Would you like to provide value to a vast audience, build relationships, and push your products or services all at once?
Quora, a leading Q&A site, reports that 60% of their Quora Ads come from B2B companies, while B2C companies make up 40%.
Asking questions is crucial to learning, but the best part about asking questions is getting the answers. Not only does providing answers to people’s questions add value to them, but it also makes people trust you and see you as an authority in that field.
How are you building trust and adding value to your clients?
Q&A sites are increasing in popularity due to their endless marketing opportunities and advantages to you and your clients.
If you are new to Q&A sites, you’re about to learn so much about this versatile resource. Here are the topics we will cover:
- What are Q&A sites and how do they work?
- 5 major benefits of Q&A sites
- Why is content key with Q&A sites?
- The 5 best Q&A sites to use in 2021
- The best WordPress Q&A Plugins
- Examples of Brands that Are Effectively using Q&A Sites
Let’s quickly dive in!
What Are Q&A Sites and How Do They Work?
Q&A sites are crucial for business owners who are interested in helping people, building relationships, and pushing their products or services at the same time.
When creating blog posts, the focus is usually on addressing questions that you believe your target audience want answers to. However, more often than not, you may find yourself not providing these much-needed answers.
That’s the gap that Q&A sites help to fill.
Since the people on these sites are asking the questions already, you have a starting point to work with.
By providing valuable answers and relevant links to inquirers, you are directing people to the right information about your product or service, building your reputation, generating leads, connecting with your target audience, and providing links that sometimes have SEO value back to your site.
Q&A sites also incorporate voting, badges, profiles, and other features to make users enjoy their time on the site and locate any information they need faster.
So, how does this work exactly?
- First, go to any of the Q&A sites of your choice and start searching for questions in categories that are relevant to your area of interest.
- Create a user profile to get people to know, like, and trust you. This is also a good place to add a link to your website.
- When you find relevant questions, answer them as clearly and as accurately as possible.
- While answering the questions, chip in the name of your product or service and add a relevant link to your website.
- Follow-up and interact as needed. If someone asks for further clarification or makes a suggestion on your post, acknowledge it and interact courteously. Also, if another contributor provides a great answer to a question, congratulate the person.
(Source: AMNavigator)
Don’t forget to check the message boards of these sites to find questions you can provide answers to.
5 Major Benefits of Q&A Sites
B2B marketers, no matter the niche, have so much to gain from leveraging Q&A sites to meet their goals. These benefits stand out:
1. Competitive Intelligence
What is your competition doing differently?
As a business owner or CMO, you need to conduct competitive research to stay up-to-date on what your competition is doing. One way to do this is by using Q&A sites.
It’s simple! Just search for questions that relate to your competition’s brand and evaluate the ones they respond to. You could learn a lot from the answers they provide therein.
2. Grants Easy Access to Targeted Traffic
Do you want to get more targeted traffic and increase conversions?
Q&A sites attract millions of visitors all searching for answers and solutions to specific problems. Some of these sites are niche-specific, while others are general.
When you find questions that relate to your specific niche, you can take your time to provide highly relevant and detailed answers to them and also link to your website or blog. This way, more targeted traffic will visit your website and this can lead to higher conversions.
3. Great for Keyword Research
Do you want to improve on your keyword research?
Question queries in Q&A websites are usually in the form of long tail keywords and produce higher search volumes than generic primary keywords.
These Q&A sites give you an insight into what users want, latest trends, and amazing ideas that can help with content creation.
4. Diversifies Your Backlink Profile
Do you want to get backlinks to your website from different sources?
Diversity is crucial to link building. Q&A sites generate natural backlinks that are also great for SEO. Leveraging these sites will be great for your ranking in search engines.
(Source: USERP)
5. Builds Relationships and Connections
Are you eager to connect with industry experts in your field?
Locate insightful answers from questions relating to your niche. To build a relationship with such an expert, you can ask for permission to include their insights in your blog posts, then link these insights to their site. This way, they may want to return the favor. A solid relationship could grow from there.
Why Is Content Key with Q&A Sites?
Q&A sites are perfect if you want to educate people and build your reputation.
How is this possible?
By creating high-quality content that answers questions that are relevant to your niche. Q&A is extremely versatile and can be a very effective digital marketing tool if you use the right type of content.
Here are 4 types of ways your content can be used effectively in a Q&A:
1. FAQs
FAQs are most likely the most popular type of Q&A for marketing. Since people who visit your site usually have questions, your website can offer a FAQ page where you answer the most common and likely questions from your customers.
(Source: Slideshare)
2. Case Studies
Using a Q&A to get your customers’ success stories is time-saving. You can interview your customers and create Q&A from there.
3. Expert Roundups
Get insight from different experts in your field through interviews; record the entire interview, then turn it into a Q&A section on your website. You can also use this Q&A from expert roundups to create a blog post, podcast, or whitepaper.
4. Tech Briefs
Are you finding it hard to explain how your product or service works?
Q&A can help with that.
Instead of using a user-manual format to address issues like how your product or services can be applied to different scenarios and users, use Q&A format.
“How to” questions can be arranged as clear headings and relevant answers provided under each heading. This will make it easier for people to navigate your tech brief and find solutions.
The 4 Best Q&A Sites to Use in 2021
Are you wondering which Q&A sites would be best for your business?
We’ve handpicked the best 4 for you to try out:
Yahoo! Answers
According to comScore, Yahoo! Answers is considered the largest in the Q&A industry with about 47 million US visits in November. This broad website leaves questions open for up to 4 days. During this time, users can provide answers to the questions after which either the asker or the community votes on the best answer.
Answers.com or WikiAnswers
Answers.com is the second largest Q&A site with 41 million US visitors every month, according to comScore. This broad horizontal website is connected to reference sites like Oxford University Press and West’s Law. So, when you ask a question, expect answers from any of their reference sites.
What does this mean?
Well, as a wiki site, users do not provide different answers. Instead, they collaborate on the answers provided by the connected reference site.
Questions are left open so you can contribute to answers even if the question was asked several days before.
LinkedIn Answers
LinkedIn Answers is an advanced professional networking site that operates as a B2B Q&A site. It is great for building your brand reputation, more targeted communication, and lead generation.
Aardvark
Aardvark is a Q&A site with a closed system of operation. You can only ask questions and get answers from people in your social circle. It is not ideal for reaching out to people outside your network.
The Best WordPress Q&A Plugins
Each Q&A site is unique and provides features that make them more user-friendly while meeting the needs of users.
What features should you look out for in the best WP Q&A plugin solutions?
- A field and button that users can use to type in their questions.
- Options like bold formatting, images, and links that users need for enriching their content.
- Options for users to create profiles to add credibility to their answers and build the user base.
- Modules that users can answer questions with.
- Categorizing questions and answers to make it easier for people to find any information they might need.
- Option for email notifications and following-up on questions.
- Voting for ranking answers.
Considering these features, let’s look at 5 of the best WordPress Q&A plugins that are easy to set up on your WordPress site.
(Source: Slideshare)
Heroic WordPress FAQs
The Heroic WordPress FAQs plugin is perfect for business website owners who are interested in developing clean and beautifully branded FAQs. This very easy-to-use plugin creates FAQs for all types of online presence including blogs and eCommerce sites.
It saves time and improves customer support by helping to find the most frequently asked questions from customers and posting them directly on your website.
The pixel-perfect interface is user-friendly and FAQs are categorized.
Although Heroic WordPress FAQs plugin has no free version, you can access it for $49 yearly on one site, $69 yearly for 3 sites, and $149 yearly for 10 sites.
AnsPress
This WP Q&A plugin is completely free and majorly adds both Q&A and FAQ sections to your site. Website owners use AnsPress to create useful sections for customer support.
AnsPress is a versatile plugin equipped with features such as social networking integration, voting, automatic deleting of defense content, and voting.
DW Question & Answer
If you like the functionality of Quora and Stack Exchange so much, the DW Question & Answer plugin can help you to create a website that looks and operates just like it. In addition to supporting 22 languages, this plugin gives the admin lots of control over how the Q&A section looks.
This plugin allows you to either build your site around it or simply add a Q&A section to your site. It includes features like posting, answering questions, follow-up, and social sharing. There is also a leaderboard function that allows you to reward active users.
All the primary features, icons, and add-ons for this plugin are free.
WP-Answers
This sleek WP Q&A plugin is quite straightforward with few advanced features. You can log in to your WP-Answers account using your integrated Facebook and Instagram accounts, without creating a new email account.
WP-Answers, which is perfect for people who want an improvement on Reddit design, has a leaderboard that gives badges to top ranking users. It is gamified and awards point to users as they answer questions.
Since this plugin is mobile-friendly, your Q&A section works great on any device.
bbPress
Do you have a WordPress website you want to add a forum to?
bbPress plugin would be your perfect option. As one of the most popular plugins for WordPress forum, this plugin integrates seamlessly with most themes and makes creating and managing a forum very easy.
As your site’s traffic grows and the number of users and forum posts increase, this free plugin can help you scale your site. It turns your site into one very functional forum.
Examples of Brands that Are Effectively using Q&A Sites
Are you still skeptical about building a community for your brand on Q&A sites?
Many companies have already plunged right in and are quite successful at it. If you want to compete and enjoy all the benefits that these companies are enjoying, you would do well to join this trend.
Here are some examples of companies that are building communities in Q&A sites:
HubSpot
HubSpot’s community on Reddit is so active that they now have a HubSpot subreddit community made up of more than 900 members.
At this subreddit community, users ask questions on different issues and also troubleshoot software-related issues. Their users meet here to discuss HubSpot’s products and services too.
Drift
Drift is a digital communication company that uses Quora to share knowledge, interact with a wide range of users, and provide useful information to a vast audience. Their employees provide value by answering relevant queries and linking to the company’s page or other relevant resources.
Modern Imprint
Modern Imprint showcases their brand as one capable of providing expert answers to relevant queries on Quora. They also have a business account on the site that improves people’s knowledge of the company and builds trust.
Ready to Get More Targeted Traffic to Your Website?
Q&A sites are truly versatile and beneficial to your digital marketing efforts.
But if you find yourself needing guidance on how to start using this resource to grow your traffic and conversions, reach out to FlyingVGroup.
Our full-service internet digital marketing agency, located in Irvine, California, will give you all the help you need. Get in touch with us here!
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