Quora is largely uncharted territory for many. You may get your daily email from them and see people asking questions that just make you roll your eyes. On the other hand, you’ve no doubt heard some people raving about how much it has helped them,
Well, this article by Daniel Ndukwu is perfect for anyone who is curious about the benefits and wants a guide on how to make it work for them. It is another installment in our “Great Articles You may have missed” series.
People have mixed feelings about Quora.
Some, like Leonard Kim and Nicolas Cole, swear by the platform.
Others, like every other person who has failed to see results, say the platform isn’t worth the effort. I was in the second category until I committed myself to a 30-day challenge to see if I could figure the damn thing out.
I’m happy to say my personal Quora challenge has turned into a consistent traffic stream for my website. I’ve gotten tens of thousands of page views, thousands of email subscribers, and built a thriving tribe that interacts with me daily.
So, how exactly did I do it? We’ll get into that in a second. First, I want to show you a bit of proof before I start explaining how you can do it too.
Here’s a screenshot of the traffic stats of just one of the posts I’ve promoted using Quora in recent months:
And here’s a screenshot of how the traffic jumped over 400% in just 30 days:
It’s an in-depth article about market research, and the best part is that it isn’t the most popular article I’ve promoted using Quora.
In this post, I’m going to show you how to generate a huge amount of traffic for your website from Quora – even if you’ve never written an answer before, don’t have a following, and don’t know where to start.
First, What is Quora, Really?
At its core, Quora is a knowledge sharing community. If you’ve ever tried to browse the website, you’ll know you can’t look at more than two pages without signing up for an account.
People from diverse backgrounds — students, professors, doctors, entrepreneurs and athletes — share their experiences, stories, and advice freely. People with no experience and no idea how to tackle life use the website to tap into the collective wisdom of the world.
Your wisdom.
If you’ve got an interesting story, a unique perspective or deep expertise, and won’t give up after your first answer, then you’ll do well on Quora. If you just want to drop a few links and disappear, then it may not be the right platform for you.
In August 2016, according to SimilarWeb, Quora received over 300 million visitors.
The number above doesn’t take into account the amount of people using the App *mindblown*.
Quora is a community where knowledge is appreciated. What are you if not a domain expert? What is your mission if not to help your tribe?
Alright, let me stop gushing and look at how to use Quora to get a consistent stream of traffic to your website.
How to Use Quora To Put Your Traffic on Steroids
You’re probably excited about jumping right in and getting the most out of Quora, but you’ve got to do some preliminary work. Remember how you did research and development before you launched your website?
The same process applies before you launch your Quora career. It won’t be nearly as difficult because you already have a niche. What you’re going to do here is set up your profile to reflect your area of expertise.
Set up a Killer Quora Profile
Your Quora profile is the place people decide whether or not they’re going to follow you. They check out some of your other answers, what you say you write about and your tagline. If they like what they see then they’ll reward you with a follow.
Nicolas Cole is a popular Quora user and has a profile that drives traffic to all his web properties. He has a killer headline that lets you know who he is while equipping him with heaps of social proof — a powerful cognitive bias.
His bio continues the seduction with a prominent picture and links to multiple landing pages, and lets you connect with him on social media. It works well because you can find him around the internet while encouraging trust.
What to put in your profile:
- Create a killer headline also known as a profile tagline that quickly explains what you do.
- Links to a few of your social profiles
- Written a bio that explains who you are in more detail than your profile photo.
- Linked to your website and multiple offers/optins
The next step is to follow topics relevant to your niche.
There are thousands of topics on Quora with more being added every day. Of course, there are popular ones like motivation, fitness and entrepreneurship that have millions of followers. There are also the deeply specialized topics with only a few dozen followers.
Choose the ones that make the most sense for you and follow the top writers there. Why do you want to do that?
- It’ll expose you to the type of writing that does well on Quora
- They may follow you back (this one is unlikely if you don’t already have many followers on Quora)
Write a relevant bio for each topic you know about. Quora will prompt you to write a short bio every time you write an answer for a new topic.
The last step is to follow some topics you have a genuine interest in, even though they may not be directly related to your niche.
For example, I’m a big motivation buff but run a website focused on marketing and business. On Quora, I get to share exploits that aren’t the focus of my website. And it still brings me a healthy amount of followers that wouldn’t have otherwise seen my writing.
After I implemented these simple tweaks, I started to get more followers and endorsements on my answers.
Alright, you’ve finished the preliminary work. Now it’s time to get some traction.
How to get Quora Traffic and Build your Brand
Even though Quora is different, it’s still a social network. That means interaction from the community is crucial if you want to get quora traffic to your website. It has an algorithm that gives preference to active writers that don’t get too many downvotes.
If you add joke answers, poor answers with nothing but a link, or answers that are way off topic, then people will downvote you into oblivion. With those downvotes, your overall standing on the platform will be diminished.
Getting downvoted often means that when you do decide to answer a question seriously, it’ll appear at the bottom of the heap.
A few weeks ago, I answered a question that asked, “what is the most important habit I can develop over the next five years if I only have 1-2 hours a day”? I felt like the best ability you can develop would be focus.
I also knew people would want to know how to focus and achieve a better quality of life — both for business and pleasure. Anticipating that, I added a link to a useful article on my website that goes deep into flow state.
The answer blew up with tens of thousands of views in just a few hours. The way I structured the answer funneled a good bit of that traffic to my page.
But I had to find the right question first.
Four Things to Look for in Good Questions
There are a few stats you can use to determine whether the question will bring more visitors to your website. If you can tick the boxes on all of them, you’re in a good position to get Quora traffic.
The more views you get, the higher the likelihood of sending Quora traffic back to your website.
1. Number of people following the question
This one is tricky. The number of people following a question is an important metric. As soon as you answer a question, followers will receive an email notification and your answer will show in their feed.
If only two people are following a question, then it may not be the best one to answer. On the flip side, if two thousand people are following a question, it may also be futile to answer.
Let me explain.
A question with a lot of followers has the tendency to amass a lot of answers. Just like you, some people are looking for ways to get a lot of views and build authority in their niche. Some are in it for the fun. No matter what group it is, everyone wants a lot of views and upvotes.
This would be a difficult question to answer.
Not because you couldn’t contribute something meaningful, but because there’s already a lot of competition with over 100+ answers. Many of the people who’ve answered this question are already top writers on Quora.
A better question to answer would be something like this:
There are a few people already following and only a few answers are fighting for attention.
Look for questions with 50-100 followers and less than 10 answers. When I became deliberate about the type of questions I answered, my answer views shot up.
2. Age of the Question
This is something most people overlook. How long has the question been waiting for an answer or how long has it been getting answered by others?
You can check by navigating to the right-hand side of your screen where the question stats are displayed.
This is an example of a question you can jump on because it’s not too old (or wasn’t when this article was originally published) and has a decent number of views.
The younger the question, the better your chances of sitting at the top of the heap when you give a good answer.
3. Total views and distribution of total views
The last point I want to talk about when selecting the right questions are the total views. This is an early indication of how popular a question is. When viewing a question that hasn’t gotten any answers, Quora will show you how many people viewed the question in the last day or so.
If you see over a thousand people have viewed the question then it’s a good indication that people find it interesting3.
That aside, total views after a few people have answered the question is still an important metric to look at. If a question has one thousand total views after five answers then people may not find it interesting.
If, on the other hand, there are tens of thousands of views then there could be a lot of potential there.
This question, for example, has potential:
They liked the answer and quickly upvoted it, which generated the majority of views on the answer. Roughly 28k out of 31k. The next most popular answer had fewer than 3k views and the other two didn’t cross one thousand.
Might not be such a good question to answer after all.
Selecting questions that’ll drive a consistent stream of traffic back to your website, is a multi-pronged approach. It’s not difficult but it does require diligence.
4. The Last Piece of the Puzzle for Driving Quora Traffic
The last piece of the Quora puzzle shouldn’t be a surprise to you. You’re a website owner, so you already do a lot of it. Web readers are different from people reading offline.
They scan, they have short attention spans and abandon pages ruthlessly.
Your writing has to be engaging and properly formatted to even stand a chance. On Quora, I’ve noticed two forms of writing that do well.
- Anecdotes – the more personal the better.
- Lists – Yes, they still work.
Some of my most popular answers and the most popular answers of many top writers, fall under these two categories. That coupled with good formatting will help you climb the ranks and become one of the top writers on Quora.
Conclusion
If you’re struggling to get your website off the ground, it’s important to adapt a quick win and slow build strategy simultaneously. SEO doesn’t yield much return for the first three to six months and you won’t be recognized as an authority for at least that long.
With platforms like Quora, you get to tap into their large community to grow your digital presence —fast. You grow your tribe and Quora gets some amazing answers as well. It’s a win-win situation.
To get started, just follow the simple steps outlined in this post and you’ll be in great shape. Let me know your experiences with, or continued objections to Quora, in the comments.
Daniel Ndukwu
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