Tuesday 27 March 2012

Promote the System that Powers Popular Q&A Communities

With an ever-increasing amount of information on the Internet, people are getting more and more specific with their web searches. Instead of simply searching for generic keywords, they’re increasingly entering their search queries in the form of a question. That’s why an expert Q&A site can be a great way to get lots of traffic and earn some substantial revenue.

And that’s one angle you might want to take after you sign up for the Answerbase affiliate program. In this review, we’ll first take a look at what Answerbase is and how it works, then we’ll move on to the affiliate program itself and how you can make money online promoting this solution.

The Answerbase software is being sold as a SaaS (system as a service), completely powering a full question and answer community. It can be integrated with an existing website or it can built as a brand new site altogether. People ask questions, experts answer them, the content is moderated, and you get some nice SEO benefits as a result.

Shown above is an example from the Edmunds.com Q&A community. People can ask a variety of questions about cars, car insurance, car maintenance, and so on, and then the experts can chime in with their responses. There’s a leaderboard for the experts and the points they accumulate too.

While there is certainly an incentive to launching a Q&A site and populating it with advertisements to make money, it is also a great way to build a community around a brand or a company. In fact, the Q&A style format is great for customer support, allowing new customers to look up existing answers to their “new” questions, as well as connect with existing customers who are already loyal to your brand. With content moderation built into Answerbase, you can have a great deal of control over what is posted too.

With Answerbase, you get everything you need to launch that Q&A site, including full customization of the design and access to an API for further development. You’ll also find widgets, widget builders, social media integration and even a mobile-friendly site design.

The affiliate program for Answerbase is powered by Shareasale. What this means is that if you already have an account with Shareasale, you can join directly by filling out the application inside of Shareasale itself. After you receive your approval email, you can grab your referral link and other supplementary material, like ad banners in the three most popular formats: 728×90 leaderboard, 300×250 rectangle, and 160×600 skyscraper.

Rather than simply providing you with a one-time commission, Answerbase offers a recurring commission for the life of the client’s membership. You get a generous 50% commission on the first month, and then a 15% commission for every month after that. This is a highly competitive rate, especially considering that your referral has up to 180 days to sign up. That’s one long cookie!

Before taking the plunge, your referrals can take advantage of the free trial to see if Answerbase suits their needs. After that, they can choose from the three main plans.

As you can see, the basic plan is just $15 a month and it comes with all the basics for setting up that Q&A community. The $45 professional plan adds in CSS customization, a content API, and the mobile site, as well as widget builders and Facebook/Twitter support for log-ins. The $200 business plan goes even further with even more features.

If we assume that your referral signs up for the most popular professional plan, it means that you will earn a $22.50 commission on that first month, plus a $6.75 residual commission for every month after that without doing any additional work. That’s not too shabby if you ask me.

CLICK HERE FOR THE ANSWERBASE AFFILIATE PROGRAM

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