Promote Your BANS Store With Yahoo! Answers

If you haven’t at least heard of Yahoo! Answers yet, I think you should try and come out from underneath that rock. Yahoo! Answers is one of the fastest growing social sites on the internet. The basic premise of the site is that people who have questions can ask them (in just about any category imaginable), and others go and answer them. People asking specific questions, looking for specific solutions. A GOLDMINE for affiliate marketers!

Wait, isn’t that just called a forum? Whats so great about that?

The biggest difference here is that Yahoo! Answers uses a rating system to rank users who are answering questions. The implications of that are huge. Instead of a bunch of people coming in and flaming the crap out of you, which is what happens on most message boards, the people answering questions actually have something to gain…R-E-S-P-E-C-T!

In a nutshell, the Yahoo! Answers point system works like this: There are 7 levels of “expertise” that you can achieve. The higher your ranking, the more authority you have on the site. Observe:

So Where Does BANS Come In?

If you are having trouble putting two and two together, let me spell it out for you. With millions of people asking hundreds of thousands of questions in hundreds of categories every day, you would be hard pressed to not find something related to your niche. All you have to do is get out there and find the right questions to answer, then throw a link to a store page (or content page) on your Build a Niche Store site in the “sources” section, and bada bing badaboom…targeted traffic!

Sounds Great, where do I sign up?

Hold on there skipper, you can’t just go around spamming the crap out of Yahoo! Answers. They are cracking down more and more every day on spammers, so you have to cloak your ulterior motives behind a veil of knowledge. If you plan on doing this, you better plan on answering questions like your the leading expert in your niche, or you can bet that your account will be banned in no time. There is a real art to this (which i have yet to master), but the rewards can be pretty big. There is a shit ton of traffic flowing through Yahoo! Answers everyday, you just have to know how to get it.

If this method is too black hat for you, I’m sorry. Please don’t even bother reading the rest of this article. I personally don’t see any real harm here. People are asking questions, and you are answering them with valuable information. Its a win win situation for both sides.

Example Please! Kthxbye

When I first read about this method over at CashTactics.net (which, by the way, is the best damn affiliate marketing blog you will EVER read) I was pretty confused about what exactly was going on, and I wished someone would have given me an example (I still wish someone would give me a good example, actually!) . So here you have it, a visual example just for you!

Obviously the links I put in my sources go straight to a custom tailored search page on my BANS store. (Here and Here). I gave a brief paragraph sharing my personal experience (which is a true story), and put my links in. Now this doesn’t quite demonstrate how you should be answering questions, its just a quick example. You really should be taking some time and effort into answering each question. You will also eventually notice that questions start to repeat themselves after a while, so SAVE all your answers for later use!

Oh, and my names not “John”, thats my super secret Double agent Yahoo! Answers alias. Pretty slick eh?

Talk to yourself

Taking this Yahoo! Answers method a step further, you can create multiple Yahoo accounts and answer your own questions! Ruck over at CashTactics.net has around 50 unique Yahoo IDs just for this method. 25 for asking questions, and 25 for answering them. Answering your own questions means you can manipulate the questions and answers to appear higher in Google’s SERPs. See below…

Parasite SEO

Here is another great thing about Yahoo! Answers. Google fricking LOVES it! Seriously, I’m sure you have seen plenty of Yahoo! Answers pages rank on the first page of Google’s SERPs. They are a PageRank8 Site, and its crawled constantly.

So how can you take advantage of this? Easy. Using standard SEO techniques, like Keyword rich titles (super important here) and text, you can achieve some pretty impressive S.E.R.P rankings in very little time. Don’t Believe me? Check this out. This was a question I both asked and answered myself for the sole purpose of getting a good ranking in google:

No, that’s not a joke! That is a NUMBER 2 RANKING for a highly targeted, highly searched keyword. The best part? I got there in less than 1 hour. I’m not kidding you, within 1 hour of posting my question (which I then answered with my other account, with links of course!) I was in one of the top SERP spots. Please tell me you see how you can benefit from this…
The downside is that these rankings don’t last quite as long as a normal website you might build (they tend to fluctuate up and down), but you really can’t beat it for what it is!

TIP: In order to get ranked so quickly, I used PinGoat.com to ping that specific Yahoo! Answers page. This basically tells the search engines that there is updated content on that page, and to get over and index it right way. Pinging is not just for blogging!

Finding the right questions to answer

You will quickly notice that searching and waiting for targeted questions to appear can be somewhat time consuming, so you’ll want to find a way to find questions as quickly as possible (after all, the more you can answer, the better the results). There are two solutions to this problem:

1. Buy the AnswerSniper script, which is super powerful.
2. Use my very own, exclusive RSS method.

“I’m cheap, whats this RSS method about?”

I have not personally bought Answer Sniper yet, although I do plan on it, so I came up with a less effective, but much cheaper method of targeting questions to answer based on specific keywords, here goes:

1 . Get a list of keywords that you want to target. For me, ill use the keyword “Honda” as an example.

2. Click on “Advanced” search:

3. Fill in the details of your search. Be sure to select “Open Questions” (marked in green), and “Within 7 days” (Marked in Orange).

4. Do the search, and subscribe to the RSS feed at the bottom of the search results.

5. You will now have an updated list of all open questions with your keywords! Answer away.

Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

All of what I have presented here (except the RSS trick) I learned over at CashTactics.net, which is run by a guy name Ruck who is a seriously awesome dude. If you haven’t been over to CashTactics.net, Get your ass over there! Here are some Yahoo! Answers related links from Ruck’s site:

• Free “Ebook” on Yahoo! Answers Marketing
• Video Follow-up to the ebook
• Question and Answer Session
• Forum Post

THAT is why CashTactics.net is the best F#@king Affiliate marketing blog you will ever read.

Get your BANS store up and Cash in!

If you haven’t already, its time to just break down and buy your copy of Build a Niche Store. I know there is a lot of controversy over the BANS script, but I can tell you from personal experience that it has paid for itself at least three times over, and it keeps increasing every month! Just do it already.