Yahoo! Answers For Linkbait Ideas

An important part of creating link worthy resources is understanding what people in a given vertical want to know. This is easy in the SEO and internet marketing verticals. They're heavily populated by bloggers, tweeters and other early adopters of web technology. News travels fast and it's always clear what the prevailing issues in these industries are.

However, once you get outside of the echo chamber of the internet marketing and SEO vertical it becomes harder to dictate what the hot topics in a given vertical are. What are the burning questions for restaurant industry, flower shops, and mechanics?

I have had some success with using Yahoo! Answers to determine what people are asking. It's pretty simple:

• Search for questions on Yahoo! Answers
• Subscribe to some feeds around these questions
• Watch for trends in what people want to know
• Create killer linkbait that expertly answers the question
• Market the linkbait
• PROFIT!

There may be some verticals that this works better in than others, but I've had a lot of luck in mine.