Q & A About Using Q & A Sites
to Build Your Business & Reputation

Posted by Gil Reich on January 19th, 2010 at 11:53 am

Q&A sites are a great way to get your message across and to build your brand and reputation.

How many people use Q&A sites?

• In a recent Business.com study, 49% of companies that use social media said they ask questions on Q&A sites. Only 29% said they use Twitter to find business-related information. The 49% doesn't even include the many who get info from Q&A sites by Googling or Binging.
• Answers.com (where I work) is now ranked (by comScore) as the 17th most visited site in the US. The vast majority of Answers.com's traffic is to user generated Q&A pages. Yahoo! Answers gets even more traffic. Much of your potential market is already getting their answers from these sites.

What's in it for me?

Providing quality answers and links to relevant pages can help you in the following ways:

• Direct your customers (and potential customers) to accurate information about your product.
• Connect with people in your market, build your reputation, and generate leads.
• Provide links back to your site. Some of these links are Follow links, and thus also provide SEO value.

How do I use these sites?

The general rules of social media apply here too:

1. Help others
2. Build relationships
3. Push your products and services when they answer somebody's question or request.

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Are Your SEO Resolutions Actionable?

Posted by Dr. Pete on January 4th, 2010 at 7:09 pm

It's that time of year again; the one where we look back on everything we ate during the last two weeks and promise not to do it again in the new year. It's also the time that many of us set new and ambitious goals for our businesses. Unfortunately, while goals are important and ambition can be admirable, we make the same mistake with our professional resolutions that we do with our personal resolutions. Take the classic weight-loss resolution. The problem with saying that you're going to lose 20 lbs. in 2010 is simple - it's just not actionable. At the end of the year, you'll either have lost 20 lbs. or not, but that outcome is affected by dozens of things beyond your control. What exactly are you going to do to make it happen? If the answer is wait around and wish for the pounds to melt away, best of luck.

Uncontrollable SEO Resolutions

Similarly, our SEO goals are too often beyond our control. If you set a goal like "Rank #1 for Keyword X" (a very common SEO resolution, I'm sure), what does that actually mean in terms of action? Are you going to pray to the Google Gods every morning and say 50 Hail Matts to purge your SEO sins (my apologies to our Catholic readers)? If you're worth your salt as an SEO, you have actions in mind that you plan to take, so why not resolve to take those actions in a measurable way? It's fine to have ranking (or weekly searches, CTR, CPC, conversion rate, etc.) as an ultimate objective, but wishing won't make it happen.

Actionable SEO Resolutions

Before this starts to read like a self-improvement seminar, let's look at some SEO resolutions that are actionable. These are goals that you can directly control - you're in charge of whether or not you accomplish them. I'll break them up into two groups: (1) On-page SEO, and (2) Link-building (with some social networking thrown in). Of course, not every idea is appropriate to every situation - these are just ideas for actionable goals (substitute an appropriate number for "X").

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