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How to Use Quora to Drive Tons of Traffic to Your Blog (The Ultimate Guide)

Last modified on 16th November, 2018

Blog traffic…

The most elusive thing every new blogger could ever have.

You tried promoting your posts on the social media but when you stop sharing, the traffic stops too.

Search engines take too long to rank your posts.

Perhaps guest blogging is the answer. So you write several guest posts only to get a trickle of visitors.

Sounds familiar?

You wonder if there’s a faster way to get traffic than the search engine or without the need to pitch your ideas like guest blogging. You want the traffic to continue to flow even after you stop writing.

Well, good news, there is a better way!

This is where Quora comes in.

 

What Is Quora

If you don’t know, Quora is a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users.

Think Yahoo Answers but better and the answers are actually helpful.

When it was started, Quora goal was to create a platform where community members can provide a high-quality response in order to build their own reputations as experts.

From the start, Quora was tremendously successful in attracting people who were at the top of their fields. Early contributors to the site included Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

Here are a few interesting facts about Quora and Quora traffic stats:

• Founded in 2009 by former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo.
• As of June 2017, Quora has 200 million monthly unique visitors.
• According to Alexa, Quora is the 92ths most popular website in the world and 44th in the United States. (last updated July 18, 2018)
• A large portion of Quora’s user base (20.4%) is from India. The majority, 36.7%  is from the US.
• The most followed Quoran is Balaji Viswanathan with over 480,000 followers
• Ashton Kutcher and even Barack Obama have taken their turn answering questions on Quora.

 

 

The Benefits of Quora

There are a few tangible benefits you can gain by participating in Quora Q&A such as

• Establish your position as an authority in your niche
• Build your personal brand
• Grow your email list faster and with more targeted subscribers.
• Drive targeted long-term traffic to your blog – your popular posts will continue to drive traffic for months even years after being posted.
• If you write an excellent answer, the Quora staff may pick it up and have your posts syndicated to major publications including Time and Inc. Magazine.
• It can be an effective place for content marketing.

However, those things can only happen if you have an effective Quora strategy to get your answer viewed, read and upvoted like the top writers.

Using Quora for Social Media Marketing

To use Quora for marketing your business or blog more effectively, you need to determine what’s goal.

Do you want to build a personal brand, use Quora to drive traffic to your blog, get leads to your freelance business, build a huge online community, help other people by sharing your knowledge?

While getting tons of views to your answers is great, there are other benefits to using Quora for marketing your blog and business.

If you share valuable tips and real insights to your Quora readers, you’ll reap the rewards by building trust, authority and credibility. It’s the best way to promote yourself and your business without selling out.

How to Use Quora to Drive Traffic

To use Quora to drive traffic to your blog and build trust as a Quora contributor you need to:

1. Optimizing your profile
2. Finding popular questions to answer
3. Writing your answer with authority and proper formatting

We’ll look at each of these in turn.

How to use Quora effectively?

Start by replicating what other popular Quora users have accomplished. While it won’t be easy, it’ll be worth the effort.

Using Quora for SEO won’t take you far though because any links placed within your answers are no-follow links. This means you won’t get any SEO benefits for using relevant anchor text or getting backlinks from Quora.

As you start answering more questions, you’ll start receiving more notifications of questions that other Quora users have asked you to answer.

You can simply pass on the questions if you don’t want to answer them. However, those who asked you may turn to followers or upvote your answer if you can write the best answer for them.

When people check your profile to learn more about you make sure it’s optimized to showcase the best of what you have to offer.

Make Your Quora Profile Stand Out

To use Quora to drive traffic and get targeted leads, you’ll need to optimize your profile by adding relevant attributes based on your niche.

It’s your chance to stand out, demonstrate your knowledge and expertise and help you get traction from early on.

To edit your profile, click on your profile picture on the top right, then go to Profile. On the right-hand side, click the Edit link next to the Credential & Highlights.

You’ll have an option to add several credentials in the following areas:

• Employment
• Education
• Location
• Topic
• Language

Add all the necessary info about you.

You can then select one of your credentials and set it as the default as shown below.

Your default credential also serves as a tagline which is shown at the top of every answer.

This tagline should tell your audience that you’re qualified to answer those questions. So it’s important to make it enlightening and attention-grabbing.

One popular format is to give a list of descriptive roles separated by a “pipe” character.

For example, for my default profile I use:

Blogger at Sabahan.com | Internet Marketer | Programmer

You can follow me on Quora if you want.

Any links you place in that field won’t be clickable so you may want to include them in the Profile Summary.

The Profile Summary is the chance for you to stand out. You can:

• Tell a story of your personal or professional experience
• Ask the readers to follow your social media accounts
• Ask the readers to visit your blog,
• Entice people to sign-up for a lead magnet
• Link to your popular and most useful Quora answers
• Structure your profile summary to make it scannable.
• Include social proof – such as major publications where your work was published if any.

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Copy how the top writers write their bios and adapt them to your own needs.

In addition to having a default credential, you can also set specific credentials for the different topics you write about. This serves as a custom bio highlighting your expertise for that topic.

For example, for the Blogging topic, instead of showing my default tagline, I use “I Blog at Sabahan since 2006”

To customize your topic credentials, click the three dots at the bottom right of your answer, then click Edit Credential.

Provide In-Depth Content On Your Blog

People come to Quora to find an answer to their question and they are actively looking for new ideas to try.

Your own blog is the best place for you to find content to link to in your Quora answers. So you need to bring your best blog posts to their attention.

Choose a blog post to use as your answer. Strategically place related links pointing back to that post or specific section in the post.

No, you don’t have to link to your blog posts each time you answer a question.

What you’d want to do is pick a post with multiple examples or strategies that are not included in the Quora answer. This gives the reader a reason to click on the link.

Don’t copy the whole post and present it as an answer on Quora. There’s a chance that Google will penalize you for duplicate content if you do that too often. And be sure to disclose your authorship when you link to the post.

Having written a blog post, article or opinion piece on the subject position you as having some form of authority. People will pay attention to your answer more.

 

 

Find Popular Questions in Your Topics

Here’s another secret sauce you can use. Instead of answering every question in your topic, try to answer popular questions or those that are gaining traction.

Why?

Because popular questions help you get more views to your answers quicker.

There’s something for everyone doesn’t matter what niche you are in. Here are the 50 most followed topics on Quora at the moment.

On Quora, lifestyle-related questions are more likely to get upvotes and comments.

While those questions may get you more views, if they’re not related to your blog niche or business, you’ll likely get fewer click-throughs to your blog or drive lower quality leads.

How to Find Questions With the Most Views & Followers

To find a question with the most views and followers, start by searching for a topic in your niche.

Use short phrases and pay attention to Quora autosuggest topic names. Don’t use long sentences because they are not good for getting relevant topics you want.

For example when you do a search for “blogging”, Quora will suggest related topics like “Blogging Platforms, “Blogging Advice”, “Guest Blogging” and so on.

The Blogging topic has 775.5k followers which is a clear indication of its popularity.

You can also browse the Related Topics section and gauge their popularity by the number of followers they have. These would be great topics for you to target.

Once you found a popular topic, drill down until you find a popular question.

You may be thinking the most popular questions have already received too many answers and you can’t possibly compete with them. But remember, most popular questions also have a ton of followers so when you post an answer, those followers will be notified that there’s a new answer.

So, how do you know if a question is popular?

The Question Stats reveal how popular the question is.

Once you’ve found a question with lots of followers and views, you can start answering it right away.

Ideally, the question should be asked recently and already being followed by at least 500 people. However, don’t limit yourself, you can respond to any question with a low number of followers as long as it’s getting lots of views.

It’s even better if the question has only a few answers but a lot of followers as you will be able to stand out easier and more people will see your answer.

Now, instead of searching and then writing an answer each time, you can mark the question to Answer Later. You can search all the popular questions and build a database of questions you want to answer.

Later you can spend time dedicated for writing the actual answers. That way, you’ll work more efficiently as you’ll be focusing on doing one task at a time.

Many of the followers will be notified as soon as your answer is posted so you will start getting views almost immediately.

Quora places a strong emphasis on promoting new answers similar to how google likes fresh content.  So your answers may get an instant boost in view.

Questions That Get At Least 1000 Views After a Week

A question that’s at least a week old is gaining traction if it’s starting to accumulate 1000 views or more. There’s a chance that the question will continue to get more views.

Quora doesn’t indicate when a question was first asked but they do include the date when it was last asked in the Question Stats. When a newer question is merged with an older one, the last asked will show the date of the newer question.

Unfortunately, you can’t sort your feed by date or view count so you will have to dig around looking for such questions on your own.

Find Questions That Appear On Google Search

Some Quora questions also appear on the first page of Google search results bringing in tons of organic traffic.

For example, the long tail keyword (phrases that contain 3 or more word)  “drive traffic to blog using quora” appears second on the search result page. These questions are good candidates to target if you can find them.

Find Questions Answered By Most Viewed Writers

Another way to find popular questions is by finding questions that were answered by the most viewed writers on the topic.

While not all of the questions are popular, you may discover a few that have contributed to the popularity of the writer.

You can also follow these people. Your home feed will contain an assortment of questions answered by the people you follow. Quora will also notify you of any questions they’ve answered.

You will notice that some of the most viewed writers are no longer active but their answers still get significant views. That can happen if your answer continues to be relevant long after it’s first created.

Find Questions From the Topic FAQs

Some topics have an FAQ section listing the top questions being asked or most relevant ones to the topic.

The Topic FAQ contains the most common and frequently asked question in the topic’s subject area from people learning about the subject. The questions aren’t overly specific for the topic.

You can start finding popular questions from the FAQ list and share your take on them. Just make sure to be helpful and avoid writing just another me-too answer.

Some of the questions may not have good answers (or any answers) at the time they are added to the FAQ. So this is your chance to give good guidance and demonstrate your knowledge of the subject.

Keep an Eye on A2A (Asked to Answer) Questions

Ask to Answer or A2A is when a user request or ask someone to answer a question on Quora.

As you start answering more questions, you’ll start receiving more notifications of A2A questions that other Quorans have asked you to answer.

Check the Question Stats and take note of the view count.

You’d want to answer questions with fewer existing answers (ideally less than 5) but are gaining traction by getting lots of views (500 or more) in a matter of hours.

Because there are only a few answers, there’ll be less competition which means you should be able to stand out easily by writing the best answer.

The person who created the A2A may upvote you and turn into a follower if your answer is really helpful to them.

 

 

How to Write the Perfect Quora Answer

Now that you’ve located relevant and popular questions you want to answer, here’s what you need to do to craft the perfect Quora answer.

Make Your Answer Scannable

No one likes to be confronted with a massive wall of text when trying to find answers to their question.

People don’t read your answer word-by-word, they scan because it’s more efficient and help them find information faster.

So it’s important to break your answer into smaller, easily digestible chunks.

To create scannable answers, make sure to incorporate the followings:

• • Subheading – organize your answer into different sections to help the reader navigate your content. Drive curiosity by using descriptive headings.
  • Short paragraphs  – break up large blocks of text with short paragraphs to improve readability.
  • Bullet points and numbered lists – create itemized lists to make the content scannable.
  • Bold, italics and underline – draw the reader’s attention by bolding, italicizing or underlining important keywords. But use them sparingly.

• AVOID USING BLOCK CAPITALS.

Tell a Story

People love reading stories.

In fact, it has been proven that when we hear a story, our brain activates the same areas as if we were experiencing the events of the story ourselves.

Depending on your niche, you can use personal stories of struggle, tragedy, perseverance to pull people in and inspire them

Even when writing about a technical topic, you can turn some of your points into a story to make your answer more engaging and relatable.

Add Images or Videos

Use images to make your answer stand out more. As people scroll down the thread, using images is a powerful way to grab their attention and ‘interrupt’ their scrolling.

If you are talking about an event, add a related image, a public domain celeb photo for entertainment topic perhaps  to get people’s attention

Don’t just use any image, use relevant photos, infographics, charts etc. to support your ideas and illustrate your points.

There’s a study which shows people like reading content with images. Make sure to use only high-quality images and optimize them so that they load quickly too.

If you don’t have personal images, you can use any of the free stock photo sites to find suitable ones to use in your answers. Quora uses the first picture in your post as the preview so make that one counts.

Adding a related YouTube video can also help you to stand out.

Be Different

Have you noticed how some answers tend to be repetitive?

For example, the answers to the question how to make money online always involve creating a blog, promoting affiliate offers, selling your own products or services and so on.

As the readers scan your text trying to extract useful information, try to make them think that yours is different. With new information to learn, or interesting story to enjoy they’ll less likely skip your answer.

If you can’t come up with a better answer, try to be different.

So back to the how to make money online example, you answer could involve unconventional or strange ways people can do to earn money such as selling your hair, be a virtual jury, or even rent a friend!

When the followers are notified of a new answer, they will receive a preview of your answer.  So ensure that your intro is intriguing enough to encourage click-through.

Provide Hint There’s More

If your objective is to drive traffic to your blog, try to offer the gist of the subject in your answer.

It should provide enough value to get views and upvotes, but not so much people think there’s nothing else to learn.

Include a call to action in your answer to encourage people to take the next step, that is to click on your link.

How Long Your Answer Should Be?

As long as it needs to be.

Although, you should avoid writing a very short answer (50 – 100 words) as it adds little to no value to the conversation unless the question can be answered satisfactorily with a short answer.

I often write 500 words or longer to ensure I provide much-added value.

Additional Benefits of Writing Good Quora Answers

Keep in mind that you’re considered as an expert so having an opinion matters.

However, when coming up with a statement, make sure to back them up with data or include links from the sources. Avoid writing self-promotional answers as it will hurt your credibility.

If you know other bloggers who’ve written a comprehensive post about the question, don’t hesitate to link to them in your answer. This way, you’re perceived as being genuinely helpful.

An additional benefit of writing good answers is having the chance of getting featured in Quora Digest.

Quora Digest is an email sent by Quora daily or weekly which contains a list of answers which Quora thinks you might like to see.

The answers are a mix of programmatically generated and hand-picked from globally popular topics. It is sent out to 1000+ users and sometimes 3+ million Quora users.

As you can imagine, this could drive even more views to your answers.

Also if your answer goes viral, more people will check out your profile. As I mentioned earlier, having an optimal profile is a must as you don’t want this traffic to go to waste.

How to Get More Views and Upvotes

If your answer got upvoted by other Quora’s user, it will rise to the top of that thread.

The higher your answer in the thread, the more view you will get. The more view you get, the higher the chance to get upvotes.

Upvotes will result in the followings:

• Boost your answer up the thread
• Provide social proof which makes your answer look more trustworthy
• More people will check out your profile and click the link to your site.

The number of upvotes can form a positive feedback loop where it drives more views and upvotes to your answers.

Some even resolved in buying upvotes to boost their popularity. Avoid this as it will put your reputation and account at risk.

Unfortunately, getting real upvotes for your answers to get the top of the thread isn’t easy either.

So how do you get more upvotes to your answers?

• Avoid self-promotion – try to be genuinely helpful. Make sure the link pointing back to your blog post complements or provide further clarification to your answer.
• Tell a story – as I mentioned earlier, telling a story is a way to engage with your readers and develop a strong emotional connection. As people get more engaged they’re more likely to upvote your answer.
• Share actionable steps – focus on how-to content mixed with personal storytelling.
• Be yourself – sharing technical details and data is good but if you can inject some personality in your answer, doing so helps you to stand out more and be more relatable to readers.
• Avoid technical jargon – use ordinary, everyday language to connect with more people.
• Grab attention with the first sentence – you can make the first or second sentence interesting enough so that people will click through to see the full answer.
• Wrap up with humour or inspiration – you can try making the last line or two humorous or inspirational. If you can end a solid answer with something that makes people smile or feeling inspired, they’ll be more likely to upvote you.

How Often Should You Post on Quora?

There are several Quora users who amassed millions of views to their answers. If you are not one of them, don’t worry 🙂 It’s a tough thing to achieve but not impossible.

These people usually fall into one of the following groups:

• Longtime Quora users who consistent writing answers and manage to answers 3000+ questions during their time on Quora.
• Those who write a few hundred answers and get picked up by Quora Digest and their answers go viral.
• Famous personalities or celebrities.

If you are just starting out and are serious about driving blog traffic to your site from Quora, you’ll need to start answering questions. I would recommend answering one question (or two)  per day on Quora for at least 30 days.

Focus on answering questions related to your niche. Answering questions that are of personal interest is a good way to start because you are answering topics you know a lot about.

When you are answering questions from your own personal experience, you won’t have to spend a lot of time thinking about your answer. When you don’t have to think of a topic, you could answer rather quickly.

As you write more, there are more related answers from you on the topic for the readers to check out.

You can write on Quora every day because you can repurpose the answer for content marketing on other social media like Facebook, LinkedIn and get traction there with it as well.

If you can’t make a commitment to writing on Quora daily, you can dedicate more time writing one or two answers per week and make them the ultimate answers.

Some users who manage to attain top writer status managed to do so with only a few hundreds of answers under their belt.

Case in point, Oliver Emberton who managed get 16.1 million views answering only 125 questions and was named Top Write in 2013 and 2014.

When Is The Best Time to Post on Quora?

According to Imran Esmail, if you are living in North America, posting early in the day or late at night can help.

Since a large portion of Quora’s user base is from the Indian subcontinent (20.4% according to Alexa), you can get a lot of views when they are just waking up or going to bed. (When it’s 8:00 a.m. in New York City, it’s 6:30 p.m. in Mumbai; 10:00 p.m. in NYC is 8:30 a.m. in Mumbai.)

For me, I don’t specifically try to target audience in other time zones. I prefer writing according to my own schedule, usually after 9 PM.

I’m located in Malaysia, two and a half hour ahead of India. So when it’s 9 PM here, in New York City, it’s exactly 9 AM and it’s 6.30 PM in Mumbai.

Finding the optimal time to post will need some testing on your part.

Avoid Spamming and Follow The Rules

Quora defines spam as:

On Quora, spam is defined as one or more questions, answers, posts, comments, or messages whose purpose appears to be to direct traffic to external commercial sites while providing little to no value back to the Quora Community.

When linking to your blog post, provide a summary of how the reference answers the question. If the link is not relevant and the gist of the answer is not understandable by the writing on Quora then the question will violate answering policies and guidelines.

Quora allows some leeway when posting about your product or company as long as it’s relevant. However repeatedly posting the same information or intentionally misapplying topics on posts in order to gain more visibility may be considered spamming.

Answers that drive traffic to external sites for promotional or commercial purposes and do not sufficiently answer the question are considered spam.

Try to avoid writing a one-line answer, pasting a link or quote. Short answers often contain less value and may be collapsed by other Quora users.

If you’re doing affiliate marketing, keep in mind that Quora’s policies disallow you to post affiliate links. Instead, add relevant links to your blog post (when appropriate) which may contain affiliate links.

How to Track Quora Traffic For Conversions and ROI

Review Your Performance With Quora Stats

Quora Stats allows you to see summary and detailed statistics regarding how many people had viewed, upvoted and shared your answers.

The more views, upvotes and shares you have the better your performance. It’s an indication of the impact of the knowledge you are sharing to the world.

However, you may want to dig deeper than just be content with those numbers.

You’d want to track the number of Quora users you’re driving to your blog, the email list conversion rates or whatever important metric you want to measure.

Use Google Analytics to Track Conversion

Here’s how to do it.

Sign-up with Google Analytics if you haven’t already then install a plugin like Google Analytics Dashboard for WP to help you add the analytics code into your blog.

For this example, I am tracking my newsletter sign-ups.

1. Set up Goal Tracking In Google Analytics

You can follow this instruction to set up your Google Analytics account for goal tracking.

2. Locate Quora In Social Networks Traffic Acquisition

Inside your Google Analytics account, on the left-hand menu, click

Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals

You should see Quora listed on the list.

You may be wondering why I get very little traffic from the social media.

If you follow my earlier post, you’d know that Sabahan.com is a very old blog that I am trying to revive. None of my earlier posts have any social media presence because I didn’t do any social media marketing for Sabahan in years.

I’ve also set all the old blog posts to no-follow so Google no longer can send any traffic to them. Hence the low number of visitors I get at the moment.

I could have made some extra money from AdSense if I didn’t do that but I needed to create a laser-focused content that Google will love.

So I am literally starting from scratch.

This is actually good because it gives me the opportunity to test different strategies to grow Sabahan.com and find out for myself what works and what doesn’t. And you can read all my findings on Sabahan.com!

Anyway, as you can see from the image above, the average visitor from Quora spent around 3 minutes reading my blog, the longest among the social network traffic.

To find the actual newsletter signup conversion, navigate to:

Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels

Then click on Social to delve deeper into the numbers.

A break down of the social media traffic shows 14.29% of visitors from Quora has signed up for my newsletter in the past 6 days.

Admittedly, the sample size is small. Nonetheless, I found traffic from Quora consistently outperformed other traffic sources when it comes to lead generation.

A large sample size can be found from an experiment conducted by Wishpond where up to 79.2% of Quora visitors signs up for a free trial after landing on their blog.

Conclusion

Quora is one of the most under-utilized social media channels for driving traffic to blogs and it should be part of your digital marketing strategies.

Let’s be real though, you can’t expect a torrent of traffic after spending just a few hours answering questions here and there.

Unless you are being featured or get lucky, expect little traffic for the first few weeks.

Also, remember only to link to your blog post when it’s helpful and necessary. Linking to the same source repeatedly is considered as spamming by Quora.

I hope you now have a solid strategy to dominate and use Quora to drive website traffic to your blog!

Aside from using Quora to drive traffic to your blog or build your email list, you can use it to get clients for your freelance business, drive relevant people to join your Facebook group or follow you on Twitter or whatever your goal is.

Spend time on Quora and you’ll be rewarded for your effort.

Have I missed anything that isn’t included in the article? Have you already started using Quora to drive traffic to your blog?

Let me know in the comments below.