Whether you’re looking to promote your latest product or gain traffic for your site, Quora can be a powerful lever in your marketing strategy. But how exactly can you use Quora to your advantage and leverage its enormous reach to get millions of views?
Over the past 12 months, my Quora answers have received about 4 million views. In this post, I’ll explain why Quora can be valuable for your business and how you can get a million views of your own on the question-and-answer platform.
Why Is Quora Important?
If you haven’t used Quora as a means of building traffic before, it might seem like the primary benefits of getting a million views would be a bit of fame, recognition, and bragging rights. In reality, though, nothing could be further from the truth.
Quora traffic is incredibly powerful for one major reason: it represents the long tail. Just about every iteration of every question you can think of has already been asked on Quora. And because the site has such a strong SEO presence, it very frequently appears in the top results on Google when we search for a highly specific question.
When readers are sifting through answers on Quora looking for the best solution to their problem, where do you think they go next? Many of them continue seeking more information wherever the most helpful answer directs them. If they were reading your answer, then, that next destination could be your site.
This is why Quora is such an incredible tool for building traffic. By specifically targeting questions relevant to your product or service, you can direct potential customers to your site en masse.
Here are my top nine strategies for doing exactly that.
#1 Start With A Great Profile
Before you even start writing answers, you should take a few minutes to create an informative Quora profile. This gives readers a reason to trust your answers and leads to higher quality interactions with other Quorans across the site.
Having work and education credentials alongside a profile photo lets your readers know you’re a real person, not a bot. And by placing the answers you want people to read within your profile, you can push a lot more traffic to your site through those specific answers.
#2 Learn From Experts In Your Field
After you’ve fleshed out your profile, you’ll want to find experts who have already received a high number of views on questions related to your field. This is so that you can start answering the same questions as those experts, piggybacking off of their following to boost your own view numbers.
Finding these experts is not hard. First, search for a few questions related to your field on Google (or DuckDuckGo) using the site:quora.com operator. Next, click on the profiles of the top few answers for 10-20 questions to see if any of them have a large number of views. If they do—and those views are coming from questions relevant to you—take note of those questions so you can answer them later.
When learning from experts, you should also pay close attention to how they structure their answers and the elements they use to make those answers so powerful. In some fields, photos work well, while in others, listicles are a more appropriate format. Studying the experts in your field is a great way to determine the content your answer needs. Also make note of the things those experts are missing that you can add in to write an even better answer.
#3 Write The Best Answer
The first and most important way to write the best answer is to directly address the question being asked. This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many Quora answers are so general that they don’t actually address the specific question being asked. If you do this, readers are simply going to scroll on by.
Don’t stop at just answering the question: the key to getting massive results on Quora is to have the best answers. And as with most content on the web, one of the most reliable ways to become the best is to cover the topic more thoroughly than anyone else. If you need to take an hour or two to dive into the specifics of a single question, do it. This is why many of the top answers on Quora are thousands of words long. They answer the question being asked directly and then add plenty more information so readers can learn even more.
In my case, I rarely write answers that are less than 1,000 words long, since that length works well for me. For example, in my answer above, I give 1,000+ words of value to the reader before linking to a post on software engineering interviews with even more information about their question.
I’m not the only one using length to my advantage, of course. Another Quoran who has capitalized on the power of long answers exceptionally well is Hanson Cheng. He garnered more than a million views on his answers in just 45 days. Perhaps more impressively, Cheng has only answered 41 questions to date, which means his answers have received an average of 34,000 views apiece. That’s the power of writing long, detailed answers.
#4 Use Video
Just as savvy SEOs have been touting the power of video for years, the same is true on Quora. Answers embedded with relevant YouTube videos tend to perform better than those without them. If you aren’t a video whiz yourself, you can use software like Fastreel to easily put together a video that adds more depth and color to your written answer. Even if your video is just a shot of you explaining your answer, it can send your engagement through the roof – something the Quora algorithm loves.
#5 Share Your Answers To Relevant Spaces
After you’ve written an answer, you shouldn’t just move on to the next one. Instead, you should try to get as much exposure for it as possible by using Spaces. These are Facebook Groups-like communities built around specific topics of interest. Spaces are crucial to getting more views on your Quora answers – especially larger Spaces with hundreds of thousands of members. Many of those members receive notifications whenever someone submits a new answer to that Space. This gives your answers an immediate traffic boost.
The process of being accepted as a contributor to a Space can take weeks or even months, but it’s worth it. Spaces supercharge your reach and are the key to getting thousands of views every single day.
#6 Avoid Over-Publishing
It’s important to be patient when publishing answers on Quora. If you publish too many answers at a time, they’ll start to get taken down one by one. And there’s even a chance you’ll be removed from some of the Spaces you’re contributing to. This can be extremely costly for you over the long run since Spaces will be the primary driver of your growth on Quora.
Rather than publishing dozens of answers at a time, I suggest publishing no more than 3-5 answers per day. I also suggest publishing answers with at least a 2-hour window in between so that Quora knows you aren’t a bot.
#7 Don’t Over-promote Yourself
In every Quora answer, you’re free to recommend other books, products, and resources if it helps you answer the question better. When you talk about your own product or service, though, you should always be aware of the tone you’re using, and avoid linking to yourself more than once or twice per answer.
For example, in my answer above, I go far deeper into software sales (the topic of the question) than any of the other answers before linking to this post on my site where readers can learn more. I’m also careful to position my site as an optional resource rather than a panacea, which comes across as spammy.
Tip: If you’re not sure whether your answer comes across as spammy, it almost certainly does.
#8 Develop A Toolbox
After you’ve been answering questions in your industry for a while, you’ll notice that Quora users tend to ask many slight variations of the same questions. If those questions are relevant to your business, you’ll want to answer many of them, but doing so can be extremely time-consuming.
To cut down on the amount of time you need to invest, I suggest developing a document to help you answer those question variations quickly and easily. I call this document a Toolbox. Your Toolbox will house all of the resources and relevant information you can use when answering questions. Then, when it’s time to answer a new question, you just pop open the Toolbox, customize your answer, and go from there.
The great thing about a Toolbox is that it’s a living, breathing document that grows over time. As you learn more about your field and start to recognize patterns in the answers that perform well, you can customize your Toolbox to offer greater depth and variety in your answers. This makes them more valuable for everybody.
#9 Capitalize On Trends
Once you’ve got the fundamentals down, you’ll start to notice how trends across the wider Internet appear on Quora. Every once in a while, one of those trends will be relevant to your industry. By answering questions about it, you give yourself the opportunity to capture an enormous audience in a short amount of time.
For example, take Brooks Conkle’s answer to the question “Who is Jay Shetty?”, shown below.
In Closing
In summary, Quora is a powerful tool you can use to gain widespread exposure for your product or service. Getting started can be difficult, but once you’ve built up some momentum, started contributing to Spaces, and developed a Toolbox to help you along, you’ll start seeing your numbers go up.
Just like any marketing method, Quora is one that takes time to master. But if you’re committed and follow the strategies I’ve laid out above, you can see a great return from it in a short amount of time.
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Jordan Bishop
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