Quora is one of the most valuable social media platforms that does not seem to get the credit it deserves. Though it has been around for a while, Quora and hasn’t passed as a top marketing tool up until now.

If you are wondering what Quora is, and how it can be used to drive the traffic of potential customers to your course then you are at the right place. Quora marketing is yet to be fully utilized like say Facebook and Twitter marketing.

Quora is a hot topic for debate today amongst marketers today.

What is Quora

 

Quora is a social network that was created to foster sharing of knowledge. Coming in at rank 46 amongst all sites in the United States, only 45 sites currently get more traffic than Quora. This stat alone is something to behold.

As defined by their Quora for Business page, the company’s mission is to grow the world’s knowledge through sharing.

The Quora website allows users to ask and answer questions. It is a community-fueled question and answer platform that can be optimized for brand awareness, to drive traffic and also establish thought leadership.

The questions range from hypothetical, to academic and also harbours a voting system just like Reddit. When answering a question this is what it looks like.

 

The Quora community has a regular user base and those who come in occasionally for self-promo. All in all, we will teach you ways on how to take advantage of this tool without having to spend an eternity online looking for credits.

Quora has a very large audience meaning that is recognized by most internet users but somehow manages to avoid the radar of online marketers. With that said, Quora is certainly an excellent marketing tool that offers an opportunity to connect with a massive audience.

Benefits of Quora Marketing

Like other social media platforms, selling should not be the number one reason for marketing on Quora. Quora was created for sharing knowledge and it’s best you join the community in order to help others.

By answering questions, you gain insights when engaging your followers. The enlightenment will help you repurpose your content, target your audience better while you ask and answer questions.

Indulging in the community will make you more aware of the bewildering issues that are distressing to your potential customers. As a marketer, this information could be crucial in forging the direction of future content.

By answering questions in your niche, you demonstrate expertise in the space and simultaneously improve your brand image. The most important use for Quora, however, is to influence people’s thinking and align that with your product niche.

How to Use Quora Marketing for Your Brand

Create a Useful Profile

As with any social media platform, it is essential that you give your profile some thought. On Quora, your profile will be able to tell people who you are, what professional space you are in and also give them an opportunity to connect with you through Twitter, Linked In or your blog.

To optimize your profile consider doing the following:

Setting Up Your Bio

To make the most of your bio space you can make it topic specific. Quora allows you to change your bio depending on the question you are answering.

To do this, proceed to the “Edit Credential” option.

 

From the pop-up, select the credentials that you want to alter and click edit. Another box will pop-up again where you will be permitted to change your bio and save. You have the option of setting this as your default for all questions.

 

Add Links to Your Description

The description box is a good place to elaborate expertise in your forte but it’s even a better place to drive more clicks to your website. Quora allows you to include hyperlinks and you can use this to generate some SEO value.

Use this space sparingly though, you want to place relevant and useful links such as your blog and or social media accounts.

Optimize Your Headline

Your headline gives you an opportunity to be found under a particulars industry keywords and it’s important that it is optimized.

In the image below, for instance, Bob Ruffolo has creatively used his headline to incorporate their brand name as well as keywords such as inbound marketing agency.

 

Just remember to keep it short, as Quora will limit this to 50 characters.

Create Your Brand as an Independent Topic

If you are Nikon or any other company out there that sells a service or product, make sure to create a topic for your brand. This encourages people to ask and answer questions about your product or service.

Here is an example from Nikon.

 

Find Relevant Questions

Once your profile is properly optimized it’s time to contribute to the community.

Where do you find questions to answer?

Well, there are millions of questions on Quora and you only need to answer the right ones. You do not want to spend time answering irrelevant questions. Find a question that will raise your brand awareness once you receive upvotes.

If you are to answer questions about ‘Social Media Marketing’ search for the item on the query bar and select the topic from the drop-down list.

 

While you are on the topics feed, the best place to start is the Topics FAQS. Don’t be discouraged to see that hundreds or even thousands of people have answered a question. It means merely that many people are interested in the question, and that’s a good thing.

With the large audience, if your answer does provide additional value, chances are these people will upvote your answer and rank it higher on the feed.

Another sure way of finding a relevant question is by searching a keyword into the query box. Once you are done, filter the results to questions asked within the last one month.

Look For Questions with Over 1000 Views

After identifying a particular topic’s FAQs go for questions that have more than 1000 views and were posted within the last one week. The idea is to latch onto a question while it’s still hot. This will inadvertently increase the exposure for your answer.

The stats for the questions can be found on the right sidebar right under the ‘Question Stats.’

It’s unfortunate that Quora does not sort questions by views meaning that you’ll have to search manually for the most viewed questions, but it’s very worth it.

Turn On Your Notifications

This is a simple yet powerful technique to increase your brand awareness on Quora. This will enable you to receive notifications for questions that you follow.

These will be from questions that are in your area of expertise and by providing answers to the questions, you will be establishing yourself as a thought leader.

How to Answer Quora Questions

So you have found a question and answered it perfectly. It’s the most thought out answer in the whole thread and yet you are not getting the upvotes you deserve. What do you do about this?

Once you have found the questions that you want to answer the fastest way to gather momentum is by using content that you already have. Simply put, find a way to pull content from your own or any relevant blog.

Do not use the entire blog, however, feed your viewers with bits and pieces, and include a link to the full piece on your site.

In addition to linking your blog, you can link your sources as footnotes. Quora allows you to add links as footnotes and this adds more credibility to your answer. People often write a lot of content that could easily pass as novels but won’t look as legit as your answer with sources included.

Another surefire way of getting upvotes is by including images in your answer. If you can back up your answer with a graph, chart or meme do it as it attracts more attention to your answer.

Become a thought leader in your niche. If viewers find that you are very knowledgeable in a certain subject, they will follow.

Requested Answers

If you are active in your space and are a recognized thought leader, you may eventually find people asking you to answer specific questions. This is great as it means that people are finally beginning to trust your proficiency in the subject. It’s up to you to leverage this and turn them into traffic for your blog.

Connect With Other Quora Users

Like any other social media platform, it’s essential that you connect with people with like-minded interests. To find people to connect to on Quora:

1. Find top answer and followers of topics that you are interested in.
2. Create insightful content and contribute to boards to topics in your niche.
3. Develop a habit of sharing content valuable information on and off Quora to develop a strong following.

Monitor Your Quora Analytics

As with any other marketing strategy you want to review your analytics in order to gauge its effectiveness and identify any areas of improvement if need be.

Quora won’t offer very deep analytics but it gives you the option of examining the results of your questions, answers, posts or all of them combined filtered according to date. With that information at your fingertips, you will be able to see what questions or answers attracted the most views.

You can then see what areas need optimization.

 

Getting Featured

Well, sometimes wonderful things happen to wonderful people. If it happens, that Quora features one of your answers in their newsletter you will notice a surge in viewers in that specific question. This, in turn, gives your question and account exposure.

 

While this may not directly result in a ton of upvotes or followers, it may spike an outpouring of viewers in all your content going forward. Getting featured in the newsletter may not be a shortcut to world fame but will give you a much-needed boost if you are a beginner.

Growing Your Account

In Quora, the more followers you have the more your question and answers will receive recognition and the more your Quora Marketing will be impactful. Quora is one the hardest to grow social media platforms, but there are a few tricks you can use to increase your numbers.

1. Connect to Facebook: connect to Facebook in order to get a following from friends and colleagues. While they may not be your target audience, they may be crucial in giving you that upvote due to the personal connection.
2. Be active in one community: as aforementioned, establishing yourself as a thought leader in a certain space is very important. Answering questions from a variety of niches institutes yourself as a master of all trades and a master of none. Rather, it’s good that you position yourself in one niche and you will inadvertently get a following from majority of people in that forte.
3. Engage with people: social media is partly anchored on the ‘I scratch your back, you scratch mine’ phenomenon. Follow people that you are interested in, upvote good answers and you will unintentionally get them yourself.
4. Be active: while it’s easy to log in once in a week and answer a few questions here and there, that’s not going to cut it. You will realize slow growth. The reliable way of growing your account is by scanning through interesting niches and answering questions every now and then. Whether you opt to promote your content or not it doesn’t matter, just get your name out there.

Source Ideas on Quora

While this tip may or may not work for everyone, it has worked wonders for a few of my colleagues and we thought we’d toss it here. This involved using Quora as a source of content. The strategy involves asking a question on Quora and crowdsourcing the content in order to create a post on your blog.

Create a Quora Blog

What are Quora blogs?

Quora gives you the ability to create a blog where your followers can monitor you and further allows you to establish yourself as an expert in that niche. If you use the Quora blog, we recommend that you maintain its purity by writing about topics of a particular niche rather than mixing things up.

This platform can as well be used to introduce your WordPress blog and increase your online reach to your Quora followers.

Why should you create a Quora blog?

The primary reason behind a Quora blog is to eliminate the need to find an audience that is interested in your content. Your Quora audience is definitely interested in your topics so it’s just a two-way traffic where you give them what they need and you get traffic in return.

Once you have your WordPress blog setup, engaging your Quora followers is just as simple as copy-pasting snippets of your latest blog posts to your Quora blog. Placing a “read more” link onto this will direct your viewers to your main website after which you can channel them to your paid products.

Because Quora has excellent Google credits, your blog will also gain from the SEO.

How often should you post on your Quora blog?

Like your WordPress blog, consistency is key. If you can update your Quora blog weekly, it will go a long way into amassing a steadfast following from people who check in weekly for new content.

On the classic quantity vs. quality debate, it is essential that you do not compromise on either. If you intend to grow your business through Quora, make time to give your audience quality content adequately.

Bonus: Things to Keep In Mind

Quora is very strict and can ban your account for very flimsy reasons such as answering an answer incorrectly. There are some practices however that emerge when using Quora that will promote your brand without necessarily flouting their terms and conditions.

To avoid such situations:

Avoid Being Spammy

It goes without saying, but if your answers are all about redirecting viewers to an external website you will get banned if you do this within a short time span.

Don’t Generate Fake Upvotes

People can come together and agree to upvote any answers posted by a friend. While this may work for a week or two, the Quora algorithm has a way of tracking these and if detected, all the accounts will be banned.

Be Careful When Copy Pasting Answers

Do not copy paste answers directly from previous questions. If you have to reuse your answers, you have to do some ‘doctoring’ so that they are not detected as spam.

Recap

To sum it all up, your Quora account is an avenue that gives you lots of opportunities for you to grow your business. In order to translate your Quora followers into sales, however, you need to:

• Create a great profile; with a well-crafted profile, anyone interested to learn from you will be able to reach you via your website or your social media profiles.
• Give your answers an extra ‘oomph’; in order to get upvotes on your answers, you need to go the extra mile. You can do this by inserting a graph to accompany the numerical figures in your answer or you can reference your answer to reliable sources to enhance its credibility.
• Connect with your Quora followers; like Facebook and Twitter, it’s important that you cultivate a natural connection between you and your viewers.
• Monitor your Quora Analytics; though it won’t give you an in-depth analysis, Quora metrics are a great perspective for you to assess your marketing strategy and see its impact.
• Getting featured; getting featured in the Quora newsletter is stepping stone to better Google rankings. If it does happen, it’s a wonderful opportunity to get your name out there.
• Growing your account, increasing your followers will obviously come with increased upvotes. In order to achieve this you need to connect Facebook and other social media platforms, choose a niche, and be active in it, and engage your followers.
• Source ideas on Quora; Quora is a great platform to draw ideas from your target audience. Find what information appeals to them and structure your content to suit your followers.
• Create a Quora blog; A Quora blog like any other blog allows you to stamp your authority as a thought Through the blog, viewers will be able to keep up with you and direct any questions towards you whenever necessary.

Over to You

Is Quora something you’ve considered for your marketing strategy?

Which of the above methods do you think might be helpful for you and your business?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic and any strategies or tips you’ve come across that have been helpful. Feel free to drop any thoughts in the comments below.