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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