Subscription Encouragement

It is vital that experts on your site know when questions are asked that they might be able to answer.  Until now it has been a manual process for the users to figure out which categories or tags they would like to subscribe to in order to get those notifications about new questions. We’ve recently made updates to the system so its more proactive about this, and actually leads users to subscribe the categories or tags that they have expertise in. Whenever a user answers a question he is also encouraged to subscribe to the categories/tags of that question, unless he’s already subscribed. This means that as the experts do what they do best (help others with their problems), they can also expand their subscriptions and thus they broaden their impact by receiving notifications about similar questions that they might also be able to help with.  This helps you grow your community of knowledgeable experts who are immediately notified when a question is asked, and therefor promotes quick and accurate answers to the users asking questions.

Enhanced Single Sign-On Support and Documentation

We have even more goodies in our bag of recent releases for administrators related to Single Sign-On.  For site owners that integrate Single Sign On with their main site, this process has become easier with more options and better documented as well and we believe we have one of the most user friendly SSO integrations on the market.  Single Sign-On support is available to customers signed up to the business plan, and is available in the administration site under the “Integration” area.

Bulk Management of Content

We’ve made some enhancements to help you as an administrator.  When you need to go through questions, answers and users to cleanup any spam or perform other actions that require the editing of multiple items, you are now able to do so without having to go through the content one by one. We have added the option to choose all or some of the elements of the lists and act on them (unpublish/delete etc.) all of them at once. You can even choose how many items you want to see displayed in those lists, and adjust to your preference.  You’ll be able to see these new options when you’re browsing your content and user lists in the administration site.

Import Content via CSV

Now you can also import your existing content into Answerbase by uploading a CSV file with all your questions and answers.  You can find this ability in the “User Content” area of your administration site, and you’ll see the option to “Import Content” in the subnavigation there.  We help you manage this easily by providing a CSV template as well as formatting guides for your content.

Sitemap Verification

Lastly if you care a lot about your search engine indexing and use the webmaster tools that Google, Yahoo and others provide, you are now able to verify your Answerbase site with your own personal meta tags, so that you can integrate with those webmaster tools and have a full view of how your site is indexed with those search engines. You can also submit the sitemap to the search engines and make it easier for them to keep updated with your content.  You can find your sitemap and the ability to verify in the “System Settings” area of your administration site.

Tools Display Options

Last but not least, we have given you more control over the elements displayed on your Answerbase site, allowing you to show/hide the Tools box or the individual pages like Help, Widgets and the Social Sharing script.  You can turn these features on/off in the “System Settings” area in your administration, within your site’s Feature Preferences.

Answerbase’s community features that will enhance the system’s ability to turn your website visitors into an active community of users.  In addition to the core Q&A functionality, Answerbase supports category and tag subscriptions as well as public-facing widget builders.  These features compliment Q&A’s natural ability to establish and grow a community, rooted in the ever-growing number of new visitors coming through search engine traffic who become active members in the community.

“These features are making it easier than ever for website owners to turn website visitors into a thriving community around their products, services, or website’s subject-matter” says David Givoni, Co-Founder of Answerbase.com.

The category and tag subscription feature allows your members to identify if they want to answer questions related to specific topics.  Once subscribed, the system instantly notifies those users when a new question is posted within those topics.  As more and more users subscribe, this feature literally builds an army of knowledgeable experts on every subject who are immediately alerted when new questions are asked.  This helps ensure that visitors who ask questions get timely and quality answers.

Public-facing widget builders allow your members to easily contribute to the viral growth of the community, as members are able to add widgets to their own websites.  Widget builders allow community members to easily customize an “ask a question” widget, question list widget, or expert list widget and then quickly add those to their site.  This draws both traffic and new members to the parent Q&A community, while giving you relevant content and functionality to display on other areas of your site.

All of these tools compliment the Answerbase Q&A system’s natural ability to grow the community through sustained growth of search engine traffic.  As more questions are posted to your Q&A site, each of those questions creates a new page optimized extensively for search.  As people are searching for solutions to similar questions through search engines, the Q&A content ranks high in search results and draws new visitors to your Q&A community.  This naturally grows your community as an increasing number of your visitors become active members, providing one of the most effective ways to build an online community around almost any subject.  Websites like GetApp.com have been taking advantage of this system to start and grow their online community;

“When looking to engage our visitors and create a community focused on small businesses software, we determined that Answerbase’s Q&A platform was the most effective way of accomplishing that.  Given how foundational asking and answering questions is in communicating about almost any topic, Answerbase was the perfect tool to initiate interaction while also creating valuable content.” says Christophe, Founder of the business software marketplace GetApp.com.

If you are looking for a solution to create a loyal community around your products and website’s subject-matter, many are finding that adding Answerbase Q&A to their site is the most effective way to do just that.

Add Q&A to your site today and start what Answerbase can do for you.

To enable comments for your site, simply go into your administration area and click into the “System Settings” area.  Under the System Settings area, click into the “Feature Preferences” option.  At the bottom, you’ll see two new options for adding comments to questions and/or answers.

Enabling comments for questions or answers will give you the ability to have users clarify their information, to help provide more effective communication.  These features are optional, and only encouraged if you feel it will work well for your audience based on your market and your experience with how they communicate.

“We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from website owners who had used a traditional forum to their website in the past, and were looking to more effective solution to facilitate user engagement and community based support.” says David Givoni, Co-Founder of Answerbase.com.

From the dawn of the internet, traditional forum software was one of the first tools website owners had available to add to their sites in order to engage visitors and facilitate the creation of user-generated content.  As the Web 2.0 phenomenon introduced improved ways for users to interact and for website owners to reap the benefits of that interaction, forum software largely kept its same format.

At Answerbase we saw the opportunity to provide a next generation solution to website owners for engaging users, taking the lessons from the social media revolution and provide online community Q&A software that can better serve both website visitors and owners.

“We wanted to create a platform that gave visitors a better experience when trying to find solutions, while facilitating the creation of higher quality user-generated content which benefited the website owners by driving new organic traffic back to their site.” says Givoni.

While traditional forums have successfully facilitated interaction between visitors, content created through forums is typically in the form of ongoing conversations that can sometimes go on for pages.  We realized that this format is not friendly towards other users browsing the internet or website, as it’s difficult to identify valuable contributions.  This also leads to website owners spending time managing content and conversations that bring little value to a broader audience.  These shortcomings have created a demand from website owners for a system such as Answerbase’s Q&A platform that approaches user engagement in a different manner. We’ve received feedback from clients like GetApp.com that are consistent with those demands;

“When looking to provide a platform where our SMB visitors could interact and get specific answers from qualified web-based business software experts, forums left something to be desired.  We were focused on finding a solution that facilitated a much better ratio of high-value user-generated content that benefited both our current visitors and other users across the internet.  We found that Answerbase’s Q&A platform provided these benefits.” says Christophe, Founder of the business software marketplace Getapp.com.

The advantage that our community Q&A provides over forums is that our platform is focused specifically on problem solving; ensuring that all the content produced is relevant to anyone else on the internet who shares that same question.  Given the nature of this interaction, our clients only spend time managing content that is more likely to be valuable to other users across the internet.

Answerbase Q&A software also provides a better experience for users looking for answers to their questions on search engines.  Each question asked on an Answerbase Q&A site provides a new page optimized specifically for search engines, so those pages pop up in search results of users with similar questions.  Where a traditional forum makes visitors sift through pages of discussion to find the quality answers, Answerbase Q&A has a voting system worked into the platform that easily recognizes the best answers and highlights those solutions above the other available content.  This provides a much better experience for visitors, and better impression of both the website and its brand.

As the internet continues to evolve, it’s natural that the applications driving user engagement become more effective at providing value to both users and the websites who serve them.  Our goal here at Answerbase is to provide online tools that are doing just that.

Add Q&A to your site today and start what Answerbase can do for you.

Community Q&A is a user driven question and answer platform, where customers are able to easily ask questions and receive answers.  The advantage community Q&A software has over the traditional support ticket systems is that not only can company staff answer incoming questions, but it also gives thousands of enthusiastic and knowledgeable customers the opportunity to help support each other as well. This community driven support helps ensure that customers get the best possible answers from the best possible sources, whether they’re employees of the company or not.

As a leading supplier of community Q&A software, Answerbase.com is seeing this play out as their customers take advantage of community Q&A for their support needs.

“Sometimes the best people to answer questions about a product or service are the ones actually using the product or experiencing the service on a daily basis.  That makes community Q&A a perfect tool for companies to be able to provide the best level of support to their customers while still being able to maintain control of the conversation.” says James Arnold, Co-Founder of Answerbase.

On top of having questions addressed by product evangelists so customer service representatives don’t need to respond to all the inquiries, the right community Q&A software can also reduce the number of questions that are asked in the first place.  For example, the Answerbase.com platform has advanced recognition software built in that reads the text of the question being asked and searches the database of already answered questions to see if there is a match.  When it finds a similar question, it alerts the user that an answer is already available and allows the user to see that answer immediately.  This technology satisfies the customer’s needs since they don’t have to wait for a response, and it also reduces the overall number of inquiries coming in which saves company resources.

Customers report positive feedback as they add community Q&A to their portfolio of tools to help improve their customer support efforts online;

“We’d been using another service for years, and I greatly prefer community Q&A through Answerbase. The Q&A platform makes it so easy for our members to interact, and for us to give answers to our frequently asked questions in a visually pleasing way. It’s a great service for everyone” says Meredith Dougherty, Vice President of Technology at the International Safe Transit Association

As if better quality answers and reduced inquiries weren’t benefit enough, the system also gives companies the opportunity to better control the message around their products posted the internet.

Every company is interested in controlling the conversation around its products, especially given that customers often go to search engines to find solutions.  Those same customers are often finding answers on sites not owned or monitored by the company that owns the product, and this creates a demand for having more control over what their customers are seeing in that process.

Since the community Q&A system allows customers to ask questions, and those questions are posted publically, it produces public Q&A content that other customers are naturally searching for as well.   As others go to search engines with their questions, the public Q&A content pops up in the search results where they find answers monitored and controlled by the company. This process gives companies much more control over the value of that support experience.

As the internet and search engines becomes the preferred way for people to find answers to questions about the products they own, companies are finding that adding community Q&A to their site is a critical component to a quality customer service experience.

Setup a Q&A site today and start seeing similar results for your site.

We also updated the API with a few changes and a new method:
-    We added a GetUsers method that accepts keywords to search for users by and doesn’t just return expert users
-    The AskQuestion method will now return the id of the question created
-    The PostAnswer method will now return the id of the answer created

If you have any questions or any suggestions for new features, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Kind regards,
Answerbase.com

One of our customers experienced an average of 32% organic traffic growth month over month for a period of 12 straight months, clearly showing Answerbase’s ability to consistently attract new visitors to your site from search engines and continue to grow that activity.  Another client experienced an average of 19% organic traffic growth PER WEEK for the first two months after launch, again showing the demand for Q&A content as people search for solutions on search engines.

We asked one of our customers directly why they have community Q&A as a tool on their site, and her response was simply ‘This thing is a SEO Cash Cow’.  When we hear responses like that, we get a tremendous amount of satisfaction that our Q&A system is bringing value to our customer’s websites with its ability to drive new traffic.

We also wanted to report on some notable averages in the ability of each individual question posted on your Answerbase Q&A system to draw new visitors to your site, with some systems getting up to an average of 36 unique visitors per month for every question posted.  That’s encouraging given the fact that all of the questions are user generated, not requiring the overhead of hiring writers and editors to try and create relevant content.  This provides a low cost way for you to continuously create content that is both relevant to your site’s subject matter and that drives new traffic in return.

This activity on Q&A sites may not come as a surprise to any of you who have been following the recent trends in how people are searching for content.  A recent article by SEOMOZ communicates that there’s a large increase in the search volume of question queries, where users are actually searching in the form of questions which leads to organic traffic growth on Q&A systems.  That trend is making Q&A content very relevant for those search results, and in turn bringing impressive results to companies who integrate an Answerbase Q&A platform into their website.

As asking questions on the internet becomes the preferred way for people to find solutions for their problems, we think you’ll find that adding a Q&A section to your site is an effective way of engaging your audience and draw new traffic from search engines.  We look forward to serving you in that effort.

Setup a Q&A site today and start seeing similar results for your site.

You can administrate these spots by going into your administration site and choosing Customization > Content Areas.

Let us know if you have any questions or comments.

Kind regards,
Answerbase.com