Have you ever tried using Yahoo Answers? To be honest, it can be a tough place to get a real, helpful answer when you need one. It’s full of people with the following tendancies:

• Strongly oppinionated but dont’ know anything about the actual topic
• Don’t read the question so don’t give you a useful answer
• Insult you because they can
• Copy passages from wikipedia that aren’t helpful
• Answer with “I don’t know.”
• Give you a sentance teaser, and then a link to their website.

So if you actually DO come across a good, helpful answer, they are like gold. Not to mention a boon for webmasters seeking targeted traffic.

You see, so many people focus on Google and Google alone when trying to build up their space in the internet, that they forget about Yahoo. Yes, people still use Yahoo. And people still type questions into search engines when they don’t know where else to look, and Yahoo questions often pop up on page one of the SE results.

Yahoo! Answers is a boon for webmasters is particular niches, such as automotive, beauty, food, health, pets or science, because you have a multitude of potential visitors all looking for information. Information that your website just might be able to provide.

There are a few tricks to gaining that traffic, but they are quite simple.

1. Actually be helpful. Nobody is going to click the link you dropped if you haven’t given any information.
2. Don’t drop links all the time, and don’t link exclusively to your websites. It’s spam.
3. Use a username which relates to the website you are trying to promote, and mention the website in your profile. I have noticed an increase in yahoo search results for nich website names using this method, rather than direct traffic from dropped links.
4. Don’t copy text. Write out each answer individually. Few things will earn you more thumbs-down than copy-pasting a wikipedia article
5. Vote for your answers. A lot of the time a ‘best answer’ will not be chosen by the person who asked the question, but is instead chosen by hte most votes it gets after the question is closed. You have nothing ot lose by voting for your own answer, so why not do it? Best answers get more exposure!

The point to all this, of course, is being helpfull. The internet has enough junk on it already, stand out by helping someone.