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Google Answers
Published: April 19, 2005
There's a little known channel of marketing within Google, but outside of their main organic and paid listings. It's called Google Answers and you can visit the website at http://answers.google.com. The best to benefit from this will be ecommerce businesses, particularly those selling obscure parts, products or components that are typically hard to source.
How Google Answers can help
Google Answers is a system whereby people pay for an expert to solve a particular problem. Much of it is "how big is the universe?" and questions of a similar nature, but where the gold lies for businesses are the questions buying departments and people sourcing products ask. You may sell a certain brand of capacitors or LED's for example. When a buyer asks Google Answers where they can source such items, this is where you come in.
Google may only charge from $2.50 to answer a question, which is great value if a buyer is spending hours of his time finding parts, but as a supplier of these parts, you can chip into the conversation and add a link to your shop. Your comments then form part of the discussion thread and then gets read by others either looking to source parts themselves or people interested in the products you sell which only furthers the market opportunities.
Best of all it's free and only requires Google registration.
The downsides are that you won't get hundreds of visitors flooding through the gates but the ones that do will be genuinely after products you provide and these visitors are the ones people would pay dearly for.
Another marketing tip for the TN38 archives. How long this lasts is anyones guess. Where there are marketing opportunities on the internet, be assured that the internet sharks out there are already circling, which will force Google to close the gaps so get in there now while you still can.