Build Expert Status through Question and Answer Web Sites

Q&A-type sites have been around in some form or another for many years. However, until recently they haven’t made a large impact in the scene.

In today’s World Wide Web, even the big players are getting in on the Q&A action. Yahoo has their own “answers” community. LinkedIn.com has recently made a Q&A section available within their online networking framework. Both have a tremendous following and provide a wide variety of solutions to many different types of answer-seekers.

Q&A sites come in many different formats and cater to a wide variety of target markets.

Check out www.ideaspit.com. A Chief Ingredient solution designed specifically for entrepreneurs.

IdeaSpit allows you to ask questions and get important marketplace feedback BEFORE your product or service is created.

It also allows you to build up a prospect list of people who are interested in more info and includes polling and discussion tools to allow direct communication with future customers.

Most Q&A sites won’t let you rant or rave

• Bashing of competition would be considered spam and should not be done

Secretly posting questions as ads is not a good idea

• Simply put, the community will know
• You have the chance of getting banned
• You will ensure that your company is associated with spamming practices
• The community users will flag a visitor that is abusing the system or only posting fake questions as ads

Market testing and research can be difficult on many of the Q&A web sites

• Be sure to use sites that are designed for it, like www.ideaspit.com

One of the best ways to use Question and Answer sites is by answering questions and actively offering solutions, ideas, advice and suggestions through comments

• You or one of your employees should be an expert for your industry, and therefore, should be the one that does the answering.
• Chief Ingredient can help by making it as easy as possible for companies like yours to know what sites and what sections your knowledge would be best applied. (www.chiefingredient.com)
• Some sites award their top participators with “expert” status or feature them on highly-trafficked pages