Question and answer sites come and go. Quora is today’s reigning queen.
Go to Quora.com (after reading this article, please). Search “Quora for marketing.” Search “guitar strings.” Search “miniature poodles.” Search “pickleball.”
These are just a few things that interest me. You can search whatever interests you. You’ll find oodles of relevant questions. You’ll find oodles of answers, insights and ideas. You’re likely to spend oodles of time there.
Oodling aside, my point is Quora marketing is a smart play—for any type of business and for all kinds of reasons. If one of your primary marketing goals is to deliver answers to those who have relevant questions, Quora is your silver platter.
Quora is a social network created to foster knowledge sharing. The site has an Alexa rank of 72 in the U.S. That means only 71 websites get more traffic from U.S. users.
The Quora for Business page defines the network’s mission as: to share and grow the world’s knowledge.
Given the audience size, it’s obvious Quora is not overlooked by netizens, but perhaps it is by marketers. Quora presents a tremendous opportunity to connect with a potentially massive audience.
I’ve been involved in the past and am today, but I’d be joshing you if I claimed I was a Quora expert. I wanted to learn more about it and help you do the same, so I’ll share with you some of the best practices I’ve learned for Quora marketing and for taking advantage of the powerful resource.
As is the case with any social media network, it’s wise to put some thought into the creation of your profile.
Here’s my Quora bio.
Serious Quora users will learn more about you here and make decisions about following you, receiving notifications regarding your activity and asking you questions. When someone visits your profile they’ll be offered all this information and more—including statistics regarding your activity on the site and a history of your answers.
As you’ll read about here today, you can use Quora in a variety of ways. However, as a content marketer, your Quora marketing activity is bound to focus on answering questions.
You could even think of Quora as an ongoing question-answering contest because Quora includes an “upvote/downvote” feature. So, like other online forums, the voice of the crowd is a factor.
Author and podcaster James Altucher answers questions regularly and has earned a Quora following of more than 200K. The question above has inspired more than 100 answers to date, so the 1.2K upvotes help his answer rise to the top.
I must admit, I can’t figure out how Quora applies the votes because answers aren’t necessarily presented in order of the tally.
Of course, the better your answer is, the more likely you will achieve the goals you came to Quora for, such as: building credibility, making connections, driving traffic, and generating interest in your products and services.
If questions are to come your way, you can choose to answer them—or not. If you’re trying to win favor with the Quora faithful, you should give it a try, especially when a request comes in.
If you want to take full advantage of Quora, you need not wait for questions to come to you. You can easily find questions you want to answer.
When you visit the site go into the “Answer” section, you’ll be shown relevant questions.
Today, I was served these two questions. Clearly, Quora has learned (1) I write about blogging and traffic generation and (2) I’m researching a story about Quora (cue the Twilight Zone theme song).
Quora also has a powerful search feature. A broad search will return a variety of questions related to your inquiry.
Click on a question and the chances are high you’ll be shown a generous list of related questions too.
I just discovered this (Quora evolves regularly)… You may get asked what you would like to take questions about—and can then share the notice on Facebook and Twitter.
In my Quora quests to date, I haven’t found any approach to answering questions is out of bounds. I should mention I’ve read perpetual link bombing is discouraged and violators are subject to being suspended or blacklisted.
So don’t link bomb. Don’t shy away from offering links either. The trick is to understand the reason Quora exists is to be a resource where people can find answers to their questions. Do your best to offer valuable answers and you’ll be fine. Referencing content and including links is a common practice.
Approaches you might try include:
Try not to:
This may not be the first time you’ve read a post where a content marketer has suggested using Quora as a source to find ideas. Essentially, content marketing is about answering questions from potential buyers, customers, partners or any constituent that means something to the growth of your brand.
Of course, these types of questions can come from anywhere, online and off, but Quora makes it too easy. It’s the ultimate place to source questions.
My search for “student loans” produced a long list of questions and answers archived on Quora. Nearly every one presents a potential topic idea. Above are two concerned with “no co-signer” and “online degrees.” On goes the light bulb.
Dig in often and deeply to find:
For instance (again, see above), according to my Google AdWords research, “student loan for online degree” is a legit keyphrase.
You won’t find this tip everywhere—and it may not work every time. However, it looms large for me. In fact, using Quora as a source of content was one of the first things that occurred to me when I discovered the network years back.
It’s simple: ask questions instead of answering them when you’re looking to crowd-source content. If you’re trying to create a roundup post featuring several answers to the same question, there may be no easier way than asking a smart question on Quora, gathering the answers, and curating them elsewhere.
In 2011, I posted the question above and later used many of my favorite answers in a roundup post I wrote about social media marketing.
Anyone can create a blog about anything on Quora. What are Quora blogs?
A quirky, but perhaps sensible thing about Quora is it doesn’t have a help section or support center. The things you want to know are answered Quora-style, by users (and sometimes employees). So to answer the question above I’ll share some of the answers I found:
“Quora offers a basic blog platform like any other (WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, etc.) that serves as a mini-site within the larger domain.”
“Quora is a fantastic way to get viewers both to your Quora blog and your website.”
“It’s super easy to use.”
“Quora blogs can help you in establishing yourself as an expert in your niche. Also you get the opportunity to introduce your WordPress blog here to a larger audience and increase your online reach.”
It’s worth noting that 60% of Quora traffic comes from search. Great blog posts and answers rank well and draw a crowd.
The page I linked to above includes a success story about Asana’s success with Quora advertising, by Puja Ramani.
“If you’re answering questions in a dozen different niches people will see your account and not know what to expect. If you have positioned yourself in one niche, people in that niche will want to follow you,” writes Morgan.
Spikes in views, upvotes or shares should provide some meaningful feedback. As you can see here, I did something that helped my cause on Nov 02 and earned a substantial number of views.
Here’s what I did…
I found a question that perfectly aligned with a new post I had written for the ShortStack blog. To answer the question, I wrote an original, but brief, introduction, and then I pasted in an image, the title and beginning of the post, and linked to the entire post.
What are the most popular topics on Quora? Great question. In 2014, Thomas Foster (B.A. Politics & Journalism, Monash University) did the research and provided a great answer.
How could I not wrap this post up by asking for questions?
If you have questions about Quora, please fire ‘em at me below and I’ll do my best to answer them. If you have questions about anything else, you’ll find answers on Quora.
And, of course, if Quora marketing appeals to you now, it’s time to get over there and start answering questions.
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Quora has been doing an amazing job, definitely – whenever I typed a question on Google Search, I found one or more related answers from Quora 🙂
Also, since it has been introducing language-specific versions, business looking for an international reach should consider joining, as well.
I did come across some info about the foreign language versions while researching this post, so thanks for adding that AndyT.
great article barry. so here’s my question. there’s not enough time in the day to convert quora questions into long form content.
I rarely try to be the first to answer I usually get even more ammo from other authors
I write a long form answer on my blog complete with garnishee (images, hyperlinks and videos).
Then I hand copy to quora (and medium as time allows) removing hyperlinks and lighting up videos.
It’s my understanding that quora has no follow links thus my blog wins the seo round and my stats rise on quora.
am I doing this right?
WindyCP,
It all sounds reasonable to me, so, yeah, I think you’re doing smart stuff there. However, I’m not sure why you’d extract the links. If they’re useful links, why not include them?
niel patel got banned without notice https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Neil-Patels-account-banned-on-Quora
don’t know if it’s temporary but I read somewhere it had to do with links in his quora posts – until I can confirm I’m going to be conservative –
I want to grow my 1500 views a month to help bolster my self declaration as an influencer in my niche
Whaaaaat? Seriously?
I occasionally talk to his staff thru one of his blogs – I’ll try to reach out for more detail or if it’s urban legend
If you are copying your long from answer to Quora from your blog aren’t you creating duplicate content?
Quora is a no follow site so articles there should’t get indexed
great, thanks
Even though Quora has a “nofollow” attribute on all external links on posts doesn’t mean that the content on a Quora URL doesn’t get indexed. So yes, both Neil Patel’s blog post and its copy on Quora would be indexed and therefore found on Google. But in these cases a canonical tag will help search engines to differentiate who’s the original publisher.
no – Quora is a no follow site o it doesn’t get indexed