Most jobs and endeavors will leave you trading hours for dollars. There are only so many hours in the day, so how can you go about making more money? Well, one way to do it is by developing your passive income streams.
However, even blogging isn’t all that passive. You have to keep posting new content, interacting with your community, promoting your blog, and so on. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could set it and forget it? That’s precisely the mechanic behind WP-Answers, a premium WordPress theme and plugin. Over the course of this review, we’ll take a look at how it works and whether it’s worth the investment.
Power Your Own Yahoo! Answers Site
People have questions. Other people have answers. That’s how sites like Answers.com work and the great thing is that they are populated solely by user-generated content. With WP-Answers, you can effectively have the same thing.
By and large, WP-Answers gives you the same kind of website as Yahoo! Answers, except it is powered by WordPress. Each “question” posed is really equivalent to a blog post and each answer provided is akin to a blog comment. To the front-end user, however, they probably won’t be able to tell that it’s WordPress under the hood.
Looking at the feature list, the points system is one thing that really jumps out. You can give “points” to the members who participate on your site. It’s up to you how many points they gain (or lose) when they ask questions and provide answers. If you want to give an extra incentive, you can provide prizes or some kind for reaching certain point milestones.
Question and Answer Period
WP-Answers is designed to be a comprehensive solution that provides you with all kinds of passive income. The site is fueled by user-generated content and you make money from advertising.
The provided theme is widget-enabled and it already has a sidebar widget pre-designed to accommodate 125×125 ad boxes. You can also insert contextual advertising at several locations throughout the site, like below the header or above the footer, and this can all be configured from within the WordPress dashboard.
Just like other “answers” websites, the member who poses the original question can select the “best answer” provided by the community. The member who supplied the best answer can then earn bonus points for doing so. Again, the point value assigned can be customized within the options panel.
Auto Posting Campaigns via Yahoo!
Many people are lemmings and they won’t want to participate on a site that looks barren and deserted. To give your WP-Answers site the appearance of robust activity, they’ve included an auto-posting feature.
In short, it will automatically import both questions and answers posed through the official Yahoo! Answers site. You can define the questions pulled based on a search term and location, choosing the frequency of updates and category of imports too. This way, your site will look like it’s busy right off the bat (even if it’s not).
Make Money with the Affiliate Program
Even if you don’t choose to use WP-Answers to power a few websites of your own, you can still make money from them. They have an affiliate program in place.
Several affiliate banners are provided for your promotional use and you earn 35% of every sale you refer. The single site license, multi-site license, and developer licenses are priced at $89, $179, and $249, respectively. This would result in commissions of $31.15, $62.65, and $87.15.
The affiliate program is managed by eJunkie and payments are sent via PayPal once a month.
User Generated Content for the Win
Ultimately, the best way to earn passive income is to create a website that will update itself and funnel money into your bank account. That’s basically how WP-Answers could work for you, so long as you market your site accordingly and generate a good deal of traffic.
Instead of developing a “catch all” answers site with WP-Answers, I’d say it would be much more effective to stick with a niche and become a “go-to” site for information in that realm. Offer some incentives for participation and you could be sipping umbrella drinks on a beach in no time.
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Looks interesting and could work but looks like it could be heavily saturated.
I love the scrapping feature lol.
I like the question and answer feature myself.
The scrapping feature could get you penalized by Google for duplicate content in no time, SY
Perhaps it could do that but it would depend on how many other sites would have the same content.
Duplicate content is somewhat of a myth, i’ve seen numerous sites with duplicate content, exact content, copy and pasted, and they still rank high for search results…
Google either needs to step up their game or come out and tell us its allowed…
You got the proof yourself than why do you need an announcement from Google …
Google give authority to those contents which they think is the original one ….
There are many sites out there that have duplicate content, I don’t think Google penalizes it as much as people think they do.
If they scrap them from Yahoo answers, which is a high authority sites and has published first-, then Google will take Yahoo as the primary source to index. Apart of this, scraper sites add nothing of value to an users experience, if Big G catches you your site will be de-indexed, SY
Agree very much that this could already be overly saturated. There are already so many answers sites.
I agree, it’s looks good, but it could be saturated
I agree man. Q&A sites are possibly going to be saturated like movie and music sites. This is one of my future projects though, but still it’s very potential for us to get customers and sales with the product or website as our reference to every answer.
It’s a pretty useful plugin. I might decide to buy it in the future. Though scraping feature just ruins the fun of having a real site
That’s quite a savvy program if it can auto-generate content. I really like the sound of that feature.
That feature is useful but that’s not the route to go long-term.
It seems to me that Yahoo Answers is the answer to people who look for answers from others out there.
The idea of having a site like that is good but I wonder how it would work in practice.
Set it and forget it sounds good though.
Yeah, I agree not even answers.com compares to yahoo answers.
Honestly, I feel that this is a product for suckers.
Maybe if the content is specialized on only a narrow area it might work but then the number of visitors would be severely reduced.
Yahoo answers is the most widely used answer site, within minutes you will have many answers to your question. its the best.
Why do you like the idea to add more useless, duplicated and scraped content to the WWW? Who benefits from this? SY
John this looks great! I definitely will sign up for their affiliate program and promote them on my blog! Thanks for the great Article!
Michael wrote this, not John.
What do you mean? A guest post or something like that?
I see that you just started your blog!
It looks really nice!
I checked it out as well, looks good. I thought about using that theme.
Sounds really nice.
I mostly work with a forum for such stuff, but I really like the clean look of the templates.
One of the best ways to get your answer.
Do you mean Yahoo Answers or using this WP device?
I will go for yahoo answers and really appreciate the way they are handling spam.
Do you think that it would be profitable to turn this plugin into a membership site. Where members can ask questions to experts in a particular field like cooking or weightlifting?
I think that’s the best way to about this. Be niche specific and gradually expand as the community grows.
Caffeinated Content is better. Sorry John.
lol isn’t that for ripping blog posts?
Nope, it does yahoo answers and even articles!
I like it too but this design is really nice!
I was refferring to caff content having the same functionality as this theme.
very interesting post. thanks for sharing sir john.
Why do you bother to comment, if you not even have noticed who wrote the blog post in the first place? SY
hahaha… people who wrote this post is Michael, not John..
I was looking for something similar
, this looks sweet! but i am more interested in the sponge ques/answer system which will be out soon. Neil has it own his blog :p
This would make posting on yahoo answer easier.
Why?????? SY
It sounds like a great idea, but I would like to know what safeguards are in place to keep spammers, trolls and other undesirable elements out? If that is worked out well, it could be indeed a great platform for a niche site. Thanks for another great review Michael, SY
Hi,
As it runs off wordpress you can use Akismet spam protection with it to prevent spam.
You can also moderate comments(answers) before they go live if you wish.
That is a pretty good answer although moderating comments would mean that it doesn’t run on auto-pilot anymore.
Agreed. Moreover, to really build a community there will be a ton of work in the short run. It’s not really an auto-pilot/passive solution in the short run but is in the long run.
It is like always, if you want to get quality results, you need to work for them. If you don’t put this initial work in and dream of an ‘auto-piloted make money online system’ you will get crap. And crap doesn’t make money, SY
It is a fantastic idea, many people use Yahoo Answers simply to drive traffic, but as many said, what are the safe guards againts spammers. Already a standard WP site recieves hundreds of spam comments, I can only imagine what the effects will be with this. As an example I run a user generated content site but have strict controls to control spam which I had to obtain myself.
Apart from that, great review and something worth looking into.
Love this idea, John. By opening up the Q & A to certain periods a person can run a free “taste of coaching” for say an hour, then sell spots for people who want to keep going.
The idea is very exciting itself lets see how marketers mold this strategy to their own benefit
I really like the design and everything about it, it could definitely be built up to something as big as yahoo answers!
Looks promising and with the content you can just decide to turn off the auto generated ones…
Yahoo answers and this one is totally different.
This one is on micro level and yahoo is on macro level.
I’m starting the question the passive income vs. earned income debate. I’m about the biggest fan of passive income there is, but have found that I can make more money faster “actively”. Then, I can take that earned income and put it into high yielding stocks to convert it to passive income. In short, what I’m saying is you can make more money blogging actively than with an “autopilot” answers site.
Pretty sweet addition would be nice to cut back on some of the support tickets this way.
This is good because its automated and passive income is the best type of income but the niche is very saturated, I wonder how well it would work.
Which niche do you speak about? You can always choose a niche that is not already tapped. SY
love it. This is good and i believe many poeple will like it too.
Wow, it looks just like Yahoo Answers, complete with the point system, too. Interesting.
Boy many top bloggers have started … but most of them are not getting answers …
So if you have a team of providing answers than you can turn many normal visitors into your loyal ones.
Give them priority and answer them … make yourself available for them everytime
I think that applying the system to a profitable niche the system could still work .I am not sure if could be a good idea to steal ontent from yahoo answer.
Maybe I will give it a try…
From Wikipedia entry on “Yahoo! Answers”,
“Though the service itself is free, the content of answers are owned by the respective users — while Yahoo! maintains a non-exclusive royalty-free worldwide right to publish the information.”
Similar to many user content sites. See their Terms of Service for more detail on how you can use their site.
Yea, I once tried the free YahooAnswers plugin which does similar work but the it kept posting way too many comments!
But this looks like a good idea for a separate site project which could rank well in the SERPS.
Hello, I just wanted to say that I really appreciate the articles on this blog. Also, I wanted to say that I wanted to post on other articles, but I could not, it is very difficult to get the comment box to come up on other articles, so I am posting here instead, saying “thank you” for all of your informative information.
Hello, I just wanted to say that I really appreciate the articles on this blog. Also, I wanted to say that I wanted to post on other articles, but I could not, it is very difficult to get the comment box to come up on other articles, so I am posting here instead, saying “thank you” for all of your information.
Nice blog mr. Chow!!!
I’ve made blogs that were made from scrapped content. They ranked high and even reached a PR of 4 but google will catch on and slap you
That’s true but you can diversify as the community grows.
@ d3so
If they provided you rank 4 that means you deserve that.
Now you should not do any stupidity like selling links and all … simply add more quality content and add more back links
I asked some few questions on Yahoo Answers, but I only get 1 to 3 answers from them. I think trending is one thing that might get you loads of answers in your question.