Part 2 - They Ask, You Answer

We’re eager now to start answering customer questions.

So you can help them out, show your expertise and become a recognised authority.

Which in turn makes it much easier for people to make the decision to buy from you.

But how do we know what questions to answer? We’ll cover that in this Part.

Let’s get started

The best source of questions will always be directly from your audience and customers.

But let’s say you don’t have any questions yet but want to get started with this content marketing method.

We could just make some questions up, sure!

But generally what we (as experts in our niche) think people want to know about is much more complex and advanced for our audience.

For example my most popular videos are about basic usage of ChatGPT. Not about the ins and out of large language models.

I might be interested in the advanced stuff but 95% of the people I talk to won’t share that enthusiasm. The same will be the case in your niche.

Answer the Public

Because of this we need aggregate questions. What are the general public asking, en masse?

Head to https://answerthepublic.com/

This is a free tool that’ll scour Google for the most asked questions about your niche.

For example if I want to sell virtual office space I plug in “virtual office” and get this

Notice how question words are used - how, what, when, where, which, who, why as well as will, are, can.

This basically runs loads of Google searches with these question modifiers in play to work out the questions people ask on Google.

The image above is from the free version, which is sufficient to get started.

You can also get it all in (more useful!) lists and tables like this

These are all actual questions people who are interested in your business are asking. We can use these to kickstart our question answering.

In the next Part we’ll cover how best to answer questions - the best format, style and script.

Premium Prompt - Focus down

Answer the public gives us lots to start with.

Too much in fact! 1000+ questions!

Let’s use a ChatGPT prompt to narrow it down - based on our business requirements.

Below your work from the last part use this next prompt

Here are questions I have extracted from Google. Please find the ones that are relevant to my business and remove ALL others. Be ruthless. 

Only return results that were present in the list I provide. Do not make new results. 

Here are the questions from Google:
[copy/paste ALL from Answer the Public]

Next go to Tables view in Answer the Public and select ALL like so

This is ctrl+A on Windows or Cmd+A on Mac.

Notice it has grabbed additional information from the page? That’s fine. ChatGPT is smart enough to ignore this.

For this example I used (in the first prompt) the following business information

My business is selling virtual office space to UK companies.
My customers are solopreneurs and small business owners who work from home. they are UK based exclusively. 
Their main problems are not wanting to use their home address for their business, needing a place to have business correspondence sent

Based on this business information and the Answer the Public research ChatGPT returns this

It’s stripped out all references to offices in India or the US and all references to large company concerns. The focus is instead on UK based small businesses.

This helps us cut the list of 1000+ down to 20-30 to get started with. Much better!

Pulling it together

Armed with our customer questions we can next move on to answering.

I’ll cover the steps in the next Part.

A reminder of what we’re covering

• Part 1: Questionable Content

• Part 2: They ask, you answer

• Part 3: Time for answers!

• Part 4: RIP Yahoo Answers

• Part 5: Q&A ouroboros