Quora is an excellent platform for displaying your knowledge, building your personal brand, and ultimately earning traffic back to your website.
Launched in 2009, Quora has 190 million monthly users and dominates the question and answer space. (Sorry Yahoo Answers.)
Perhaps this is why Quora answers appear so often on the first page of Google:
Whether you’re a business owner, a content creator, or simply trying to grow a blog, Quora is an enticing opportunity, if leveraged correctly.
Based on my experience over the past several months, I’ll be sharing three specific tips to help you experience growth on Quora as well.
Although I’ve had a Quora profile for over a year, it has only been within the past few months that I’ve been implementing these tactics. Within that time, I went from 24,000 answer views a month to nearly 150,000.
Check out my growth over the past three months:
There are a couple simple steps for growing quickly, so let’s get right into them so that you can also start taking action.
Format Correctly
As you may know from writing on your own blog, formatting is almost as important as the writing itself. This principle is true for Quora as well.
If you’re trying to earn views and upvotes, focus on crafting answers that are not only useful/entertaining to the reader but are also appealing in the way that you format them.
Use a lot of breaks and very short paragraphs (I generally only include a sentence per paragraph). Include at least one image, and leverage bold/italics along with bullets and numbering.
If you check out the answers that perform well, you’ll notice that they offer a whole lot of value and they’re extremely easy to read.
This answer received 65 upvotes and over 7,000 views. Look how simply it’s formatted. Not only is it a quality answer but it’s also easy to skim through and digest:
Don’t simply write a wall of text. Perhaps you can get away with doing so if you’re telling a story. But if you’re writing an answer for informational purposes, break it up into smaller chunks of text that are easier to read.
Publish Everyday
Nearly three months ago, I made a goal to publish at least one answer a day on Quora. After this period of experimentation, I can’t recommend this strategy enough.
Yesterday was the first day I didn’t write an answer, but I digress…
As you can tell from the stats above, it helps to put out content consistently.
Just as with any social network, Quora rewards those who consistently come back and engage.Click To Tweet Read answers, upvote the quality content, and make writing your number one priority. By doing so, your efforts compound over time, impacting how quickly you can grow your views, earn more upvotes, and get more followers.As you get more views, upvotes, and followers, you earn even more views, upvotes, and follows. In a sense, your continuous efforts feed into themselves, similar to the compounding effect of interest in your bank account. Put in the work now, and reap the benefits later.
Make the commitment to publish every morning as you eat breakfast or perhaps at night before you go to bed. If you can develop a habit of publishing and you’re willing to share good content, you’ll be rewarded for your efforts.
Save (the Right) Answers for Later
This advice is particularly important for saving you time and earning you a lot more views. First off, find the categories in which you intend to write. These are the topics that you have knowledge about and from which you want to build a following.
I like to answer digital marketing questions about content marketing and social media marketing. I also often answer life advice and productivity questions because part of the reason I write on Quora is to enhance my writing skills.
Once you find a couple categories, it’s time to sift through all the questions within the feed. Start clicking on all the questions that you would like to answer. Since they open in a new tab, you can open up a lot of answers at once.
Now, go back through these answers one by one. What you’re looking for is a high follower-to-answer rate. These questions are low-hanging fruit, a perfect opportunity to get a lot of views on your answers.
Although this particular question has a lot of answers, it has thousands of followers. These users will receive a notification when you or anyone else writes an answer to this question:
All you have to do is save this question, as well as others you find, in order to build out a library of questions for later.
In the future when you log in, you won’t be forced to sift through Quora looking for good questions to answer. This will be a major timesaver indeed.
Massive Growth on Quora in 3 Steps
To recap:
- format quality content to make it easy to internalize
- publish answers every single day
- devote time to saving questions that have the greatest potential for views
Using these three simple tactics, you should have no problem building a highly viewed account on Quora and ultimately referring more traffic to your website.
Not only do you have the opportunity to establish yourself as a thought leader in a particular space, but you have the chance to connect with a lot of like-minded individuals that are experts in their respective fields.
This is not to mention everything you’ll learn by reading others’ answers, and you’re sure to pick up better writing skills with the daily practice.
Bonus: People love stories. Whether you write about informational topics, such as B2B categories, or you write about motivation and life advice, try to leverage storytelling on Quora.
As you will probably notice, nearly all viral answers are stories and experiences, rather than how-tos and informational posts. If you want a chance at going viral, try storytelling out for yourself and see what the reaction is.
Henry Foster
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Awesome post! I love using Quora, reminds me of the good ol’ Yahoo answers days.
glani kali would love you to read ..Increase Traffic On Your Site Using This Quora Trick
Hi Glani,
Yes, but Quora is smarter than Yahoo! who deleted experts even if they were honest about any conflicts of interest they might have.
But I find it very challenging to get a question to go through on Quora. I believe they are aware of that issue as they have a program to pay influencers for asking questions.
I’ve considered trying it again, but the times I have spent an hour trying to get just one question to go live there were so painful I still have a negative feeling about even attempting to do that again.
Gail Gardner would love you to read ..The Relevance of Storytelling in Brand Marketing [Infographic]
Quora sure is a great way to build links especially that it’s domain authority is high. Thanks for sharing this one! Keep up the great work.
Thank you for these great tips!
I’ve been writing in Quora for almost a year now and I’m always stuck at 15 to 30k views per month. At first I thought since it’s only been a year, my account is still young, I would eventually get that 100k mark, but I didn’t. I’ll definitely try out these tips and see the results for myself next month.
Cheers!
Lucas
Hi Henry,
A very useful post. It will help me to remove my inhibition to take active part in Quora.
Now onward I will make it a point to post there religiously with a motto to bring traffic to my Physics Blog.
Thank you.- Anupam
ANUPAM MAJUMDAR would love you to read ..How Friction helps us in walking?-explanation with free body diagram
Thanks for these post.
I will try to make a commitment to publish every morning as you eat breakfast or perhaps at night before you go to bed. Good one
My blog is http://www.youmustgethealthy.com
Love Quora! Personally, my niche doesn’t have much of an oppurtunity on Quora. But I still have a couple posts on there that help drive some traffic to my website. And while the traffic is minimal, it is high quality!
Tennis Dave would love you to read ..Best Tennis Balls for Tennis Ball Machine
This is a great writeup. However, from your experience, between quora and pinterest, which do you consider more helpful in driving traffic to one’s blog?
Patrick Wilbur would love you to read ..13 Natural Home Remedies For Fast Arthritis and Joint Pain Relief
Hi Patrick, glad you enjoyed the article. It would most likely depend on your niche. For example, if I had a cooking/homelife website, I would go all in on Pinterest and Instagram.
On the other hand, if information and written content is king in my industry, I would go with Quora. Furthermore, I’m partial to Quora simply because I have used it a lot whereas I have no experience using Pinterest other than reading about it.
Also, a major part of the success of your Quora growth, as I added as a bonus above, is storytelling. If you excel at crafting stories for your audience, I would give it a shot.
You’ll probably find this article helpful: https://ignitemycompany.com/how-storytelling-increases-engagement-perfect-example-quora/
Brilliant article! Do you primarily use Quora to showcase your authority to clients, or does it directly lead to inbound requests for your expertise on their projects? Clearly, I haven’t been giving this community its due.
James Lang would love you to read ..Content Writing Translates Passion into a Message
Hi James, thanks for the kind words, I appreciate it.
Great question, and I have to answer in a vague way so I apologize.
It could be both, and here’s why:
For myself, Quora is a platform that I want to “hack” to show off my skills as a marketer. That means I jump in, figure out what the platform “feeds” off of (how the community responds to content) and I try to answer that demand so that I can grow quickly.
Therefore, I use it less to generate leads than I do for experimenting and figuring out online growth strategies. Then I can go to a client and say, “Check out how I grew this x% in x months. I can help do the same for you.”
On the other hand, Quora drives traffic to your site if you offer value and occasionally link back (plus the info in your bio of course). This means that there are a whole lot of Quorans who are not only building their brand by posting valuable content, but they are also hinting at a call-to-action.
“Checkout this article, it’s helpful”, “Sign up for the beta version”, “Shoot me an email”, etc.
In conclusion, I would say that going after both (authority and traffic/leads) is the best way to tackle Quora.
Hope this was helpful!