlands.
Estimated time: 2 hours
Number of visitors from linkedin: 61 (only 5 are directly from an awnser page, the others through different profiles)
Number of clients: 1
Not great if you look at the visitors. However since my awnsers are on target it shows knowledge and I received 1 client from it, which was well worth the 2 hour. So I keep awnsering questions on linkedin :)
Great write-up! It's nice to see that you've got some positive results from doing Yahoo! Answers. I went through a stage of answering them in a spammy way a few years back when I knew little-to-nothing about SEO.
I tended to avoid it all together but I might start having a prowl to answer some now to get some extra visitors to my site!
Thanks a bunch and have a happy New Year.
Nice post Nathan. Extremely well presented and easy to follow. Great charts as well. Looking forward to reading your follow up post. Happy New Year to all!
Nice post. I'm in the process of putting together a social media plan for my company, and the hardest part is justifying time spent without a very good measure of ROI.
Without these comparisons, social media is just a fluff word.
A great post and a smart way of tracking campaign ROI, this can also be done for multiple sites including websites such as SEOmoz or Wordpress articles you have written.
Do you know if there are any other Q&A sites other than Yahoo! Answers and WikiAnswers? Could these be potential sources of traffic?
LinkedIn has an answers link at the top of every page. You also build your authority by getting Best Answer or Good Answer.
And they don;t suspend your account if you include a link to your site. In fact, there's a form that enables you to add your site link.
Good luck.
PL
LOVE this breakdown. The great thing about this is that it is measured over the period of a year. I feel that anything less than six months isn't accurate, but it's really difficult to continue to track one tiny part of a campaign for this long. Also, it's nice to know that something so simple can lead to $$$$ Great article!
Do you have statistics for commenting on blogs? I would expect that to work even better, especially over a full year.
Stephan
Hrmm, I disagree here. The reason being that blogs are very specific usually. For example, this is a site for SEOs researching most of the time and very few people come here to answer questions. Whereas a site like Yahoo! Answers is a place specialising in answering any questions thrown at the users.
Good post Drummerboy. what goes around, come around. Thats the theory of karma. The more you will give to the world, the more you will get back. And this theory can be easily applied to the Social Media Marketing. Why contribute only to yahoo answers? why not contribute to other web properties (like industry forums, groups, blogs, wikis, magazines, journals etc) which are frequently visited by your target market.
It's a strategy I use quite often but have never been able to determine how effective it is. This clears it up! Nice work...
Hi,
How do you find the Yahoo Answers questions you want to participate in? Is there a tool that you use that helps you find the relevant conversations for you to join, or another method you use so that your time there is spent effectively and not pushing through irrelevant questions?
Thanks for the post and data - this is awesome.
Simple answer: You can search for questions by keyword, then subscribe to the feed using Google Reader etc....
Advanced better answer: My next post will address this. To do it correctly with the least amount of time there are several steps you will need to take initially, after which it pretty much goes really easily.
Did you ever post that "nest post" that talks about how to find the questions?
This is something we have been doing with great success.
Yahoo Answer is a great tool if it can be managed correctly..at one time I was able to get yahoo answers into my top 5 refering sites...and this is something worth time investing.
This is a great post! We did this a couple times for our company a while back but I thought it would be insignigificant and I never actually tracked the results. I guess I should look it up on analytics. I think its a great idea to do this in order to drive traffic but people in Yahoo answers like many other forums dont want spammy answers. They genuinely need some help. If you can keep it from being spammy, then yes, I think this works. It might not bring in as much traffic as PPC but at the same time you are just calculating cost on your labor...you're not spending money on AdWords campaigns.
Nice article! I wonder what'll happen over time with all the pushy sales guys out there. Right now they can still sell stuff on the phone or by chasing leads. Over time, I think, that'll change more to the situation you've sketched. I wonder what that does to the equilibrium in Tech <-> Sales land :)
WOW, INTERESTING READ, I WILL TRY THIS METHOD, THANK YOU FOR PASSING ALONG THE INFO, WE ALL CAN USE A LILLTE BACKLINKING STRATEGIES.
BIZUSAONLINE|https://onsitelocal.com
this is a great entry and it gave me something to think about.. based on my experience, online presence would really do good for any business most especially if your site is keyword optimized. My website created by Prova really created an overwhelming result. I think I'm gonna try doing Yahoo answers as well to see if this will in any way impact the standing of my business..
Wow this is amazing! I guess I will start doing this as well.
Thanks for the information!