Quora is an online question and answer community where people join in to ask any kind of question which they couldn't find solution anywhere else and people who have a better understanding on the topic give their opinions.
With the pressure on digital marketers to promote content and get high quality backlinks all round the year, Quora is deemed as one of the best platform for content marketing. Promoting contents on this platform as an answer or a blog post not only help a person get attention of the readers but also helps to get quality backlinks and traffic to his website with a huge conversion rate. You can get a good email lists with a huge number of followers and probably someday get noticed by major publications who might publish few of your articles.
Despite all the potential it has, most of the people fail to achieve optimum benefit from it as only a handful of them are getting good views while others are lost. So, I'm here to explain to you how to use Quora in the most effective way.
Before starting to go through the measures, I'd like to introduce myself. This is me, Jiwan Thapa who started out on Quora on 1st June 2018 and have over 156,000 views on my answers within these first 5 months at an average of 1,000 views every day. Though my following is very low so far, I'm getting a good amount of referral traffic from Quora each day which I'm sure will go on increasing with the passage of time. So, what am I doing that is making the difference?
What's the difference?
Over millions of questions and a few dozens of answers to each of them, only a few answers seem to break thousands of views and only a few manage to get millions. Though, most of the writers might suggest you to write something controversial which has the power to attract a lot of attention and shares, I would say 'NO'. It might be a good idea to bring in controversy once in a while in your answers but to get a steady number of views everyday, you need something more in your answers.
From close observation and some extensive research, here are some secrets that I found being used by most of the influential writers on Quora.
1. Focus on relevant topics
The best writers on Quora don't answer every question pointed to them but instead choose the most relevant questions to their brand and portray themselves as thought leaders. Their answers dominate online search results related to their business. Questions on lifestyles most probably get the highest upvotes and comments but if they are not related to your business or brand, don't go for it. You might have a good answer to few of those questions but they won't be worthy for your business.
Optimize your profile with your detailed about me section, area of expertise, geographic location, educational background, past jobs and social accounts along with a tagline according to your business. The tagline appears on top of each of your answers which is customizable for each answer. If you are interested in broad topics and write answers on a lot of them, it's better to create a few taglines.
2. Optimize your profile
Answering the questions relevant to your business only won't work if you did not optimize your profile. If you look at profiles of the top writers in Quora, you'll find one thing in common which is their profile. These people maintain their profile like a website with nice image, brand name, features, social links, links to other contents as well as latest offers.
Your profile provides you with a great platform to add backlinks to your own contents which will help you to drive huge amount of referral traffic.
3. Find the right questions
Writing quality answers is very important but so is finding out quality questions. Here are some attributes that can help you find out such questions.
- At least 5:1 ratio of followers to the number of answers provided.
- A number of bad answers.
- A question where you can add relevant images.
- A question where you can share your stories.
- A question relevant to your offer.
Search questions under every topic you have chosen. Generally, the top performing questions have the highest follower ratio. Save the questions to answer later. Save at least 10 questions at a time and take your time to write better answers.
4. Add relevant images
A study by Skyword found out the increment in viewership by 94% on articles with relevant image in comparison to the ones without any image. It's the most powerful weapon in Quora and you can see top writers always including images in their answers.
There's no need to place the image on top of the answer, you can place it anywhere you like. Quora displays the first picture from your answer on preview. Most of the writers use images of celebrity to generate higher click rate while some of the best ones use before and after images with good story to draw emotion from readers.
5. Add personal experiences and stories
Quora readers love personal and genuine posts. Best Quora writers add their personal experiences and images in their answers and generate a lot of followings.
You can go for humor or advices. Everyone has a lot of stories which can be turned into an emotion evoking content. If you look at the answers from Dushka Zapata, you can see how she turns ordinary stories into a remarkable one. Similarly, Sean Kernan is the one to follow for excellent advices and controversial humor.
Use of metaphors or smilies can add a good emotional weight on your answers while using phrases like "Imagine this", "Let me explain", etc involves the reader. Developing such writing skills will help you connect to the readers immediately and stand out among the others.
6. Add your personal touch
Quora is all about questions and answers. So, content is not necessarily the king here as it is everywhere. Add your personal touch on your answers to make it look different along with some embelishments. Here are a few things you can do to make your answers much better apart from metaphors and smilies.
- Limit your paragraphs to one or two sentences only to make it easily readable on mobile devices.
- Mark important words and statements by bold or italics.
- Use bullets and numbering.
- Minimize unnecessary words like “very”, “really”, “that”, etc.
- Use contrast stories to explain failure before success.
- Reflect pains and struggles.
- Always end your answers on a positive call to action.
7. Follow up your best answers
When one of your answer starts getting good views, follow it up with another one as a lot of readers would be looking for what you've written up. Make sure to make it look relevant. Don't place anything clearly promotional on your answers like asking them to visit a resource to learn more.
Avoid phrases like:
- Learn more about what we do here.
- Start your free trial here.
- For tips 11 - 20, go here.
Instead, use phrase like If this is a subject you’re interested in, we’ve written many articles about it. You can read them here: [insert link]. I hope they will help you to get over [pain point]. You can even include backlinks in a list post while blending them with other links to make it less self promotional. Asking people to join a facebook group seems less promotional and works much better than asking them to visit a site. Keep in mond, Quora readers hate self promotion.
Make sure, you use these strategies after your answers start getting huge number of views.
Don't forget to add a backlink to your content at the end of your answer. Keeping it on top of the answer might get you banned. Make sure, you place a call to action on relevant answers only. Keep it separate to make it look distinct. A well placed link can drive huge relevant traffic to your content.
8. Target keywords
You can find a number of online tools that can help you get a list of related keywords for your contents. You can use those keywords while writing answers for Quora and easily get ranked on search engines faster. That will help you get organic traffic to your answers on Quora and quality referral traffic to your website.
9. Attract best writers
Once you start getting views, you can follow the best performers on Quora and answer the questions they have already answered and tag them too whenever it's relevant. They can tag you back in their answers which will obviously increase traffic to your profile and generate more followers which probably means more business. Excellent answers are picked up and published on major media outlets by Quora regularly with great links to your profile.
Conclusion
Quora is not just a platform to ask questions or write answers but a great platform to build a community while developing thought leadership. If you could use it the proper way, then, it can become one of your best channel for quality traffic. Whatever you do, don’t stop. No one became a top writer right from the start. With lot of practice one can develop these skills and achieve the best possible outcome.
Let me know, which of these strategies have you implemented so far? What's the best number of views you have achieved so far? What other strategies do you think would work better?
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