Regularly churning out content on your website is neither an efficient nor sustainable strategy. Whatever your niche, your core audience is probably tired of reading the same information they’ve already seen a hundred times. This is especially true if the entire experience isn’t designed to lead to action and transformation by the end. “People are beginning to realize that more information isn’t the answer to their problems,“ said Russell Ruffino, founder of Clients on Demand. “For example, they’ve already read a million articles about ‘The 7 Diet Secrets Everyone Should Know,’ but they’re still overweight.” If you want your marketing efforts to yield good results, your focus should shift from publishing more information to providing actionable solutions that get results.
To do this, you need to leverage platforms that will give you a direct line to your target audience. Social media platforms are a great place to start. But if you really want a site where you’re guaranteed to find people who can use your expertise, a Q&A website like Quora is a perfect choice. These are people who are tired of the surplus of information, which is why they want direct answers to their specific questions. “Smart CEOs are recognizing this and beginning to understand that the customer doesn’t want information, he/she wants transformation,” says Ruffino. “The customer wants to achieve certain outcomes in his life, and helping people do that should be the main focus of a successful business.”
What are the Benefits of Quora for Marketing?
Here is a quick look at the potential benefits of utilizing Quora for marketing:
Get Fast Results Traffic can start pouring into your website as soon as you post valuable answers to the Quora questions. You can also use paid ads to reach users who search for relevant topics on the site. Multiple Content Promotion Options For a Q&A site, being able to answer via image, video, or external links is a huge advantage. These options allow you to showcase all the good stuff your target audience should expect from your brand. Free-Forever Traffic Lastly, if you are able to provide top-notch answers that get users’ upvotes, you can continuously direct traffic to your website for free — that is, if you know the right strategies.
Sounds cool, right? But that’s not all. Quora also gives you the ability to specifically target the right kind of prospects. This means your efforts will have a much bigger impact on your bottom line than most other forms of marketing. Without further ado, let’s get to the nitty-gritty of utilizing Quora for traffic.
1. Building a Professional Profile
Before you go about and answering questions, an important prerequisite is to set up a professional business profile. Don’t worry — the process is akin to building a profile on any other social media site. Steps, like entering your name and uploading your profile photo, are as easy as ever.
What’s important, however, is for you to fill in your updated credentials and a description that says why Quora users should listen to your answers. You can also add your fields of expertise under the “Knows About” section of your profile. Again, all these elements can be edited straight from your Quora profile page. Below are a few guidelines that will help you create an authoritative profile:
Write the Perfect Profile Description
On Quora, you don’t need to write an entire article to introduce yourself. A single paragraph that describes who you are and highlights your experience should be enough. Also, try to write using your natural writing voice to help users get to know your personality.
Add Relevant Links
Although Quora lets you add images to your profile description, a more lucrative approach is to simply insert links to your social media pages. In addition to photos, they will also learn more about the story behind your brand.
While you’re at it, don’t forget to insert a link to your website or landing page.
Use a Headshot Image
Keep in mind that you’re creating a personal profile — not a Quora page for your business. Users don’t come to Quora to look at branded content. Rather, they come to the platform expecting to receive genuine advice and insights from other people. To put things into perspective, notice that popular brands like Microsoft, Facebook, and Wikipedia are nowhere to be found on the site. Instead, you can find the profiles of their respective CEOs — namely Satya Nadella, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jimmy Wales.
Highlight Your Top Achievements
On the “Credentials & Highlights” and “Knows About” sections, don’t hesitate to share anything that can boost your credibility as an information source — especially in line with the topics you typically engage in on Quora. Some of the key information pieces you should provide include your job, company, educational background, and your central location. If your company isn’t an existing topic on Quora, you have the option to create one. This incites discussion around your brand in the future and will make your profile a tad more authoritative.
Mind Your Tagline
Just underneath your profile name, you can create a tagline that other users will see whenever you answer a question. This should be a brief summary of your credentials, including the company you work for, your job title, and your experience in the industry.
Similar to your description, you need to keep your tagline concise. You do, after all, only get up to 60 characters — make them count.
2. Start Finding the Right Questions to Answer
Answering questions is the bread and butter of Quora marketing. However, you can’t just answer any question that aligns with your expertise. You need to find the ones that will expose you to as many users as possible. First, you need to look for topics that have a large number of followers. Simply enter any keyword that describes the topic you’re looking for and click the top-most result.
Why couldn’t you just pick one of the topics already suggested by Quora? By selecting the top result, Quora may present you with a list of sub-topics that you can also mine for questions.
From there, you can follow and bookmark the topics that catch your attention — as long as they also have an ample number of followers you can capitalize for traffic. At this point, you should be able to find a ton of questions on your feed. But before you spend thirty minutes crafting an answer to a question, you need to evaluate its potential for traffic.
Ideally, you need to find questions that only have one question for every five followers — a ratio of 1:5. This increases your chances of writing the top-voted answer and getting the attention of more users. For example, the question below has a ratio of exactly 1:5, which makes it well-worth an articulate answer. Just be sure, of course, that it’s a question you can answer with the information and, if possible, products or services that you offer.
Once you find the right questions, you don’t have to answer them right away. A good strategy is to create a spreadsheet of all potential questions along with their answer-follower ratios and topic. Sort these questions according to their viability and work your way from top to bottom answering them.
3. Write the Perfect Answer
Finally, you need to craft an answer to end all answers. It must be an exhaustive answer written with readable, simple words and packed with actionable insights — something that would eliminate the need for Quora users to ask even more questions. Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all blueprint that guarantees you’ll write the top-voted answer every single time. There are, however, a few practices that will help improve your chances of turning heads with your answer:
Use Images
Visual assets like infographics, before-and-after pictures, and other images that can help convey your points are more than welcome in Quora. Not only will it improve the audience’s willingness to read your answer but it also makes data-driven information more digestible and easier to remember. The general rule of thumb is to only use images that are relevant to your answer. Otherwise, the Quora community will definitely not appreciate your attempt to clickbait.
Write As If You’re Speaking to a Friend
The best thing about Quora marketing is the fact that you don’t need an elaborate strategy. You just type in your answer as if you’re writing a message to a friend — plain, honest, and genuinely concerned about their problem. Answering as if you’re writing a textbook is a surefire way to bore users. That said, use simple language and learn to use proper formattings such as bullet points, italicized text, and quotations to boost readability.
Sprinkle Your Answer with Links to Relevant Sources
To reap the benefits of Quora for marketing, don’t forget to weave in links to relevant pages — such as your contact page or social media pages — whenever they make sense. The key here is to avoid forcing links that don’t have anything remotely related to the topic at hand. Do so and the community will immediately see through your thinly-veiled attempt to utilize Quora for a self-serving cause. Remember, if your answers and links really do help users solve their problems, then it doesn’t matter if you’re trying to sell a product, an online course, or a book — a handful of readers will be intrigued enough to know what your brand has to offer one way or another.
Conclusion
Quora offers brands an opportunity to quickly generate traffic and sales, but not everyone knows how the platform works. The post above should help you build a solid Quora presence that could spur your brand’s growth. Who knows — you may even end up being a thought leader in your niche one day. Good luck!
