Using Quora for Marketing: the Ultimate Guide

In case you’ve not heard… what is Quora?

It’s one of the top content platforms — based on a question-and-answer format — attracts 300 million unique visitors a month, and according to Alexa is one of the top few hundred sites in the world.

It’s also worth something like $2 billion — not bad considering it was founded in 2009.

Heck, even presidents have used it.

If you’re approaching it for marketing purposes, as I’ll be showing you here, it’s a powerful tool for:

• Growing online visibility.
• Attracting web traffic, leads and sales.
• Research.

Here’s What’s Coming Up…

I’ll be showing you:

• How to use Quora for long-term business advantage.
• How to avoid issues — like account bans — that some users unfortunately end up with.
• Why you should be using Quora as part of your content marketing strategy.
• How to set up your account in a way that gives you maximum return for your time investment on the platform.
• How to use it to grow your online visibility, attract traffic and generate leads — and as a powerful research tool for your market.

Before we get started, download the free cheatsheet you need to use Quora for marketing effectively:

Why Should You Be Using Quora for Marketing?

Admittedly, although still a well-used popular platform, Quora used to be more popular.

It has less impact than it used to, and for some marketers chasing the next bright and shiny object, it has lost its appeal.

Personally, that seems a little shortsighted.

After all, it wasn’t too long ago that Twitter seemed downtrodden and on its way to obscurity — it’s now back to solid growth.

Quora will get back into growth too at some point — it’s just been testing a few things that maybe haven’t worked so well.

In fact, now is likely to be a great time to create a solid foundation of authority, audience and content on the site before there’s more competition and activity heats up again.

For the US alone, Quora is one of the top few hundred sites (Alexa), with around a third of Quora’s visitors coming from the US — in other words, around 100 million people a month.

Alexa

So if your business targets the US market, those numbers are not to be sniffed at.

Quora gets around 60% of its traffic through search, with Quora content regularly attracting first-page rankings for long-tail keywords.

Alexa

Considering that it often only takes a few minutes to repurpose content for the site in order to start attracting some of the benefits, it seems a no-brainer.

But what are the benefits?

As already mentioned, a big one is…

Traffic

The traffic you attract from Quora isn’t short-term, and reliant on continuing activity (though that is beneficial!).

You’ll continue to attract hundreds of views for your answers — and therefore potentially visits to your website — for years later.

There are three main ways in which people find their way to your website though Quora:

• The main one is clicking through via links provided in your answers — though you have to approach this in the right way to avoid issues.
• Seeing your domain name in your credentials — shown above your answers — and taking a peak to find out more about you.
• Links provided in your profile.

Of course, once you’re getting traffic, you can convert a proportion of those visitors into…

Leads

I won’t say much more about this right now, but I’ll be showing you a couple ways to do this in a minute or two.

SEO?

If you’re linking back to your website from your answers, how does that affect your SEO?

In brief, it doesn’t. At least, not directly.

Quora links are all no follow, and pass no value to your website in terms of rankings.

But…

There are indirect benefits.

As your content on Quora increases, the chances of other people recognizing you as an authority on a topic grows too.

With that, the chances of people linking through to you from say their own blog posts also increases.

That’s not to mention connecting with you in other ways that may lead to SEO benefits, or other advantages.

Research

I mentioned using Quora for research previously.

In fact, it’s the perfect tool for generating ideas on what to create content about. If you’re ever stuck with a blank page and a post to write, head on over to Quora.

You can find out exactly what people in your market want to know about.

More on how to do that soon.

The first step is to get your Quora account set up the right way…

Setting Up Your Quora Account

Register with Quora

If you don’t yet have an account, create one by registering with the platform.

As part of the registration process, you’ll be asked to choose topics of interest — choose ones that seem most relevant for your business and your target market.

You’ll notice that as you select topics, subtopics or related topics then become available, giving you an increasing number to choose from.

You could literally be here all day!

So once you’ve picked a dozen or so of the most applicable topics, click on the button to continue.

You can then, in theory at least, start answering (or asking) questions.

But before you do so, you should…

Add Your Quora Profile Information

Click on your profile (top right of the top menu bar), and then click on your name.

The first step is to upload your profile picture.

Don’t be tempted to upload a logo, that won’t work on Quora — this should be your personal pic.

The next stage is to add a profile credential — this is what shows above your answers as well as on your profile itself.

You can always adjust it later, as well as set up different credentials with more relevance to specific topic areas.

So for now just get something basic in place.

Click the Add profile credential link shown on your profile page.

In sixty characters or less, enter some information to help give some authority and add some credibility to your answers.

You can’t enter a link here, but you could for example enter your domain name so people can look up your website if interested.

As mentioned above, this is one way in which you attract traffic from Quora.

Once done, enter a longer description on your profile via the Write a description about yourself link.

This provides a lot more space to write about yourself, including the ability to add:

• Clickable links
• A YouTube video — enter the link to the YouTube page, and the video embeds automatically.
• Images

While unlikely to drive a huge amount of traffic, some people will be interested in your profile after reading your answers, and click through to find out more about you.

Your goals on this page should be to provide:

• Links to your other social profile pages — including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and so on.
• A link back to your blog — see the information below on tracking traffic from Quora, so you can see how much traffic this attracts over time.
• Other information that helps build authority and credibility for the answers you’re providing.

This is how Gary Vaynerchuk links through to his content on various channels:

Above this are a number of paragraphs illustrating his experience and expertise.

All done?

With that all set up, you’re now ready to start contributing to Quora in ways that also add value for your business.

How to Use Quora for Marketing

It’s a question and answer site, right? So the first thing you need to know is…

How to Find Suitable Questions to Answer

Here are three different ways to do that.

1. Answer Icon

Click the Answer icon on the top menu.

This shows questions based on your selected interest areas.

Most of those listed will show that someone has followed the question — in other words, requested to be notified when new answers are provided — within the past day or two.

2. Search Facility

You can also find questions via Quora’s search facility — just enter keywords relevant to your business and to what your target market are likely to be interested in:

A little like Google’s search prediction tool (often referred to as Google Suggest), Quora displays potential questions beneath the search box as you type.

You can also hit enter, or click the top option on the list, for a full result page relating to your search query.

For each question in the listing, you’ll either see the number of followers — indicating the question’s relative popularity — or the start of one of the answers.

However, be careful of immediately jumping to questions with the highest follower counts. They also attract the most answers, so it can be harder for your answer to achieve visibility.

It’s akin to choosing long tail keywords over short tail in SEO — short tail keywords seem to be where the party’s at, but when you arrive you find too many people are already there and you have to work doubly hard to get noticed or heard above the din.

With long tail, it’s a quieter gathering, and far easier to form meaningful relationships.

But I digress… back to Quora.

Just as I choose long tail over short tail, I choose questions that are less popular and which only have a few answers. Seems a more solid long-term strategy.

3. A2As

With A2As — Ask to Answer — rather than you looking for questions, the questions find you.

This is where you get direct requests from people to answer their questions.

It won’t happen immediately, but once you’ve been contributing for a while, you’ll start to see these coming through.

I now get several a week.

Of course, you don’t have to answer them, but you may see questions coming through that are a good fit.

You can choose whether or not to receive email notifications for your A2As via Settings > Email & Notifications after clicking on your profile.

Answering Questions

Now that you’ve found a suitable question or two, the core of contributing to Quora lies in answering them.

Doing so is very straightforward.

Beneath the question, you’ll see an Answer button.

Click it to see an editor box, and you can start to formulate your answer.

Before hitting Submit, click the Edit Credential link just beneath your name — you’ll need to either select the profile credential you entered earlier, or add a new credential.

To add a new one, after clicking the Add a credential link, select Topic.

Start to type in the Select a topic field, and select from one of the suggested topics.

In Describe an experience, enter something from your experience that helps to illustrate your authority on the chosen topic.

Remember to mention your domain name to attract some additional traffic via your credential.

Of course, answering just one question won’t give you a big result. The key to success on Quora is to…

Answer Questions Regularly and Consistently

It works the same way with most content platforms, including your blog.

The best results come through consistent, regular action.

My own experience is a perfect illustration of this.

From around 2013-2014, I began answering the odd question on Quora. Essentially I dipped my toe in the water, but didn’t properly commit — I had just a handful of answers.

Towards the end of 2015, I decided to give it a proper go and began to contribute more regularly.

As soon as I did so, my views rose rapidly.

By the end of 2016, I’d received several thousand views, and was getting 50–100 views a day on average.

But it didn’t stop there…

My views rapidly shot up again, giving me 500–1000 views a day, sometimes more, so far amassing over 2 million views, hundreds of upvotes and dozens of shares.

Even several years later, I’m still getting tens of thousands of views a month.

For best results, making it part of your post-publication routine for your blog, or other primary content channel.

Look on Quora for a relevant question or two you can answer based on that content, repurposing it appropriately.

One of the most common questions from people who start answering questions on Quora is…

How Long Should an Answer on Quora Be?

More important than content length, is to answer the question as clearly and succinctly as you can.

It doesn’t have to take more than a few minutes — after all, you already have the content from your primary channel to base your answer on.

Sometimes, a question only requires a relatively short answer — perhaps just a paragraph or two.

If you’ve fully answered the question, don’t extend it out just for the sake of it.

But for more open-ended questions (such as How do you use Quora?), a much longer answer might be required.

This takes longer, but the benefit is in significantly increased engagement with your content in the form of views, upvotes and shares.

One from Neil Patel for example on SEO is nearly 5,000 words long, and has attracted significant engagement:

So, in brief, the length of an answer on Quora should simply be as long as it needs to be to answer the question to the best of your ability.

But then…

How Do You Use Your Answer to Attract Traffic Back to Your Website?

Your answers should — at least, some of the time — link back to your website.

However, it needs approaching in the right way.

If all your answers link back to the same domain — and aren’t diluted for example with links elsewhere, along with some answers with zero links — you can find yourself locked out of Quora and your account suspended.

Here are some key ways to stay in line with Quora’s policies, while still directing traffic to your website via direct links.

1. Add Value to Quora

If you provide a low quality, rushed answer for the sake of getting a link back, it firstly won’t achieve very much — it’s likely to get buried out of sight by better answers — and is likely to get flagged as spam.

Instead, you attract benefits back to your site by aiming to add real value to Quora:

• You attract upvotes, which in turn gives your answers more visibility — more on how upvotes work soon…
• You get more views of your profile.
• You build authority, credibility and trust.
• And ultimately of course, you generate more traffic to your website, and the visitors arriving from Quora are more likely to convert.

2. Don’t Use Every Answer to Link Back to Your Site, and Your Site Alone

As stated above, linking back to your site — and just your site — from every answer can leave you with difficulties.

So answer some questions which don’t present an opportunity to link back at all.

Just answer questions to provide value.

After all, you still benefit anyway:

• This practice supports your other answers, keeping them visible and in good standing.
• You attract more followers, increasing the ranking of your answers and the views they receive.
• Some will still look you up via the domain name in your credential and/or click through from your profile.
• The more content you have on Quora, the better — it seems to improve views generally, and provide higher rankings more quickly for new content.

Rather than linking back to your website, you can also choose to link to supporting content you’ve published on other platforms, like here on Medium and LinkedIn’s article publishing platform.

Or perhaps embed a relevant video you have on YouTube into your answer.

Each adds further benefit to you, while adding further value to your answers.

This doesn’t preclude you from linking direct to your website in future either. If a particular answer takes off — some perform way better than others — you can return to edit it and add a suitable link.

3. Avoid Linking Back Directly to Products/Services

Depending on the question, it’s sometimes acceptable and justifiable.

But generally, as Quora advises in its spam guidance, steer clear (or see their policy on promoting your business within answers here):

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

While it may be tempting to do so — and you may even see others doing so — approach it instead by linking to (or embedding) relevant content you’ve published on other platforms that’s:

• Optimized for lead conversions.
• Or potentially allows you to retarget visitors with ads (though note retargeted advertising is becoming less ineffective due to cookie changes).

4. Link to Unconnected Resources Too.

Linking to external resources — such as supporting content on other blogs — from your own blog posts adds value for readers, and thereby boosts SEO.

This works on Quora too.

It adds value, boosting views, while diluting any impression an internal Quora reviewer — automated or human — might get that your posts are entirely self-serving and promotional.

And if you’re repurposing blog content as answers on Quora, it’s going to be quite natural to do this anyway, as the original post probably does the same.

Although it can seem a little counterintuitive at first, the more you add value to Quora and their users, the more benefits you ultimately receive.

5. Never Use Affiliate Links

Quora’s policy on this is explicit — don’t use them.

“Nuff said”.

Track Your Traffic

So now you know when and how to link, but you also want to be able to track the traffic you get from Quora.

You can then for example judge the impact that changes in your approach has, and improve as you go along.

To be able to see Quora as a traffic source in Google Analytics, you’ll need to use UTM links — these have special codes at the end identifying where the traffic has come from.

For example, a link back to a post on EverywhereMarketer might look like this:

https://www.everywheremarketer.com/blog/rss-submission-sites?utm_source=quora

If you want to add other UTM parameters at the end, use Google’s Campaign URL Builder.

However, note that this only tracks traffic that comes via the clickable links.

And your initial results are no predictor of future success. Expect very little to start with. It builds and becomes more significant with regular, consistent action.

Use Text Formatting and Images to Boost Engagement

Add visual appeal to your answers, and assist readability, with:

• Suitable text formatting — bullet points to break up longer paragraphs, along with bold and italicized text.
• Images — just as on mainstream social platforms, engaging visuals work on Quora too.

Make your answers as easy as possible for people to skim-read and get value from without having to read word for word.

Grow Your Audience

Just as on other platforms, by growing your audience, you amplify your content.

Apart from more people seeing your answers, your credibility and authority grows too as your follower count increases.

Here’s how following someone works on Quora…

“When you follow a person on Quora, your Feed will start to include their activity — answers they’ve written or upvoted, and questions they’ve asked or followed.”

How do you grow your audience?

The best way, once again, is to simply regularly and consistently contribute content to Quora.

The more you do so, the more opportunities people have to follow you.

They do so by:

• Clicking the Follow button after hovering their mouse over your name.

• Clicking Follow from your profile.

Quora’s Ranking Factors

As you’ll notice, when you click on a question, answers to that question are listed down the page.

Just like on search, those higher up the page will naturally attract more visibility.

So how does Quora decide the order answers are ranked in?

It’s more sophisticated than first-come, first-served.

The goal with their ranking algorithm is to:

…put the most comprehensive, trustworthy answers at the top of the page, so that they are easily accessible for people who have a question.

This is why it’s so important to aim to provide as much value to Quora as possible — after all, if your answer’s never seen, it’s worthless.

So how does Quora determine which answers are the most “comprehensive” and “trustworthy”?

There are a number of background ranking factors, including the following:

• The text, links and images provided in your post.
• Your level of expertise on the topic, indicated in part by the number of previous answers you’ve provided in the past and how they were regarded by the community.
• The number of followers you have — this provides some indication as to how your previous answers have been perceived and the value provided.

These help determine how your answer ranks initially — you can achieve much higher initial rankings as a regular contributor, compared to a newcomer.

Again, the longer term, more significant benefits of Quora come from regularly and consistently answering questions.

Once your answer has been published, a key ranking factor then comes from how it’s treated by readers.

A key metric is Upvotes. At the bottom of your answers, readers have the opportunity to upvote — or downvote — your content.

It’s not the only factor, but your ranking will generally improve with the more upvotes you attract.

Users are also sometimes asked directly whether or not they found your answer useful:

As you’d expect, their response also helps determine where your answer should be placed on the page relative to the others.

Before you start to be concerned about potentially malicious respondents, not all votes are treated in the same way. Quora also takes into account “how trustworthy voters are in a given topic”.

The platform provides guidance on how to achieve better rankings and visibility for answers, which is worth studying.

However, as a summary, you should strive to:

• Make your answers as clear as possible.
• Make them easy to read, including for people who will just skim it.
• Answer the actual question that was asked — address it head on, keeping your content as relevant as possible to the exact question asked.
• Demonstrate credibility, showing why your information is accurate and helpful — one way to do this is to link to relevant sources.
• Provide information that’s useful for everyone clicking through on the question.

How to Use Quora as a Powerful Research Tool

Quora is a useful and powerful research tool for:

• Researching competitors.
• Researching your market— for example, it’s a great source of blog post ideas because it tells you exactly what information your market is interested in.

Researching Your Competition

By looking at relevant questions — or adding your own questions—you can gain valuable insights into:

• Who your competition is — you may assume your competing against X, but your market may tell you it’s actually Y; or you may find out about other competitors you weren’t aware of.
• What their frustrations are with your product/service, and those of competitors.
• What their needs and pain points are — this can lead to insights for improving your product/service, or even creating brand new ones.

Researching Your Market

Quora tells you exactly what your market wants to know about.

If you ever struggle to work out what to create content about to attract visitors to your website, head to Quora!

It’s a bit like meeting up with a big group of prospective customers, and hearing them tell you:

• What they need help with.
• What they don’t yet understand.
• Where their knowledge gaps are.
• Advice they’ve had in the past that might be inaccurate or misleading.

To use Quora in this way:

• Look at different topics.
• Search for relevant keywords.
• Look at the questions people are asking.
• Click through on relevant questions.

Note that if you’re using Quora’s search facility, by default they list questions that contain that keyword.

If you also want to see answers containing your keyword, change the By type filter on the search results page.

You can also adjust the By time filter, such as to see the most recent questions.

You can see how popular different questions are by:

• The number of answers provided.
• The number of followers the question has attracted.
• The amount of engagement answers have received, in terms of upvotes, shares and comments.

To Conclude

You now have all the information you need to succeed on Quora, including how to:

• Create and set up your account.
• Find relevant questions for your market.
• Answer questions in a way that generates visitors to your website and leads.
• How to use Quora as a research tool.

With regular, consistent action on Quora, you will build up a source of traffic and leads that will not only keep growing, but likely continue for years in future.

Don’t forget to download the cheatsheet you need to use Quora effectively for marketing so you have it to refer back to:

Sincerely,

Steve Shaw
EverywhereMarketer

PS. Like This Story? Please help us reach more people by clapping below. And don’t forget to follow EverywhereMarketer to get more content like this.

Recommended Related Reading:

Publishing Articles on LinkedIn: Your Complete Guide