Yahoo! Answers is an accessible online forum that internet marketers can use to help drive traffic to their sites.

How does Yahoo! Answers work?

The way the site works is simple: a regular person like you or me asks a question, thus opening a new thread, and active users in the community try to answer the question and get either hand-selected by the asker for the best answer or thumbed-up by the community by the end of the week (the time limit for all threads).

The best answer gets featured right below the question, so any future visitors to the thread will see it right away as the "best" answer and be convinced that it is. The other answers are ordered underneath by the number of thumbs-up they receive.

The person with the best answer gets points towards leveling up. Anyone with a Yahoo! account counts as an active user, though you need to be level 2 and higher to be able to thumb posts up or down. The best users have orange "top contributor" badges under their name; you can also hover over any user's name to see what percentage of their answers have been top-listed.

What does this mean for you?

Because Yahoo! Answers acts very much like a forum and allows offsite links, you can promote your website easily on it. Just post the link anywhere in your answer (while actually answering the question, of course), and a clickable backlink is created.

This means that if you answer a question in more detail than the other answerers, and you are either hand-selected for the best answer by the questioner or voted up by other answerers, your post may be listed directly under the question forever after, giving visitors who later come searching for answers to the same question the impression that your answer is for them, and subsequently that your site is a good source of further information. Since Yahoo! Answers crawl their way to the top of search results often -- you may have visited it searching for answers to a few questions yourself -- this means you can open up new avenues of traffic through answering questions the same way you can here on Street Articles.

How do you get voted for the best answer?

The vast majority of answerers on Yahoo! Answers are actually not very nice, so it isn't that difficult to get toplisted ahead of them. Just make a solid, encouraging answer that is both relevant and informative, and you will most likely get top-voted either by the asker or other answerers. I have gotten the best answer merely for posting a link to my site, on occasion.

Additionally, dozens of questions are asked in each category (there are numerous categories) every few minutes, giving you vast opportunities throughout the day to get the top answer. Remember, everyone visiting the thread after it is closed will see your answer chosen as "the best" if it is toplisted, which means, if you include a link back to your site in that answer, you will have opened up a new avenue for generating traffic to your site forever.

What else?

Yahoo! Answers can also be used as a tool for investigating what your potential visitors may be looking for, and hence who they are and what keywords could be used to reach them.

Just a quick perusal of any category and you'll discover that some questions are posed numerous times, meaning that specific question is something numerous people want answered -- and thus, that there may be more people searching for answers to it than just those on the forum. Plug in some of the questions into a keyword research tool such as Jaaxy or the one on Wealthy Affiliate and you should find hospitable results.

And again, mingling with the people in your niche by answering their questions is a great way to figure out who your demographic is and what it is they're ultimately looking for in your niche.