If you’ve spent any amount of time online you’ll have heard of “Yahoo Answers.” Yahoo Answers is basically is a constantly updating site where people from the general public ask questions and other people gives answers to them.

If you don’t know much about why you should be using it (namely free traffic) but I won’t be going into here, as I’ve written about it before on this blog, just do a quick search on my blog for more details or click here.

Now onto this blog post…

If you think about it the majority of people will probably go through the first 3-5 answers and after that they’ll probably move on to the next question.

But, wouldn’t it be great if you could grab the first position and get the majority of traffic clicking through to your site?

Yes?

Here’s how I do it.

1. Find the topic you’d like to answer questions on.

2. Pick a question that’s just been freshly asked. You may need to reload your webpage to get it updated.

3. Get typing quick! But don’t think you need to answer the question now you don’t. I usually, just put in “Try this” or “Yes” or “No” something short and then submit my answer. That’s the fun part, while others are typing like crazy to get in first you’ve already beaten them.

4 . Look at you short answer and you’ll notice that there’s a little “edit” link you can use to get back in to edit you answer. This is when you go in and give a good quality answer (no junk, nobody’s going to follow junk) with a workable link in your resource box.

5. Voila! If you’ve done steps 1-4 properly you can sit back and watch those web stats changing immediately.

But, remember there’s no point getting in fast with a poorly written answer. The better the answer the more people are inclined to want to know more.

If you’d like more great tips on Yahoo Answers click here.

As you may know I wrote about this topic before in one of my other articles, but I feel it’s important that I’m going to bring it up again.

Headlines like “Money” are what make’s the world go around. We’ve become so busy and limited with our time nowadays that we usually pick and choose what we read usually because of an interesting article title.

Take any of the current newspapers or women’s magazines as an example. If you stroll past your local newsstand you’ll see numerous magazines and papers screaming out read me, read me!

The funny thing is the majority of them have the exact same celebrity story or major news event in them but a great article headline on one paper or magazine can make it stand out from the rest and grab your attention.

Now bring that idea back to your article in an article directory. Like the newsstand there are numerous articles on various topics all screaming out read me, read me!

Probably all containing the same content more or less but the headlines on some articles are what make the winners stand out from the losers.

So what can you do to put the odds in your favor and also should you write your article headline like you would an offline headline?

To take the second part of the question first the answer is NO and for two reasons.

1. If you’ve written your article to be more search engine friendly you really should be putting the major keywords of your article in the first 3-4 words.

Take my articles title as an example “Article Marketing – Is Your Article Headline Killing Your Article?” the major keywords I’m after is “Article Marketing” so this is the first words my headline begins with, plus I’ve used the one of my keywords again further down the headline to reinforce my keywords.

2. Not only does it help with search engines anyone doing a quick scroll through the various article in an article directory would read the first 2 words and know that my article is on article marketing.

They don’t have to read the full headline and they also don’t have to work out a cryptic headline that could be vague and miss leading.

It’s the same idea as most sales letter online. They may begins with a question like “Are you overweight?” if I’m overweight and looking for a solution I’ll probably read it if not I’ll just move on the next thing.

The thing you need to remember is that not everyone’s going to read your article but if you focus it toward your target market you’ll read the right people reading it.

Now back to first part of my question. How do you put the odds in your favor?

How? Do a keyword search for what people in your target market are looking for in the search engines. Are they looking for “How to” information or “Tips”?

Find out what they’re looking for and then just give it to them. For example if I was doing another article on “Article Marketing” I could write an article headline like “Article Marketing – How to write a great article that gets passed around.”

Remember “how to” and “tips” are what people want the most readers are looking for help on how to do something or are looking for tips or advice to do something faster or cheaper.

Then when you have a rough quide line of an article title go to (www.aminstitute.com/headline/) and use their free tool to analyze your headline.

This simple tool give you a score for how good your headline is (the higher the number the stronger the headline.)

You’ll be amazed at the results you can get just from changing your words around or putting in a new word here or there.
Finally,

All this may sound a pain to do but when you consider that this article is going to be online for years to come sending traffic to your site you can see it worth doing well. Plus once you send that article out there there’s no way you can get that article back. If it’s got a lousy headline it’s always going to have a lousy headline.

So your lesson for the day…Be kind to your articles and send them out into cyber space with a headline they can be proud of!

For some of the best article headlines visit www.ItWasSoEasy.com and see what other people are doing with their articles. Plus submit your article to us and we’ll do our best to send you as much lovely FREE traffic to your site as possible…its what we’re here for!