WP-Answers is a premium WordPress plugin you can use to create a question and answer website very similar to Yahoo! Answers. If you have never seen Yahoo! Answers it works like this; a member asks a question, it’s answered by other members and the person who originally asked the question selects the best answer. The question is then marked as solved and the best answer sits below the question.
An extremely wide range of topics are covered on the Yahoo! site and new questions are added every minute. I think this plugin would work best in a tight niche. Something like fishing, skateboarding or even blogging.
To generate content in the very early days you could ask and answer your own questions, or send out membership invitations to your online social circle. If you couple this with a bit of promotion on Twitter, Facebook and other Web 2.0 sites and you should soon see others using the site and getting involved with the community.
The great thing about question and answer sites is that they generate content on auto pilot. But there is a caveat – they need traffic for it to happen.
WP-Answers is a very new plugin and the developers of it say they are making up to $1000 per month from one site they are using it on.
It does look like a great plugin and I have a couple of sites where I think a question and answer section would fit in quite nicely. I am tempted to give this one a go, but will have to look into it a bit further before I buy.
The price at the moment is $89 for a single site. This is an introductory price, it will soon rise to $149.
Main features
- Members create profile pages which show the questions they have asked and answered
- Members can upload a Gravtar if they wish to do so
- Import content from Yahoo! Answers
- Space for advertisements
- Includes 6 premium themes
- Free tutorials and lifetime support
It is not easy to earn cash with a question and answer website. I will not take a risk on it.
Anyways, thanks for sharing this information.
I don’t think it would be easy either, unless you could leverage existing traffic. If you can’t do that, you would need to work hard at establishing the site before you could make any money from it.
Have you had any experience of running this type of site?
Thanks Stephen. It looks like a cool plugin. I’ve wanted to build a Q&A site for a while now, but this will definitely make it much easier, even if I need to modify a few things. I will have to check it out once I get some free time :)
Was looking for a plugin to power my QA site, will give it a try!
Good luck! If you get it, come back and tell us about your experience with it. I’d be very interested to know.
I like your plug-in, but I’m wondering if it could work for what I’m trying to set-up. http://www.HealthAndWellnessCommunity.com
I’d like to have people set up LOCAL chapters (groups) using buddypress, and then be able to ask questions and have LOCAL expert advisors answer them (basically these “questions” could be leads for them)… the idea being to go to local offline plastic surgeons, cosmetic dentists etc. and invite them to be our exclusive expert adviser for their area (our local group). This would be on a free trial basis, and if it brought them leads, they would pay – if not they don’t. If they do, I’d offer 50% to the affiliate that recruited the business.
So the question is (finally) – Can your plugin be used in buddypress groups somehow? or is there a better way I can offer local businesses to find local leads?
You can find out the details at: http://www.HealthandWellnessCommunity.com
Thanks