Joining Interest Groups 

Whether you are on Facebook or in a news forum, you will have the opportunity to join groups of similar interests. These groups serve several purposes. They allow people of similar interests to congregate online. They offer an area to discuss topics of relevance to the group and to share information. They let you post resources and links so that other people can learn from other people online. That's where you can step in to make yourself an expert within the group by learning how to contribute to the group in a way that creates value and community.

When You Join

Introduce yourself when you first join, if that's within the guidelines. Other groups allow you to “lurk” by registering for the group without adding to the discussion until later. Whatever you decide, make sure you are following the guidelines set up for the group so that you get started on a good foot. Try not to dominate the conversation when you first start, but if you are asked to introduce yourself, put up a small blurb about who you are, why you are there, and what you hope to gain from joining the group.

Comment Intelligently

Next, you are going to try to join in the conversation and comment intelligently. Don't be bashful about showing off your expertise. Whether it's solving someone's problems, answering a question, or directing someone to an interesting resource or tool, you can show others that you are the person to come to when they need help. The more you contribute, the more others will recognize your expertise and will start to crosslink your answer to other posts around the Web. This gets you a lot of great, free press and will increase your reputation exponentially.

Automatic Promotion Through Signatures

Of course, if you don't have a link on each and every post going back to your website or offers, it will only be a bunch of gabbing with little returns. Rectify that situation by adding a signature that is automatically appended to any post you make in the group. Some groups won't allow you to do that as it is against their posting guidelines, so check that out first. If you're not sure, you can open a few posts and see if others are using automatic signatures. You will be able to tell because the bottom of their posts will have their names and a few links to other places on the Internet. If the group you want to join doesn't have an automatic link back to your profile (as in the case of Facebook) or allow you to post signature files, it's best not to waste your time in that group. You want to promote yourself as an expert and make sales too.

Yahoo! Answers

Where's a good place to find experts? Where lots of people are asking questions! Yahoo! Answers is one such forum devoted to a community of people asking questions on a variety of topics. Anyone can join, and you can quickly develop a reputation as an expert just by choosing to answer a few questions every day.

Quality Counts

The idea behind Yahoo! Answers is that many brains are better than one. When someone posts a question, anyone with information to add to that question can post an answer. The community provides feedback on all the answers given by voting thumbs up or down on them. Thus, the good answers are usually the ones that aren't just self-promotions or short replies. They're usually well researched and come with some substantiation in the form of sources.

Community Regulated

The community of experts regulates the answers by voting on the answers. If you keep posting items with only links to your site that have no relevance to the question, you will be reported to the moderators for abusing the site terms. This can get your account banned. You can also get a number of thumbs down votes on the answer, which will push it to the bottom of the pile where most of the spam and poorly conceived answers land.

Best Answer Wins The Game

The answer with the most number of favorable votes automatically climbs to the top of the pile and becomes highlighted as the “best answer.” This provides instant publicity for the author of that post. If you get the best answer repeatedly, people will start to recognize your expertise in that topic and you will gain a great online reputation.

Google Loves Yahoo! Answers

Although Yahoo! Answers does have a large audience, the traffic it generates is more a factor of the way that Google loves to index this site. The best answers in particular can show up at the top of Google search results if there are keywords in the question and answer that are being searched. The audience is much larger than it appears. In addition, those answers may have disappeared from Yahoo!'s front page, but Google will continue to serve them on the top of its results page as long as the answers stay relevant to the searches.

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