Asking questions is a natural feature of human nature. No matter how informative your website is or how many times you’ve covered a particular topic, there will always be questions. This is really great, because no advertisement does better than being open to you and willing to answer any questions you get. Plus, answering questions can be a good way to generate traffic to your website. If you put some effort into providing short, detailed, and accurate answers, you can expect that too. better conversion rates. The Ask Me Anything (AMA) section on your WordPress website, a great way to present yourself as an expert in your niche and share your knowledge with those who need it. Not to mention that you can increase visitor engagement as well.
In this article, we’ll show you how to add ask me anything to WordPress using the Ask Me Anything (Anonymous) plugin, but before we get into it, let’s give you a few more reasons to add it. Stay tuned to find out:
One of the most obvious advantages of having an AMA feature on your site is that you show you care and have lots of actionable information to share with your audience. outside lucrative results like increased conversion rate and higher engagementSome of the equally important benefits of this feature include:
Also, adding an AMA section to a WordPress website is really simple. With the help of the right plugin, it can be done in just a few steps and we’ll show you how to do it on your own. For starters, adding an AMA feature may sound scary, but we assure you it isn’t.
As we said before, we will show you how to add AMA to your website. Ask Me Anything (Anonymously) plugin. This is very intuitive, user-friendly tool This will equip your website with a perfectly functional AMA section in minutes. Not to mention that it’s completely free. As for its reliability, the star ratings confirm what we’ve experienced with this plugin, and it’s effectiveness and simplicity. Now let’s see how to add it to your website.
We’ll assume you already know how to install a WordPress plugin and move on to the next step. If you encounter any problems during the installation process, you can see a detailed explanation of the installation process for any WordPress plugin by following the link above.
After activating the plugin, navigate to: Settings in your left side control panel menu where you will find an entirely new option – ask me what you want. Click on it to open the shortcode generator and settings page.
In the first area, you’ll find an auto-generated shortcode that you can copy and paste into one of your pages, posts or widget areas – wherever you want the AMA feature to appear. this shortcode is generated automaticallyYou don’t have to create it yourself, but you will notice that when you make changes to the default settings, they will be reflected in the shortcode as they are updated dynamically.
As for the settings, they’re mostly self-explanatory, so we’ll only cover the most important ones. The first setting to pay attention to is “Choose location” adjustment. The AMA section size will automatically adjust depending on whether you use it as a sidebar widget or as a page or post. We will select Page/Post for the location.
As for other settings, it all depends on how you want the plugin to work for you. Let’s take a look at the most interesting options and their purpose:
this Answer List Order option lets you specify whether you want visitors to see the newest or oldest questions first. It’s common practice to show the most recent replies first, but it all depends on the type of site you’re running.
Since the purpose of the AMA section is to allow visitors to remain anonymous when asking questions, Author Name option is where you enter a common name that will be displayed as a name for each question author.
this Success Message field This is where you enter the text that will appear every time someone posts a question. this Submit Button Text field This is where you can customize the text you want to appear on the button to post the question. You can also customize the text in the question box placeholder. These options allow you to add a personal touch to your AMA.
this Verification Question and Confirmation Answer options allow you to set your own anti-spam verification question.
Note that with every change you make, the shortcode will also change.
As you scroll down you will discover more customization options. It’s great that you can choose to hide the question box or the list of questions alongside the verification question. However, keep in mind that if you decide to hide the verification question, you may need to take another security measure.
All the settings you make are automatically saved and applied by the plugin, so do not worry about the absence of acquaintances. SAVE button.
If you want to customize the AMA section to better match your website style, you can add a dash of branding by adding your own code to the CSS. This option is of course for those of you with a bit of coding knowledge. Just click on the CSS tab, add your CSS and click. Save.
this Shrink output The option you can see below the encoding area allows you to minimize the output of the plugin. Recommended if you’re worried about speed issues, but most websites already have some strategies on how to deal with performance challenges, so you might not need it at all.
Even if you don’t do any customization, you can be sure that the BUT part will look good on your website as the plugin automatically mimics the style of your theme.
No matter where you want the AMA section to be on your website, you will need to create a page/post with the AMA shortcode. The plugin uses WordPress comments for questions and answers, and comments must be associated with a post or page.
Therefore, the next step is to create a page for the AMA section or add the AMA section to an already existing page. Either way, the process is basically the same. For the purpose of this tutorial, we have created a page specifically for the AMA. In your left-hand control panel menu, navigate to: Pages>Add New.
You will be taken to a new page screen. Add a title for your BUT page and insert the auto-generated shortcode directly into the content editor. You can do this before or after any image or text you may have.
The plugin will automatically generate the form and your page will be ready for your visitors to submit questions. In our case it looks like this:
This plugin allows you to have several AMA sections embedded in your website. So, in addition to having an AMA page, you can also have an AMA added to your sidebar as a widget. You can also add it to any other widget-ready area, but the sidebar will probably work best. Note that before adding the AMA widget you need to navigate to: “Choose location” set it and select Sidebar Widget.
To create an AMA widget, go to: Appearance > WidgetsClick and click the text widget. Enter the widget name and then paste the plugin shortcode. Click save and you’re ready to go.
In our case the result looks like this.
Any questions you receive will be stored as comments in your WordPress database, whether the AMA section is in your sidebar or on your page. To see them, simply go to the Comments page.
Answering the questions is as simple as possible – click the answer link below the question and type. You also have the option to delete questions if you think they don’t look good on your website.
As a result
Famous websites like Reddit, Quora, Tumblr and the like take great advantage of having AMA sections, and many of them even have AMA forums. One popular trend is to ask celebrities to answer questions on the website as guests or hosts. Thanks to the practical AMA plugin, you can now have this great feature on your WordPress website without having to learn a line of code. We’re sure you’ll find many more great ideas on how to get the most out of this useful feature that’s not fading in popularity.
