What Do You Know? Examining the Big 4 Online Answer Sites
Posted on 07. Feb, 2012 by Arnie Kuenn in Arnie Kuenn, Blog, Blogging and Content Creation, content marketing, linkedIn, Quora, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
Arnie Kuenn is the president of Vertical Measures, a search, social & content marketing company . He is author of 
Accelerate! Moving Your Business Forward Through the Convergence of Search, Social & Content Marketing.
An ideal connection between social media and search might just be “Answer” sites. The essential concept behind an answer site is that visitors can post a question eager to get it answered by someone considered an expert, who is knowledgeable in the subject matter. The response could also be powered by public knowledge with consensus determining the “best” answer. Answer sites offer users the capability to be both the inquisitor and the expert. More often than not, in basic human interaction, we can answer each others’ questions based on our own personal familiarity. We can achieve this on a massive scale using these Answer Sites.
Create Content That Answers Your Customers’ Questions
People can ask questions of all kinds on nearly every subject imaginable, and as you analyze what visitors are asking, you can more easily spot trends. From a market research perspective, this means that you’ll focus on the people that have been asking questions concerning your industry and your niche market. This way, you can obtain constructive market data about the people who are looking for solutions to their problems.
If you find a widespread theme, you can create content that answers those questions and touches closely to the specific subject matter. You might even phrase your content’s title in the form of the same question people are asking. This gives your content the greatest chance to be discovered when someone types that inquiry directly into a Google search. We have found that a rising number of people use that type of search method (question format).
On top of observing the current trends, you can get real time feedback about your industry from the consumers that are engaging with it using these answer sites. Ask a question on an answer site that relates to your product, and see what type of response you get from the community. These raw answers can give you very useful, and informative marketing data.
Let’s take a look at the “Big 4″ Answer Sites, and how to conquer them.
Yahoo! Answers
Yahoo! Answers
Yahoo! Answers is one of the most popular answer sites, and has accrued millions of questions and answers. The site gets a huge (and sometimes bizarre) assortment of questions, ranging from homework to dating to home and garden. Because of its popularity, during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign candidates Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, and John McCain submitted questions to the site, leveraging their campaigns on the Internet and generating a huge response from the public.
The way Yahoo! Answers works is pretty straightforward: participants will submit questions to be answered by the community; when asking a question, the participant categorizes it by topic, making it easier to search and easier to answer. As an incentive to ensure that answers are accurate and free of spam, Yahoo! developed a point system. Answers are ranked by other users, and the “best answers” are given the most points. Users that accumulate points have proven to be highly regarded, and are granted certain privileges, such as the ability to ask, answer, vote, and rate on a more frequent basis.
Yahoo! Answers allows you to browse by category and see what types of questions are most popular, newest, or have received the fastest responses. You can get very specific, too; every user has to categorize a question by topic before submitting it. So, it’s much easier for you to research inquiries that are relevant to your market. You can search keyword phrases to browse questions that are being asked, either within subcategories or among all categories.
Answers.com
Answers.com
Answers.com marries the best of community-driven questions and answers with hundreds of respected and trusted editorial reference books. The site knows the best answer to give you, whether it summons the extensive collection of community answers from WikiAnswers, or it taps into its ReferenceAnswers database – a comprehensive set of editorial, licensed reference topics.
If you have a specific, unique, complex or more social question, and you are seeking a to-the-point answer, WikiAnswers is the best place to ask your question. Anyone can ask, answer, edit or collaborate on answers in thousands of categories and subject matters. It’s another great place to see what your customers are asking about.
Simply enter your keyword phrase and look to the right for various questions people are asking. Or browse through categories related to your specific market.
LinkedIn Answers
LinkedIn is primarily a social networking site aimed at business professionals. With more than 100 million networked individuals, the site boasts the capability for linked professionals to collaborate on projects and develop their ability to communicate across their industry through LinkedIn Groups. LinkedIn offers an Answers channel as one of its tools for collaboration. The Q&A feature offers the ability for industry experts to show off their expertise to a network up to three degrees deep (your contacts, your contact’s contacts, and your second-level-contact’s contacts). Depending on how wide each level is, this could amount to a very extensive network.
The driving force in Q&A is similar to Yahoo! Answers, as the motivation for answering is driven by a user rating system for credibility. Here the recognition is professional, where the best answers demonstrate a working knowledge of the industry. LinkedIn further rewards members by recognizing the top answerer in a weekly ranking. The motivation for making this list is industry-wide exposure as top expert in the field.
LinkedIn Answers has predominantly good data for Business-to-Business (B2B) marketing. You can find questions your potential customers are asking about as they try to solve their toughest questions. By spending time in LinkedIn, you’ll get an insider’s view into the problems that your business can solve for your customers.
Quora
Quora
Quora connects you to everything you want to know about. Quora aims to be the easiest place to write new questions and share content from the web. They organize people and their interests so you can find, collect and share the information most valuable to you.
When you want to know more about something, Quora delivers you answers and content from people who share your interests and people who have first-hand knowledge — like real doctors, economists, screenwriters, police officers, and military veterans. On Quora, it’s easy to create a personalized homepage of everything you want to know about by following topics, questions, people and boards.
Like the others, Quora is meant to be a useful knowledge-indexing tool, a database of information provided by users. However, Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers, reviewed by users, edited by users, flagged as useful or not by users, and organized by everyone who uses it. The creators’ goal is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.
Question Yourself
By using Answer sites for research, you can quickly develop a list of content development ideas helping you through one of the biggest challenges of content marketing.
To learn more about boosting your content marketing efforts, check out Vertical Measures’ 8 Steps to Successful Content Marketing, a free guide that features actionable ways to create an implement a content marketing plan using popular (and often free) industry tools.
What Do You Know? Examining the Big 4 Online Answer Sites
Posted on 07. Feb, 2012 by Arnie Kuenn in Arnie Kuenn, Blog, Blogging and Content Creation, content marketing, linkedIn, Quora, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
Arnie Kuenn is the president of Vertical Measures, a search, social & content marketing company . He is author of Accelerate! Moving Your Business Forward Through the Convergence of Search, Social & Content Marketing.
An ideal connection between social media and search might just be “Answer” sites. The essential concept behind an answer site is that visitors can post a question eager to get it answered by someone considered an expert, who is knowledgeable in the subject matter. The response could also be powered by public knowledge with consensus determining the “best” answer. Answer sites offer users the capability to be both the inquisitor and the expert. More often than not, in basic human interaction, we can answer each others’ questions based on our own personal familiarity. We can achieve this on a massive scale using these Answer Sites.
Create Content That Answers Your Customers’ Questions
People can ask questions of all kinds on nearly every subject imaginable, and as you analyze what visitors are asking, you can more easily spot trends. From a market research perspective, this means that you’ll focus on the people that have been asking questions concerning your industry and your niche market. This way, you can obtain constructive market data about the people who are looking for solutions to their problems.
If you find a widespread theme, you can create content that answers those questions and touches closely to the specific subject matter. You might even phrase your content’s title in the form of the same question people are asking. This gives your content the greatest chance to be discovered when someone types that inquiry directly into a Google search. We have found that a rising number of people use that type of search method (question format).
On top of observing the current trends, you can get real time feedback about your industry from the consumers that are engaging with it using these answer sites. Ask a question on an answer site that relates to your product, and see what type of response you get from the community. These raw answers can give you very useful, and informative marketing data.
Let’s take a look at the “Big 4″ Answer Sites, and how to conquer them.
Yahoo! Answers
Yahoo! Answers
Yahoo! Answers is one of the most popular answer sites, and has accrued millions of questions and answers. The site gets a huge (and sometimes bizarre) assortment of questions, ranging from homework to dating to home and garden. Because of its popularity, during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign candidates Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, and John McCain submitted questions to the site, leveraging their campaigns on the Internet and generating a huge response from the public.
The way Yahoo! Answers works is pretty straightforward: participants will submit questions to be answered by the community; when asking a question, the participant categorizes it by topic, making it easier to search and easier to answer. As an incentive to ensure that answers are accurate and free of spam, Yahoo! developed a point system. Answers are ranked by other users, and the “best answers” are given the most points. Users that accumulate points have proven to be highly regarded, and are granted certain privileges, such as the ability to ask, answer, vote, and rate on a more frequent basis.
Yahoo! Answers allows you to browse by category and see what types of questions are most popular, newest, or have received the fastest responses. You can get very specific, too; every user has to categorize a question by topic before submitting it. So, it’s much easier for you to research inquiries that are relevant to your market. You can search keyword phrases to browse questions that are being asked, either within subcategories or among all categories.
Answers.com
Answers.com
Answers.com marries the best of community-driven questions and answers with hundreds of respected and trusted editorial reference books. The site knows the best answer to give you, whether it summons the extensive collection of community answers from WikiAnswers, or it taps into its ReferenceAnswers database – a comprehensive set of editorial, licensed reference topics.
If you have a specific, unique, complex or more social question, and you are seeking a to-the-point answer, WikiAnswers is the best place to ask your question. Anyone can ask, answer, edit or collaborate on answers in thousands of categories and subject matters. It’s another great place to see what your customers are asking about.
Simply enter your keyword phrase and look to the right for various questions people are asking. Or browse through categories related to your specific market.
LinkedIn Answers
LinkedIn is primarily a social networking site aimed at business professionals. With more than 100 million networked individuals, the site boasts the capability for linked professionals to collaborate on projects and develop their ability to communicate across their industry through LinkedIn Groups. LinkedIn offers an Answers channel as one of its tools for collaboration. The Q&A feature offers the ability for industry experts to show off their expertise to a network up to three degrees deep (your contacts, your contact’s contacts, and your second-level-contact’s contacts). Depending on how wide each level is, this could amount to a very extensive network.
The driving force in Q&A is similar to Yahoo! Answers, as the motivation for answering is driven by a user rating system for credibility. Here the recognition is professional, where the best answers demonstrate a working knowledge of the industry. LinkedIn further rewards members by recognizing the top answerer in a weekly ranking. The motivation for making this list is industry-wide exposure as top expert in the field.
LinkedIn Answers has predominantly good data for Business-to-Business (B2B) marketing. You can find questions your potential customers are asking about as they try to solve their toughest questions. By spending time in LinkedIn, you’ll get an insider’s view into the problems that your business can solve for your customers.
Quora
Quora
Quora connects you to everything you want to know about. Quora aims to be the easiest place to write new questions and share content from the web. They organize people and their interests so you can find, collect and share the information most valuable to you.
When you want to know more about something, Quora delivers you answers and content from people who share your interests and people who have first-hand knowledge — like real doctors, economists, screenwriters, police officers, and military veterans. On Quora, it’s easy to create a personalized homepage of everything you want to know about by following topics, questions, people and boards.
Like the others, Quora is meant to be a useful knowledge-indexing tool, a database of information provided by users. However, Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers, reviewed by users, edited by users, flagged as useful or not by users, and organized by everyone who uses it. The creators’ goal is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.
Question Yourself
By using Answer sites for research, you can quickly develop a list of content development ideas helping you through one of the biggest challenges of content marketing.
To learn more about boosting your content marketing efforts, check out Vertical Measures’ 8 Steps to Successful Content Marketing, a free guide that features actionable ways to create an implement a content marketing plan using popular (and often free) industry tools.
Search, Social, & Content Work Together at SES Chicago 2011
Posted on 16. Nov, 2011 by Ashely Zeckman in Arnie Kuenn, Blog, content marketing, content marketing optimization, lee odden, Search Engine Strategies, Search Marketing, ses chicago, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media, social media marketing
Wednesday morning’s panel discussion on search, social, and content was flush with information that was easy to digest and provided helpful tips for implementation. The session was moderated by Anne Kennedy from the SES Advisory board and featured speakers:
• Aaron Kahlow, Chairman & Founder, Online Marketing Summit & SES Advisory Board (@omconnect)
• Arnie Kuenn, President, Vertical Measures (@arniek)
• Lee Odden, SES Advisory Board & CEO, TopRank Online Marketing & SES Advisory Board (@leeodden)
Kahlow Presents the What, Why, How, and Who of Search, Social, and Content
Aaron Kahlow focused on some very basic but essential areas that all marketers should focus on when creating a campaign either online or offline. In regards to search, social, and content he had this to share:
What is Convergence?
According to Kahlow what convergence really means is that it’ is important to understand how these disciplines work together and how they impact each other.
Why is it Important?
If marketers are able to figure out how to leverage search, social, and content efforts the return on investment can be so much greater.
How Does Convergence Make A Difference?
By incorporating search, social, and content in multiple locations you are able to set next steps for prospects. An example would be leading users to a landing page that also allows them to like your Facebook page, follow you on twitter, get a link to a free white paper or fulfillment piece.
Who Should Be Participating?
Each and every one of us as marketers has an opportunity to participate and should take the next steps necessary to get involved.
Research & Idea Generation for Content with Arnie Kuen
One of the biggest stumbling blocks for clients is trying to come up with ideas for content that will engage customers. If a prospect is searching online one of two things will happen. They will find you, or they will find your competitors.
Why Should You Focus On Content?
A study conducted by GroupM Search found the following:
- 93% of all buyers online or in stores use search prior to making a purchase
- 86% of searchers conduct non-branded queries.
- 94% of buyers click on organic links versus 6% on paid links for branded queries.
What is the Path to Success?
Kuen provided a series of steps that will not only build foundational success but allow for killer implementation. Included were:
- Start with keyword research
- Do online research
- Determine types of content to create
- List the possibilities
- Put together a calendar
If Peanut Butter & Jelly Could Talk with Lee Odden
Marketers often get in the habit of optimizing strictly for keywords. What marketers should focus on is optimizing for customers and optimizing for outcomes. Odden went on to compare search, social, and content to a PB&J sandwich. It simply wouldn’t be the same without all of the ingredients. According to Odden Peanut Butter is the SEO, Jelly is the social media, and Bread is the content.
Optimized State of Mind
The evolution of SEO will continue to keep marketers on their toes. It is important that marketers understand that anything that can be displayed in search results can be optimized. By making sure that your content is optimized for keywords related to the audience you are trying to reach will put you on the path towards success.
Optimize For Consumer Behavior & Engagement
Knowing what it is that influences your customers is key in determining an content marketing strategy. Some examples of optimizing for consumer consumption would include determining the following:
- What devices do your consumers use?
- What format of information do they prefer?
- What different types of media can be used?
- What types of information would be useful?
- What time of day and frequency would they prefer?
- What topics and keywords are important to them?
Search, Social, and Content Takeaways
• Always know what, why, how, and who of creating a search, social, and content strategy.
• Research is essential in creating an educated marketing plan.
• Build the foundation for success.
• Take a customer centric approach
• Practice proactive optimization
Trying to find the forest through the trees can prove very difficult as it relates to marketing search, social, and content planning. However, what we learned from the speakers today was that doing your homework and building your plan the right way can produce enormous return on investment. I’m curious to know what process you as marketers have found works for creating an integrated online marketing strategy?
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Accelerate the Convergence of Social, Search, and Content
Posted on 14. Aug, 2011 by Jay Baer in Arnie Kuenn, Blog, Book Reviews, content marketing, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media marketing, social media optimization, Video Interviews
This is my video interview with Arnie Kuenn about his excellent new book Accelerate. It’s a playbook for integrating your social media, search, and content marketing. I wrote the forward for the book.
Video production, editing, titling by my friends at Candidio. If you need your raw video footage tidied up good, fast, reasonably priced, they are the guys.
Video transcription from Speechpad. Fast, easy, inexpensive.
Jay: Hey, everybody, it’s Jay Baer from Convince & Convert, and I’m joined today by a very special guest, Mr. Arnie Kuenn, from Vertical Measures, who is also the author of a fantastic new book called Accelerate!: Move Your Business Forward Through the Convergence of Search, Social & Content Marketing
Arnie, thanks for joining me. How are you?
Arnie: I’m doing great. I think we should end right there.
Jay: That’s it. We’re done. We’re done. Thank you. Drive safely.
Jay: How’s the book doing?
Arnie: I think it’s doing pretty well. We came out of the gate with a pretty big promotion and managed to get ranked number one in our category the first week. It’s dipped a little bit since then, which is expected, but we’re out promoting it and I’m out speaking, and I’m sure the sales will stay smooth.
Jay: Fantastic. Well, congratulations, I know that that’s not an easy task putting it together, and marketing’s not easy, so good for you.
Content, Search, Social is a Three-Legged Stool
Jay: So the book is interesting because it actually is really one of the first books that talks very specifically about the holy trinity of search and content and social and how they work together. It’s a three-legged stool. You can’t really work without all of them. Tell me about that a little bit and how you got to that point.
Arnie: We used to be primarily an SEO link building company and found that it was pretty hard for us to do SEO and link building for sites that had really bad content, generic content and so on. So we ended up writing and creating a lot of content for our clients. Just one thing led to another. Of course, Facebook exploded a couple of years ago, and Twitter, and now Google+, and it’s gotten much easier to promote the content and use social media. So we were talking around here over the last year or so and just kind of the phrase “the convergence of search, social, and content marketing” came together. Somebody here – I’ll give a shout-out to Patty Adams – suggested I work on a book about all of that. I said, “No, can’t possibly do that.”
Jay: I was going to say, you still like her after she suggested that you write a book? That’s impressive.
Arnie: Right, exactly. She still works here. But anyway, a year later we have a book.
Content Needs to Be About More Than You
Jay: One of the things that I really appreciate about your book is that you’re very upfront about the notion that while companies need to create content, it can’t only be about themselves. You can’t just talk about your company and what you’re doing over and over, because you’re only so interesting. There’s a limit to what people will support. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
Arnie: Yeah, I think the line I use a lot is, “It’s not about you,” as the vendor. As the company, “It’s not about you. It’s about your customer.” I think when I’m out speaking what I try to remind people of is to think about when they’re online, and when they’re on Google, Facebook, whatever the platform is and they’re out searching for information, how are they searching? What are they looking for? It’s generally not to find out what company has won the most awards or has the most employees, but it’s you’re trying to find solutions to your problems. You’re trying to find information, things that are going to help decide to make that purchase or investigate whatever service a little bit further. That’s what I think people need to keep in mind when they’re creating the content, is keep that searcher in mind.
Jay: When we talk about content, I think most people naturally go to the place of a written web page. Most people think about that as content in our world, but there are a lot of other places within your website that you can make a difference in terms of what you say and how you say it. One of the great examples that you use in the book is on eCommerce pages, that you can have a regular product detail page, or you can really use that as an opportunity to tell a story. I think Zappos is one of the examples that you use in the book.
Arnie: Right. I think Zappos, REI, Amazon
Video Content Still a Strong Option
Jay: I’m glad you mentioned video in that answer as well. I’m a big believer in video content, obviously, and I think you are as well. You counsel your clients at Vertical Measures to create video content and that you make some video content for your clients. Do you think that makes a lot of sense for most companies and will continue to be a good tactic?
Arnie: Yeah, absolutely. This is going to sound silly to say. I really believe in content for search, and this is the year of video.
Jay: It’s always the year of video. They always say that, and mobile. It’s always the year of video and the year of mobile.
Arnie: Theoretically if a video is optimized and done well, compared to any other piece of content, the odds of it showing up in the Google search results are 53 times greater than another piece of content. So that says something really, really powerful right there.
Infographic Explosion
Jay: It may be the year of the video or the year of mobile, but it seems like it’s also the year, or the couple of years, of infographics. I mean, everybody’s got themselves an infographic all of a sudden. I don’t remember infographics being this crazy a while back. You guys do a lot of search optimization. It must work, right, or people wouldn’t be doing it?
Arnie: Well, it does work. Infographics are nice, relatively short pieces of content, sometimes they get pretty large, but a nice snapshot and a nice easy way to digest content. So therefore they gather links, which is pretty important for SEO. The content gets spread, so sometimes it’s going to be a pretty good viral thing. I will say, and this is just strictly my opinion, I think it’s getting a little bit oversaturated. But if it’s done well, it can still be really, really good content.
Jay: Fantastic. Yeah, some of them I fell like, yeah, it’s a graphic, but it’s not necessarily info. It just gets a little bit . . . it doesn’t really convey that much, so it’s just a little bit lame. Obviously, there are other design considerations as well. Sometimes they’re really artfully done and really pretty and cool, and other times it’s not as good.
Arnie: Yeah, exactly. If you create a good piece that doesn’t have those two detractors, then hopefully it will engage and work for people. If it doesn’t have data, like you mentioned, or any info in the graphic, then it’s probably not going to work.
Link Attraction vs. Link Building
Jay: You talked about infographics being somewhat easy, at least in the last couple of years, to get people to link to. One of the things I love about your book is this notion of link attraction versus link building. Can you talk about the differences there and why they’re important for companies?
Arnie: Yeah. That’s actually been quite an evolution at Vertical Measures. As I mentioned earlier, our roots pretty much are a link building SEO company, and five or six years ago, link building was much, much easier than it is today. We could reach out and just talk to people about maybe, not just necessarily link exchanges, but here’s an interesting site. I see you link to others, or maybe you would link to this one. We could get yeses pretty frequently, or where there are other ways to go out and get links. Today it’s much, much more difficult. Webmasters and website owners are much more savvy. They understand the value of links. So we’ve been kind of on this theme for the last 18 months to 2 years of trying to get our clients to understand it’s really about link attraction. The whole idea of link attraction, is just taking the time to produce a really nice piece of content that people will want to link to as a part of their whole editorial process on their end.
Which of Your Children Do You Love Most?
Jay: Social wasn’t even an option back years ago when I started doing SEO and things like that, and now in some ways it’s harder and in some ways it’s easier. When you think about the holy trinity of search and social and content, what I find is that companies say, “Okay, I believe you. I believe you that these three things work together and that these three things are important. Tell me which of these things we should do first?” How do you answer that question?
Arnie: Yeah, that’s a good one. What the reality is, is probably everybody’s jumped into social first.
Arnie: If I had my druthers, a totally clean slate, I would say you’ve got to get your content squared away first. Even if it means creating three, four, five, ten really rock solid pieces of content on your site so that you have something to go out and promote and direct people towards, that’s what I would do. Now I suppose there’s a case to be made for it’s got to start engaging and building followers and all that, and I think that’s true. I think in social media what you do want to be doing is providing good advice. But eventually, you do have to have something pretty rock solid on your end to direct people towards.
Content Marketing Measurement
Jay: How do you know if this kind of stuff is working? There’s a lot of – I don’t know about black box – but there’s a lot of stuff that you do in your business, that I do in my business, that other people do in the search, social, content triangle where they’re not really sure what it is that’s going on. How do you measure that? How do you put a report in front of a client that says, “Look, this is effective”?
Arnie: Ultimately what we talk to our clients about is what is it that they want to measure? Do they want to measure their rankings, which hopefully less and less clients are interested in rankings and they’re more interested in traffic, and then hopefully quality traffic that’s converting and whatever a conversion might be. It might be a completed lead form. It might be the sale of a product or signing up for a service.
Jay: Well, the book is amazing. One of the things I love about it is it’s very tactical, very practical, very do this and then do this. I think if you have an interest in this topic, and you should regardless of the size of your company, it’s a book that you will keep on your desk and you’ll have all kinds of flags in it like I do here to refer back to because I learned a lot myself. And, I wrote the forward!
It is Accelerate!: Move Your Business Forward Through the Convergence of Search, Social & Content Marketing
from the man Arnie Kuenn from Vertical Measures.
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