Listening to what your readers are asking is the most effective way to:
- Brainstorm awesome link baiting ideas;
- Enhance your keyword research;
- Get new content ideas when you are stuck.
Here are a few best tools for you to find out what other people interested in the topic are wondering about:
Yahoo Answers
Yahoo Answers is the most obvious tool to start with: it is both popular and heavily over-used question-answer service but still deserves the mention.
Also, to make the most of it, don’t forget to use the advanced search that (except for basic boolean operators) offers quite a number of useful features:
- Choose the category;
- Look only for open questions (e.g. to add your answer);
- Set the date range.
Aardvark: Questions from Real People
Aardvark is a new promising application that allows you to get questions and answers from real people via Facebook and your preferred IM:
- Connect your Facebook account with the app;
- Add your details (like IM account name, gender and, most importantly, topics of your expertise);
- Get questions right to your IM and answer them instantly.
You can choose to get answers only from your Facebook friends or from everyone but giving preference to your network.
Search for Question on Twitter
There are a few creative ways to search for questions on Twitter:
1. Twitter search has a cool advanced operator (?) allowing to search for questions. You may want to exclude links from your search results because many URL shorteners use question marks in the URLs, so they may interfere with the results.
Sample search: [seo ? -filter:links] for questions about SEO excluding Tweets containing links
2. Search for and track Twitter Q&A services:
- #iknowtweet + Keyword (based on IKnowTweet, you can also try the search right on the site by the way); sample search: [#iknowtweet Thunderbird]
- “Does anyone know” + Keyword (based on AskOnTwitter); sample search: [“Does anyone know” Thunderbird]
Wordtracker’s “Keyword Questions”
Wordtracker’s “Keyword Questions” tool is a great web-based tool that singles out question-type queries based on any search term (surely, you can find question yourself by going through any keyword suggestion tool results but this one is free and saves time):
Featured Image: macrovector via Depositphotos
