The Q&A Site: Easy content creation

Can't think of anything to write about? Does the thought of writing an article make you queasy? Then the Question and Answer (Q&A) site is a great way to easily write good content.

The Q&A site is in some sense the contrasting approach to the ugly single-page site I mentioned yesterday. (By the way, it looks like my example inspired at least one other person to build their own single-page site.) The single-page site approach (ugly or not) works by having just enough content (but only on a single page) to whet the reader's appetite in the hopes that they'll click an ad (the only links on the page) to learn more about the topic or to investigate related products and services. There's no breadth to the single-page site, and very little depth. It's like a wading pool with toll gates leading out to the ocean.

A Q&A site, on the other hand, is all about breadth of information. Each page on the Q&A site consists of a question and an answer to that question. Take my CluelessAbout site, for example, which contains answers to questions like:

• Does the Google sandbox exist?
• How do I find the BlackBerry OS version?
• How do I convert a Microsoft Word document to a PDF file?
• Why do I still see horizontal bars when watching a “widescreen” movie on my widescreen TV?

Many sites follow the Q&A model. There are commercial sites like Experts Exchange and single-person-run sites like Ask Dave Taylor.

The Q&A site has a number of advantages to it:

• Each page is very focused. You are, after all, answering a specific question. The ads that get shown are likely going to be very relevant to that question.
• A single question is all you need to get started. Forget about gathering pages and pages of content. Start with the answer to a single question.
• Related material is easy to generate. One question often leads to another.
• You don't have to write a lot. In fact, conciseness is often appreciated by readers. Many surfers are looking for a quick answer, not a treatise.
• The questions are self-limiting and self-contained. If writing content scares you, answering a question shouldn't because there's a natural “end” to the the answer.
• It's less intimidating. Anyone can answer a question about something they know! Pretend a friend or co-worker just asked you the question. How would you answer them? Write down your answer, even in point form, and flesh it out from there.

You can easily build a Q&A site using a blog, too, which really makes it easy to get started. Each Q&A becomes a single blog entry, with the question as the title of the entry. You can use your blogging software's categorization feature to group related questions together automatically. The blog's feed (but don't put the entire answer in the feed, you want people to visit your site) can be submitted to various search engines and news aggregators. Other blogs and sites can easily link back to yours via trackbacks. (I should point out, though, that CluelessAbout is not blog-based, but that's mostly because I wanted an excuse to build a static site using the FMPP text preprocessing system, which lets me do neat things like automatically generate three different versions of a sitemap and create tag-based directories. But that's just me being geeky.)

For the Q&A site to work as a money-maker, though, you have to keep two things in mind:

1. It's a long-term approach. The Q&A site works best if you work at it slowly over a long period of time, writing good answers to well-designed questions.
2. You need to answer worthwhile questions. Concentrate on topics that people search for and that advertisers target.

If income isn't your primary goal, though, you can pretty much answer any kind of question you want. There's nothing wrong with building Q&A sites with no ads, or with no expectation of anything beyond paying their costs. You can always use them to direct traffic (and PageRank) to your other, paying sites.

I'd love to hear from anyone who's built themselves a Q&A site, or anyone who builds one after reading this.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

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