Generating interest in authority sites

[PoshTiger]

Hi guys,

I've pretty much setup a new authority site that's in my niche so I'm giving it the best shot I can...

The site has a Q&A script and a community and I need to get people to register and get talking...

How have other people done this - should I pay people to register and ask a question to get it going and if so - how much?

thanks....

 

[Jamie101]

I'm definitely no expert, but how about running some sort of competition to get people asking questions or something like that?

Such as: 1 entry to win ___ for every question you ask / answer this month.

 

[ratboy]

Poshtiger,

There is a tool called Keyword Researcher I used to have it but cant find it now, anyway - it uses Google's predictive text to generate questions that it's predictive text generates.

You can feed in your niche, it tells you what phrases and questions people search for... so in your Q&A simply ask a content writer to write an answer (or do it yourself), and pop them in over time to populate your Q&A area.

Google hopefully picks up on this and you get targeted traffic!

 

[Edwin]

Google the following:

intitle:what|why|where|when|how intitle:KEYWORD

(Replace keyword with a keyword closely related to the topic of your site, or a keyphrase - use "" around the latter so that it becomes intitle:"key phrase")

That will give you a list of results, lots of which have a QUESTION relating to your area of expertise as the title tag.

Start cutting and pasting interesting questions from the Google search results into your favourite text editor, and use them as the basis for a series of answers (articles, blog posts etc.). You may wish to summarise, shorten or simplify certain questions. At the end of the exercise you might have a hundred or so questions written down, and of course you can plug in a different keyword and go round again.

The above is a good way to kick-start a site if you know a lot about something but you don't know what other people don't know and you don't yet have an audience to ask (if you see what I mean).

NOTE: as far as possible, avoid the temptation to visit the links so that you never see how the original sites answered the questions - that will keep your content fresh and unique, and it means you're unlikely to be accused of plagiarism.

 

[martin-s]

As the site grows, it'll also be useful to use your Analytics data to seed new questions.

See http://www.seomoz.org/blog/using-google-analytics-to-power-an-effective-qa-strategy

 

[murph]

Out if interest, which script are you planning on using?

 

[PoshTiger]

Awesome - thanks for all the responses... I think I'll try all the above and post back which got the most new members.

It's not really a script, it's joomla I'm using with a shed load of 3rd party components.

the site is: cloudcomputing org uk

Very nearly finished but any comments welcome.

thanks,

Tony.

 

[Aegean]

How about distributing some press releases linking to directly related news stories on your site. That should help get people there in the first place.

 

[alex2013]

Hi guys,

I've pretty much setup a new authority site that's in my niche so I'm giving it the best shot I can...

The site has a Q&A script and a community and I need to get people to register and get talking...

How have other people done this - should I pay people to register and ask a question to get it going and if so - how much?

thanks....

The way I see it you have two choices:
1. You create a contest - best question/best helpful member
2. You pay somebody to create some questions and answers