All you have to do is create a new folder (/answers) on your blog domain and install WordPress and Instant Q&A theme on it. That’s really all there is to it. Once done, your visitors can take advantage of this theme to ask and answer questions on your website. Why install it separately? Q&A sites do get attacked a lot. If you are not accepting user registrations on your blog for security reasons, you don’t have to make any compromise by taking this approach.

This theme has a very dynamic look and feel to it. Your visitors can use your front-page to find the latest and most popular questions in your community. The theme has its own custom log in and sign up page. It has 3 different color schemes and can be easily customized from its back-end.

This is more than just a WordPress theme. It’s a system that rewards your visitors for participating and answering questions. So you’ll always have a chance to know who your most active members are. The theme can be used to create custom questions. It’s ad ready too.

Instant Q&A won’t ask or answer your questions for you, but it does give you an easy way to enhance your blog and add yet another feature to it. It’s pretty affordable too. If you like having your own Q&A website, this theme is worth a try.

Regardless of what niche you are involved in, you can always find people who are asking questions online that are probably being asked by many others. By identifying those questions and the needs of those people, you can write blog posts that people eat up and want to share with others. Not complicated on the paper but it does take some work. If you are looking to take advantage of this tactic to develop more ideas for your blog, here are 5 places you should look at:

Yahoo! Answers: still the best place to dig up ideas for blogs. There are plenty of questions in the database, which means you are going to have plenty of opportunities to develop ideas for your blog. You can also become an authority by participating and answering questions here.

Askville: a community by Amazon that doesn’t get the recognition that it deserves. If you are running a technology blog or have an audience that is hooked on Amazon products, Askville is a great place for your research.

Linkedin Answers: Linkedin is already one of the top social networking websites on the market. The quality of questions here are often much higher and the questions much more targeted. But if you are writing a highly technical or advanced blog, you are going to love using Linkedin Q&A.

Wordtracker Keyword Questions: a cool tool by WordTracker that lets you find out what people are searching for through search engines. It can be pretty useful at times.

Facebook Groups: Facebook Groups and fan pages are other places you can look at to find out about what people are asking and what you can provide to them. These social networking websites are data gold-mines as long as you are there to take advantage.

What’s been your experience with the above websites?

I have always believed that the more you give, the more you get back. Everything I have learned about blogging and business, I have learned from others. I didn’t suddenly discover the knowledge. Whether it was reading a book, attending a conference, or going through message boards, there has always been someone on the other side to answer my questions/concerns. So it’s always nice to be able to give back to those who are just getting started with their journey in the business world. I was a big fan of ideablob as it was a service that let people share their ideas with the world and get advice on how to proceed with their projects. Unfortunately, the service was shut-down when the parent company filed for bankruptcy. Startups.com is another service that lets users ask their questions and have them answered by the community fast. If you want to make it big as a blogger, you need to treat your blog as a business. If you have never run any business in the past, you are going to have issues and concerns to deal with on a daily basis. Thanks to Startups.com, you can get some of those issues answered.

The idea behind Startups.com is noble and something all entrepreneurs need to pay attention to. At the same time, Startups.com can be more than a Q&A forum for you as a blogger. Not only you can help other bloggers have their questions answered, you can also find out what people are curious about and write posts about those issues. LinkedIn Q&A has been a great source of blogging ideas for me and Startups.com can help as well.

The tags feature is very useful as well. It can give you a quick overview of the topics and sub-topics that people are interested in finding more information about. Startups.com is not the only game in town, but it’s a decent place to look at what people are asking and how you can provide value to them on your blog. If you are stuck and have no idea what to write about next, spending some time on Startups.com might help.