Hello and welcome back to another edition of Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesdays! I’m your host Jonathan Kraft and today we are going to be talking about one great place for you to do two things with: one, to get traffic to come into your website via things you post externally and another way to get traffic to come to your site via things that you’re learning from this website about what people are looking for.

So the website is Yahoo Answers and you can get there by just typing in Google “Yahoo Answers” or you can go to answers.yahoo.com. The whole idea behind the Yahoo Answers is people can ask questions and other people can come and answer them. So, for example, here’s a guy who asks the question, “what should I eat for making 1700 calories per day for gaining?” Question for guys, “are belly rings hot?”

Let’s say you had a blog about technology stuff. Here’s somebody who has a question about “wanna race or battle on Mario Kart Wii?” You could create a post called “how to find friends to race on Mario Kart Wii.” If you had a tech blog, you could also talk about what phone you think is suitable for this person or play two sounds at the same time on Movie Maker.

So lots of tech questions in here, but as you’re reading through here you’ll also see there are other ones about travel. For example, “how much for a taxi from Benidorm to Jalon near to Calpe?” I guess this is a question in Spain, but if you have a travel blog, this might be a great question for you to answer on your blog.  If you’re looking for content to write about, this is a great place to learn. “I’m a young, African American woman moving from Chicago to Houston.” Good thing for someone with a Houston blog or for someone who is looking to have a travel blog. You could talk about Chicago and Houston – the kind of issues that people might encounter in Chicago and Houston.

Here’s a geocaching puzzle that finds coordinates to a location #4 – so this is Games and Recreation but it’s also a travel question. So this gives you a great place to just find topics that people are already asking questions about.

The other thing you can do is search; so I’m going to search in here for “green buildings.” I know we just posted on GreenJoyment about this so I’m doing this on purpose, but we might want to do an Advanced Search because we’re pulling up all kinds of old answers. But if you do an Advanced Search here, you can find questions that are still open to be answered. Now you have to setup a Yahoo Profile in order to do this, you can, it’s very simple. So we want the question status to be “open question,” date submitted can be anytime.

So, “what is the going rate when buying a green horse?” “How does a small company get involved in going green?” See I was looking for green buildings but what I was really looking for was how companies can work to go green in their own environments. I know I have a lot of the answers over here in this post on GreenJoyment. So I can just basically copy and paste to answer this question.

“I’m a marketing manager for a small multi-media company with 20 people. We’re looking to get involved in environmentally going green. How can we get involved in a local community with little budget? Also, we are self-serving in the fact that we would like to get some recognition out of this.” So you could answer whatever you wanted. Now this has already had a “Best Answer” chosen by voters.

“When did the “going green” phenomenon begin exactly and for what reasons?” This is a great question … “when did it change from a hippie, tree-hugging thing to a mainstream thing? I’m doing a cultural analysis on this and am looking for some origin info. Any help is much appreciated. Website resources are great too.” This is a question I can answer very easily using tools that we’ve already talked about.

“It seems to have become mainstream sometime around the same time that Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” came out and won so many awards. I think the book “Fast Food Nation” also helped. Here are a couple resource sites you can use: Google Trends (remember we’ve talked about Google Trends in other videos from Three Money Methods); Google Trends shows “going green” trending up about the same time as these books.”

So here’s what I’m going to do is I’m going to go www.google.com/trends. In Google Trends I’m going to type in “Inconvenient Truth” … now this just happens to be a question I know the answer to because I offer it inside the green arena. You’ll know the answers to a lot of the questions people are asking in your arena and that’s the point of this. “Going Green” and let’s type in “Fast Food Nation” as well and “Super Size Me.” So if we look at this here, this is actually a pretty helpful graph for the person who is looking for when this became such a big issue. But really look, “going green” doesn’t really get really big until the middle of 2008.

What I’m going to do though is I’m going to copy the full web address here, so if I copy this, I’m going to actually get rid of Fast Food Nation because it doesn’t really help with the case that I’m trying to make so I’m going to rid of that. Super Size Me is sort of on that chart, so we’ll leave that there for now.

What I’m going to do is then copy this web address and go back over to my Yahoo Answers here and my source to paste that there and then another source is www.GreenJoyment.com. So I’ll just tell her something about Google Trends; “hope that Google Trends helps you out.” I usually put my name in here when I’m answering a question or something because it creates a relationship with people.

But now I’ve got two different web addresses in here, one is my GreenJoyment site and the other one is this Google Trends search. Go ahead and click preview and my answer is down here and hey, look at that; I’ve got two links … one of them comes right back to my website from Yahoo Answers. So I’m going to go ahead and submit.

I’ve helped both to answer her question – here’s someone who’s interested in the market that I’m already involved with. I’ve got a couple of links now coming back to my website from this particular term. If someone actually votes this to be the “Best Answer” then I’ll actually get more points in Yahoo Answers but I’ll also have links coming back to my website from a question that got answered at Yahoo Answers.

It’s a great way to bring traffic back into your website. It’s also a great way to find topics to post about. If I go from her open question here, it has a category called “green living.” I can go into the green living category and find open questions in there to answer. I can also just look at past questions that people have asked that have gotten a lot of attention and I can answer those questions.

Check it out! Start using it!

Yahoo answers is a great way to bring traffic back to your website and also to know what to talk about when you are looking for topics for your website.