start a new Q&A website

Hi all,

I was just thinking about a new website idea, some Q&A site in a (medium) niche and make it as completed as possible. But when you think about it, i can easily write 1000 questions down. It just takes a lot of time. But then ofcourse in my own language (not English).

I saw a plugin for around 40$ who can help with the system so people can answer new questions, and a moderator (me) can 'accept' these when they are good. But how can I make people really want to signup and answer questions for free? What's the motivation for such big sites so people answer there? Do they give (a lot of) rewards or something like that?

Also, do you think this is even possible to rank nowadays? A clean site, with proper linkbuilding and only Q&A's (so longtail keywords). Is it possible to make a decent living out of it?

You need to make your Q&A website popular and then moderate it to make it useful.
Your website need to help people to fix problems, only in this way people will sign up and interact with the community!

I signed up on BHW because I found a lot of useful informations on marketing, if BHW was total crap I would never sign up!
That's the obvious "secret"

Best of luck for you website

arganrecords said:

You need to make your Q&A website popular and then moderate it to make it useful.
Your website need to help people to fix problems, only in this way people will sign up and interact with the community!

I signed up on BHW because I found a lot of useful informations on marketing, if BHW was total crap I would never sign up!
That's the obvious "secret"

Click to expand...

So you say it's possible, as long as you make it quality answers (so firstly let's say 300 answers written by myself). And when there are organic visitors and Google wil pick the website up in the rankings, i would 'outsource' the answers through a bonus system such as yahoo answers?

scg94 said:

What's the motivation for such big sites so people answer there? Do they give (a lot of) rewards or something like that?

Click to expand...

There's usually some kind of reward system set up. For example, when you look at Black Hat World, you might wonder why some people would spend so much of their time posting or helping others out, but if you look closely, there are a few rewards (along with many others) for joining this forum:

• You receive little gold/blue/green/red stars that make you feel important (at least, that's how some people perceive it).
• You can build a positive reputation here (which can lead to connections or business opportunities).
• You gain access to a diverse community of individuals.

In your case, you could try to set up a reward system based on rank, but at the same time you need something to make them want to desire that rank in the first place as well as something to make your site stand out from others that are similar in function to it.

Zwielicht said:

There's usually some kind of reward system set up. For example, when you look at Black Hat World, you might wonder why some people would spend so much of their time posting or helping others out, but if you look closely, there are a few rewards (along with many others) for joining this forum:

• You receive little gold/blue/green/red stars that make you feel important (at least, that's how some people perceive it).
• You can build a positive reputation here (which can lead to connections or business opportunities).
• You gain access to a diverse community of individuals.

In your case, you could try to set up a reward system based on rank, but at the same time you need something to make them want to desire that rank in the first place as well as something to make your site stand out from others that are similar in function to it.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the answer, I see now I need to give something back to the people. I like to think upfront, so i will keep this in mind! Thanks a lot


About a Q&A website, it's all about the huge amount of content i guess? Because you can't do very much onpage seo. And ofcourse the amount of longtail keywords, every question is a new longtail.