How to use Quora for marketing.
& The complete Beginner's Guide
Have you ever dreamed of a platform that could generate constant traffic to your website, even years after your content marketing efforts? It’s time to establish your presence on Quora
Quora – one of the most effective digital marketing platforms.
In this article, we will take a closer look at the Quora platform. Let's find out what Quora is, how to use it, and how can your company benefit from using this site.
- What is Quora?
- Quora audience and site’s authority:
- A quick guide to starting using Quora:
- How to write answers that will benefit the Quora audience and your business:
- How to add pictures to your answers?
- What to do when the response was collapsed or deleted?
- How to choose the questions on Quora?
- How to get more views and upvotes on Quora?
- What shouldn't you do when posting answers on Quora?
- How do you measure the effectiveness of your Quora marketing campaign: Working with analytics.
- Conclusion:
What is Quora?
Quora is a social knowledge-sharing platform, a question-answer site, similar to Google, where you can ask any question and get an almost instant answer.
Still, Quora is a more interactive site where you can answer questions, and comment, upvote, or downvote any answers. You have the opportunity to get answers to your questions from anywhere around the world from a million unique users who are ready to offer different points of view.
This means that every time you ask a question, you will get the most relevant and unique answer that will definitely help you find a solution to your problem.
Also, Quora allows you to help others as it provides a never-ending list of questions. You can answer prospects’ questions, and thus, raise your authority, brand trust, and credibility.
Quora is a great place not only for asking and answering questions but also for blogging. Back in 2013, the platform launched its blogging features, which allow users to share their knowledge and thoughts in a space they control, without the structure of the Q&A format.
Now, you don’t have to answer a certain question in order to post something on Quora. You still can go viral and get the same engagement through upvotes and comments by posting useful articles & blogs.
Quora audience and site’s authority
Usually, before starting a business promotion campaign on a specific site, it is thoroughly analyzed. Let’s see what kind of audience Quora has:
According to SimilarWeb.com, most users are from the US (39.14%) and India (16.08%). Still, we believe the Quora platform is suitable for your website promotion campaign regardless of your business geographic location.
Why? The answer is simple.
Quora has nearly 541 million monthly visitors. Thus, 1% equals 5.4 million. And this is hundreds of times higher than the standard traffic requirements when choosing a platform for digital content marketing.
The Site has a good level of authority, and questions on the platform regularly take first place on the front page of Google.
According to Majestic.net, SEO metrics for Quora’s root domain are:
– Page Authority: 92;
– Domain Authority: 90;
– Trust Flow: 39;
– Citation Flow: 54.
Quora’s audience appreciates its content and refers to it persistently.
A quick guide to starting using Quora.
Getting started with Quora is quite simple, and all you need to do, in order to set up your account, is to follow the steps below.
– Register
– Fill out your profile
– Explore your options for posting questions and answers
⦁ Sign-up
The first step is the simplest one: registration. You are given the choice of registering with your Google account, Facebook account, or through simple email registration.
The next step is to choose the topics of your interest. It’s recommended to choose the topics depending on your fields of study, hobbies or skills. Now, you are successfully signed up for Quora.
⦁ Fill out your profile
Filling out your profile is mandatory. Since Quora is a reliable resource, it is very important to fill out your profile the best way and mention all your abilities, skills, and merits.
The Quora profile section provides you with various subdivisions to fill out. It starts with your profile picture and profile credentials.
On the right-hand side of the profile page, you’ll find two supplementary sections: one for adding information about your job, education, and location credentials, and another for adding Topics that are interesting and familiar to you.
- Explore your options for posting questions and answers.
Getting answers to questions is clearly the main point of Quora, so it’s crucial to know all the options of the questions asked.
First (and most obviously), you can answer any question. But there is much more you can do.
Besides answering a question, you can follow an individual question, no matter what topic it is on.
You can select the “request” option, which will allow you to find someone with knowledge of the topic and ask the selected person to answer a question.
While the above options are the most popular ways to answer a question, you are not limited to them. Here are a few more options:
- Leave a comment
- Receive notifications about changes to the questions
- Share the answer on social networks or copy the link
- Edit the question and source
- Follow the question privately
- Answer later
- Combine questions
- View statistics
- Report
As you can see, there is a lot you can do with questions. Clearly, you most likely won’t use the options noted above for every question you come across unless you’re a Quora superuser, but it’s good to know that there is certainly more to it than just answering questions.
Unsurprisingly, the answers appear right below the questions on Quora. As with the questions, the answers have their own set of features, albeit a little simpler.
Your task as a user is to find the most appropriate answer to the question asked (if it does not come from you) and upvote it. A sufficient number of upvotes will change the placement of the answer, and the answer with the most upvotes will be placed at the top of the answer list.
In terms of replies, the main features are upvoting, downvoting, posting (on Quora), commenting, and posting on social media. Additional features:
⦁ Bookmark
⦁ Suggest edits
⦁ Thank
⦁ Promote
⦁ Report
How to write answers that benefit your business/brand.
Before we figure out how to write answers, let’s establish how to choose the questions you might want to answer to:
⦁ The question must have at least 10 subscribers. We recommend selecting the questions with 20+ subscribers.
⦁ We recommend choosing the questions with low-quality answers (thin content, poorly formatted, without screenshots, irrelevant). In these cases, you have higher chances to get more upvotes and your answer will be displayed at the top of the answer list.
⦁ High engagement. The higher it is, the better.
⦁ New questions. Be sure to keep an eye on new questions in the niches of your interest and try to answer first. The most important is to offer quality answers.
- Be patient and avoid excessive advertising. Find a good balance and stick to it.
- When offering a solution, do not forget to tell about the advantages of using it. It’s not about what you can do, but what the user gets out of it.
- If you are worried about being banned because of talking about your product (which is not uncommon), add a disclaimer.
- Provide evidence and sources whenever you share statistics or data. Accurate data and numbers are popular in Quora answers, and even if your answer has not been read in full, it is often used only for research purposes.
- Add diagrams, screenshots, infographics, and other relevant visual content to back up your message. Visual content attracts more attention and is processed faster than reading.
- Use video. They attract even more attention than pictures and can be a great addition to your answer.
- Memes and funny GIFs won’t help you on Quora. When people are looking for an answer, they don’t like being distracted.
- Don’t stand still – get on with your business. Reread your answer and make sure that readers don’t ask “And…?” at the end.
- Write complete and meaningful answers. Write it in the form of a mini-article of at least 1500 characters. Make sure you have covered all the important points and the text is easy to read.
- Text formatting matters. Use numbered and bulleted dots, and highlight important parts. Mix short and long sentences to improve readability.
- Attach links wisely. Don’t just put the URL in the middle of the sentence. Choose the right reference words so as not to lose the readability of the text. Although the number of links in the answers is not officially limited, we do not recommend exaggerating. When using Quora for marketing, keep in mind that links to landing pages are prohibited. However, you can embed links to related resources, such as your blog and e-books.
- Don’t waste time SEO optimizing your answer. It may appear on the first page of Google search results only if the question itself is optimized. No matter how many keywords you use, your answer won’t be on the first page unless the question itself gets a high rank.
- When answering questions, add topics. They are marked with “#” so that other Quora users can find your answers. This can help your answer get a rating on other topics and get more views. However, make sure you don’t add too many topics.
- You are responding to a real person, not a bot. Use personal pronouns, draw attention to your ideas, and try to find common ground.
- You are a professional, so do not write in a joking or sarcastic manner. This is unprofessional, may seem rude, and lead to blocking.
- Never accuse or argue with other Quora authors. If you disagree with their opinion, express it politely, for example: “I understand your point of view, although I adhere to a different one. Let me explain.”
You may read more about Quora policy here [here]
How to attach an image to your Quora answer?
As mentioned above, your Quora answers must be complete, and you should add visual content (pictures/screenshots/infographics, etc.). Remember that your images must be unique and in place. Avoid “empty” stock images. This is very important because the image will highlight your answer among dozens of others.
So how can you add pictures to your answer?
In fact, everything is simple. By clicking on the answer to the question, a simple and convenient editor appears in front of you, which allows you to format the text, add links, quotes, images, and tag discussion participants with just one click:
Also, keep in mind that the image can only be uploaded, not pasted from the clipboard. If your goal is to add a screenshot, I recommend using the Lightshot program. This will allow you to take a screenshot and save it on the media within a few seconds.
What to do when the response was collapsed or deleted?
Clearly, you must respect Quora’s policy and follow their guidelines when posting answers.
Still, sometimes Quora moderators will hide or delete your answers. Most often, this happens when the moderator decided that your answer does not fully cover the topic and suggested making some changes, but you did not respond to it in a timely manner.
To avoid such situations, we recommend checking the notifications tab for potential problems.
Also, when your answer has been collapsed, you can delete, rewrite, and republish it.
How to choose the questions on Quora?
Choosing the right question is just as important as the ability to answer correctly. Indeed, only 20% of the answers are winning. There are several ways to choose the questions that will be beneficial for you:
The most important is to find questions with high organic search traffic. For this, we recommend using Serpstat.com.
Enter Quora root URL, go to the “Domain Analysis” tab – “SEO research” – “Top Pages” and get data for the most popular pages.
The list contains URLs, organic keywords, Facebook shares, and potential traffic. You can also analyze the potential of an exact URL or find the best questions for specific keywords.
How to get more views and upvotes on Quora?
As we’ve already mentioned, there are several rules for writing helpful answers. But their compliance is not enough for community approval. What else?
Answer the questions (which you know the answer to) and try to be the first person to offer an answer. To do this, you need to regularly follow the selected topics;
When the question was answered, do not duplicate the answers above. If you have anything to add, great. If not, you should search for other topics.
Also, we recommend applying the best-known marketing model, AIDA.
So how can this apply to your Quora marketing campaign?
AIDA model can be called a communication model, as it determines how to communicate at each stage.
In order to get the best results, you should ask yourself some key questions at all stages:
– Awareness: how do we inform customers about our products or services? What is our mobilization strategy? What should the messages be? What is our brand awareness campaign?
– Interest: how will we interest them? What is our content strategy? Is social proof available to establish our reputation?
– Desire: what makes our product or service desirable? How do we interact personally to establish an emotional connection?
– Action: what is a call to action, and where do we place them? Is it easy for consumers to connect, and where do they expect to find it?
– Retention: What is the loyalty offer?
What shouldn't you do when posting answers on Quora?
- Duplicate content. When you have to answer dozens of similar questions, you may want to copy them at least partially. We recommend not to abuse this practice. Otherwise, there is a high risk that the answer will be deleted or collapsed
- Overdo with links sharing. This rule does not apply to those cases when you post links to various kinds of tools. We are talking, about spamming links.
- Add pictures where it is not necessary. Do not overload the answer with meaningless pictures that will not make your answer either more beautiful or more informative. In this case, the use of images will play against you.
- Post answers to questions you don’t know the answer to. Even if the user who has asked the question will not be confused, your answer will remain forever (until you delete it, of course) in the history of your profile and may raise many questions from experienced pros.
Do not forget that you risk damaging not only your personal reputation, but also the image of the company whose interests you represent.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your Quora marketing campaign: Working with analytics:
Depending on your goals, the following indicators may be used as KPIs:
– the number of responses,
– views,
– upvotes,
– clicks,
– the number of registrations coming from the Quora platform, by using source tracking links.
– Google Analytics.
In GA, for Quora and other crowd platforms, you may use special reports on the number of clicks, registrations, and payments.
– internal Quora statistics.
The analytical tool provided by Quora platform, allows you to determine the number of views per day, month, or year, the number of upvotes (likes), comments and track the dynamics by day.
Conclusion:
Briefly about the main thing: A few key points of our mini-guide on how to use Quora for marketing.
Quora is a powerful crowd marketing tool that should not be neglected. Before you start working with it, establish clear and measurable goals. Given this, you will better understand what answers to write and how to position your brand.
Quora marketing should be entrusted to a separate employee or a professional Quora marketing service that will regularly represent the interests of your company within the framework of the platform.
Writing and structuring answers on Quora is no less important than optimizing the content on your company’s blog: a poor answer is rated by the platform as low as thin content by search engines.
It is not difficult to measure the effectiveness of your Quora marketing campaign: Google Analytics and internal platform’s statistics are enough for this.
Although there are many tricks and tips for marketing on Quora, the most essential thing to remember is that you need to be really helpful for the platform’s audience. Present yourself as a useful, knowledgeable resource, and your prospects will flock to you in search of answers.
If you act correctly in promotion, you are guaranteed to get a lot of traffic and a significant increase in sales.
CrowdMark provides strategic, creative, and performance services to consumer-oriented businesses. We help companies increase brand awareness, raise sales, create community, drive interaction and improve site rankings through innovative SEO techniques.