What is Quora?

Ex-Facebook employees Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever founded Quora back in 2009.

Thanks to extensive media coverage on this unique service, Quora grew exponentially over the years and managed to surpass it’s predecessor Yahoo Answers as the top Q&A (questions and answers) platform today.

Today, Quora gets about 100 million visitors every month. In fact, anybody with a question can go on to Quora to ask for answers.

The type of questions you can find on Quora covers almost everything under the sun. From realistic ways to get rich in 5 years, to the most surreal places on earth, it’s easy to see why web users love Quora.

And it isn’t just a place to discuss fun stuff. Quora is also a platform where people go to seek answers from top experts in their industry. It is a fantastic place to reach out to potential customers if you know how to use Quora to your benefit.

Why should I care about Quora?

Long-term source of traffic

To build your presence on Quora, you just need to find questions and answer them.

Here’s where it gets interesting. When you write answers, you can place a link that goes to your website.

And when you are always answering questions that are relevant to your business and your industry, interact with people who commented on your answers, you can grow organic traffic back to your website.

Best of all, if your answer is high-quality and popular, it can stay on Quora for years and continue to bring you traffic in the future!

Become an authority figure

Writing on Quora is similar to writing content for your own blog.

Once you have continuously provided excellent answers to questions, you will receive upvotes. Upvotes boosts your popularity and lets your answer trend across every user’s Quora feed.

As time goes on, you will receive topic badges that give, and you earn a position as the Most Viewed Writer in your relevant topic.

All these will add to your social proof. Becoming a Top Writer in your niche means people will start approaching you directly for answers (called A2A – Ask to Answer).

When this happens, you know you have become the de facto authority figure because people are coming to you for answers entirely voluntary, because they recognise your expertise.

Be featured on major publications

Do you know top blogs like Huffington Post, TIME, Forbes and Newsweek go to Quora to look for content?

If your answer is top quality, you will be approached by Quora staff for your permission to feature your story on these publications.

This is an easy way to get your name and your business on top publication websites, without the need to approach them to pitch for guest blogging.

Once again, this can be a massive boost for your social proof.

How Do I Start using Quora for my Business?

1. Create your profile

While you can read answers on Quora without an account, you need to create one if you want to start answering questions and leaving comments.

Your profile page will need to look professional, as Quora users will be looking at it whenever you post an answer.

That means having a good-looking headshot that clearly displays your face as your profile picture.

Spend some time crafting your bio too. You have 2 objectives: Make yourself personable, and introduce your business to readers.

Talk about your interests, hobbies and professional experience. Quora lets you place images in your bio paragraph, so use this to your advantage and put an attractive CTA that links to your business website.

2. Select the topics that you are interested in

Immediately after your account is set up, you will be given the option to choose which topics you are interested in, and they will show up on your main Quora feed.

Of course, the best way to choose this is to pick the topics that are relevant to your business.

For example, if you own a software company that provides SaaS solutions for retail sales, you’d pick topics like:

Sales, SaaS (Software as a Service), Enterprise Software, B2B (Business-to-business), Cloud Computing

Or, if you run a local carpet cleaning business, you might want to pick topics such as:

Housecleaning, Rugs & carpets, Vacuum Cleaners, Carpet cleaning, Cleaning services

Pick at least 10-12 topics, preferably ones that have a few thousand followers. Don’t worry if there aren’t enough topics related to your niche.

You should pick a couple of topics that you enjoy talking about outside of your business. If you’re passionate about golf or whiskey, choose those topics.

These may not be relevant to your industry, but there are benefits. One, it allows your followers to know and like you as a person.

Secondly, many marketers come to Quora to peddle their products and services. Quora users aren’t stupid, and they know who are just doing it for the money.

When you start answering questions outside of your industry, you come across as a genuine person who is contributing to the Quora community.

Thirdly, it opens doors to business opportunities that are otherwise hidden from you. Sometimes you can uncover new clients because he or she has the same interests and hobbies as you.

3. Look for questions to answer

Now that you have set up the topics, you will start to see questions that are relevant to you appear in your feed.

But don’t wait for Quora to recommend questions. Start looking for good questions to ask on your own.

You shouldn’t be answering every single question that shows up. In fact, picking the right questions to answer, and crafting a well thought out answer is the key to Quora success.

Find questions that have a large number of followers. If the question has many followers, but only a handful of answers, go for it.

Recent questions are great because they usually have a good followers-to-answers ratio.

More importantly, only pick questions that you can answer confidently. If your answer is poor quality or irrelevant, you may be flagged by Quora as spam. This can put all your writing efforts to waste.

Find all the questions you want to answer, select Answer Later to shortlist them. You can always come back to them when you have the time to write.

4. Craft your answers

There are no hard-and-fast rules in writing Quora answers. Ideally, your answer should be original and not copied from somewhere else.

It should include your personal opinion, experiences, and thoughts related to the question.

Fortunately, you can get better at answering as time goes by. It’s really not that difficult. Here are some tips to help you write your Quora answer

Do answer in a helpful, non-promotional way

Just like writing your blog articles, you shouldn’t be inserting sales pitches into your answers to sell your product or service.

Stick close to the answering the question, and give examples and data to support your answer. Place a link to your website at the end of your answer and suggest the readers to click on it if they wish to learn more.

Give them a reason to click through the link in your post

You need to provide an incentive to make readers want to click on your link.

For example, if you think you have more info on your blog that you feel can help answer the question in more detail, let your readers know.

Talk in first person using “I” or “me.”

Quora is a community-driven platform. This means that adding a personal touch goes a long way in building a following.

So use personal pronouns in your answer such as “I” “my” and “me” when appropriate. This will also make you look less of a business, and more as a human being contributing to the community.

Use images or videos in relevant answers

When writing answers, you’ll want to be as detailed as you can. This means your answer will look like a wall of text.

Images can make your answer more enjoyable and easy to understand.

In fact, you should always have at least 1 image in your answer, as the image will be featured beside your answer in the Quora feed. It helps to grab the reader’s attention.

Quora doesn’t have a lot of graphics and images in its database, so you should find something appropriate from Google search.

Note: Do not use meme pictures, gif animations, and anything that is irrelevant or inappropriate. Quora doesn’t like images like these and will take down your answer as they deem fit.

Quote your references

If your answers are based on information that is found somewhere else, always remember to quote them.

This gives readers the impression that you have taken the time to craft your answer carefully and have done the appropriate research, and it goes a long way in making your answers look credible.

Use bullets

Bullets are great for writing because they make your answers more readable and easy to understand.

Users are more likely to give you an upvote if they read till the end, so make it as easy for them to understand as possible.

5. Track your traffic that is coming from Quora

Once you have more than a handful of answers, it’s time to see if your efforts are paying off.

Using our favourite Google Analytics tracking tool, you can see if Quora is bringing traffic to your site.

Go to your Google Analytics account and click the “Reporting” tab. Choose “Social” under “Acquisition.” Lastly, click “Network Referrals.”

You should see Quora under the list of Social Networks. If you click on Quora, you should see what the exact Quora URL that is bringing you traffic to your site are. This will tell you which are the answers that are the most effective in bringing you traffic.

Using this intel, you can then come up with new content ideas for your blog. Or you can head back to Quora and find more questions to answer that are relevant to your most effective answers.

But what if you find that none of your Quora answers are pulling in the traffic numbers to your website?

You’ll need to go back and look at your answers. Are you answering the questions relevantly? Did you follow the tips and best practices as mentioned above?

You can also look at other top performing answers. Try to pick out why they are interesting or entertaining to read.

Perhaps it’s the sense of humour, or maybe it’s the storytelling aspect of the answer that draws people in.

Use these top answers and see what you can learn from them, then improve on yours.

Quora is a powerful tool for traffic

Every business is hungry for more traffic. But few of them are looking towards Quora, even when it’s around for a decade.

For your business, that means a huge untapped marketing potential is sitting there waiting to be unleashed.

If you’re already producing your own content on your business blog, then you’ll be glad to know you already have what it takes to stand out on Quora.

So start building your authority through Quora. The sooner you get to it, the sooner you’ll dominate.

Remember, the benefits are long term and will continue to snowball and bring you ROIs long after. Do it properly once, and your traffic will grow in the future.