This is a guest post by Wayne Liew.
LinkedIn Answers is a tool often overlooked by bloggers. Over the past couple of months, I have been playing around with the available features and finding ways to get the most out of them.
While consolidating the features into The Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn Answers, I discovered the fact that apart from being able to generate traffic, leads and sales for bloggers, the platform is also an awesome place for bloggers to come up with blog post ideas.
Photo Credit: Flickr
Eager to find out how? Quickly grab a pen and paper. We’ll jump right into the first tip.
Browse for Blog Post Ideas
LinkedIn has a huge database of questions and answers. Going through all the open questions at any point of time will give you endless blog post ideas and the problem of not knowing what to blog about will be gone forever. Seriously, I’m not exaggerating here.
Some of the questions here have more than 50 answers. If you are willing to spend time going through them, highlight the useful points and put them into a readable manner, you will get yourself a highly resourceful blog post. Of course, please have a link to the question. Give credit where credit is due.
If you are smart enough to subscribe to any categories that are relevant to your blog via RSS, you will soon realize that similar questions keep coming up. This is when you should come up with blog posts that answer these “frequently asked questions”. As these questions are constantly being asked, you can simply direct the person asking them in the future to the blog post that you have written. With this tip, you get to build some targeted traffic too.
Crowdsource for Elaborated Points
As bloggers, we often put an idea for a blog post away due to having insufficient expertise and experience on the subject matter. With LinkedIn Answers, you can ask a question relating to an idea for a blog post and easily get useful responses from the community.
Spot quality answers and reach out to the person answering your question for an elaborated response. You can do this by asking a more specific question in the personal note of your invitation to connect on LinkedIn. To boost the response rate, you can also consider offering a link back to the person’s website or blog.
Scout for an Interview Guests and Guest Bloggers
Apart from being an easy way to create content, an interview or a guest post can become a powerful traffic magnet if the interviewee or guest blogger has a significant following. There are two ways you can use to find potential guest bloggers and interviewees on LinkedIn Answers.
First of all, as seen in the screenshot below, there is a list of top experts for every category. These top experts are selected based on how close they are to you on LinkedIn and the number of best answers they have for the category.
Secondly, you can choose to ask a question. Be specific. Try to strike a balance on the difficulty of question so that you can get a fair amount of responses from people who really know their stuffs.
Once you have created a list of individuals using the two methods above, reach out to them with an invitation to connect and please remember to personalize the invitation note by stating your purpose of adding them as a connection. They will be much more comfortable in accepting your invitation.
Conduct a Survey
LinkedIn Answers is also a great place to look for survey participants. The results from surveys can be used to come up with infographics or commentary blog posts dissecting the results.
However, if your question contains a link to your survey, it might be flagged as spam. Therefore, instead of just asking people to click on the link, explain what the survey is all about and the purpose of it. You can even include two or three key questions from the survey as part of your LinkedIn question so that people who choose not to do the survey can answer them in the default space provided.
Keep Your Sources Happy
Many bloggers leave their interviewees, sources or guest bloggers in the cold after the blog posts are published. Please avoid this because looking for new sources, even with LinkedIn Answers, is hard and time consuming.
Keep a list of individuals that helped out with your blog content. Follow up with them from time to time. You can even ask for their permission to add them into a mailing list on Mailchimp or Aweber so that you can send them an email if you need their input for a blog post that you are working on.
Moreover, having third party quotes is capable of boosting the credibility of a blog post so this is definitely an idea that is worth testing.
With the tips above, you can see how powerful LinkedIn Answers can be for bloggers when it comes to content creation.
Have you invested time and efforts on LinkedIn Answers? How are you using it to generate traffic or blog content for your blog? Feel free to share your results and experience with LinkedIn in Answers in the comment section below.
