There are websites that provide questions and answers for a huge range of topics. This is a gold mine of information just waiting to be tapped.
A user on one of these Question and Answer web sites can submit a „question“ on a particular subject and other users of the Question and Answer web site can provide answers to it and the answers can be voted on (and then sorted by) relevance (more votes meaning more relevance). All of the responses can be seen online.
These Question and Answer web sites can generate you great amounts of traffic if you can answer questions in your area of expertise (it goes without saying that you need to ensure that your answering Questions that are related to your particular niche on the Internet).
Yahoo have a Question and Answer website that offers a complete question and answer service and it’s very helpful to get your name out there and on peoples lips.
You do certainly need to be careful about your postings. Don’t expect to be able to just post a URL and get masses of traffic, you will find your „answer“ voted down or even removed if you do this.
As I have mentioned numerous times, providing great quality and relevant content will be far more valuable. Actually helping people out (by answering their question) will show you to be an „expert“ in your market in no time flat.
The rules generally specify no „soliciting“, so answer the question and help someone out, with a detailed answer and then add a reference to your website for people to follow up for more information.
The other great reason to use Question and Answer sites (particularly Yahoo given that Google is not accepting new questions and answers) is that lots of websites syndicate the questions and answers for content on their website.
Because of this an increase in web site traffic occurs.
As I mentioned above, Questions and Answers can also appear in search engine results. Of course the other benefit is that users of the question and answer sites themselves will get to your website from reading your responses.
In my experience I treat the answering of questions as the building of a presence on the Internet rather than a source of huge traffic to my websites, however it is certainly something that should not be ignored.
With that said, I believe it can be a great „return on investment“ where for a relatively small amount of time invested (to answer questions) you can get a steady trickle of web traffic.