Many of you are probably familiar with Quora. But not everyone knows that Quora can be turned into a perfect marketing tool that will drive high quality targeted traffic and conversions to your website.
I made the most out of Quora and continue to use it as one of my major marketing tools for increasing conversions. How, you ask?
I’m one of the most viewed writers on many popular topics including videos, online videos, video production, and explainer videos. My answers gained 1.2 million+ views during the last 10 months.
Want to know how to make a go of Quora on your own? Keep on reading.
I’ll cover:
- Setting up an account with Quora (some banal steps are unavoidable).
- Finding relevant questions about your business (sounds easy, but there are easier ways).
- Writing useful and trackable answers and avoiding being banned (may be a little tricky).
- The golden rule of the Quora community (if you are in Quora, you are there forever! Just kidding).
- Using SEMrush to find high ranking Quora questions.
- The golden rule of marketing (test, test and test).
Let’s get started!
Quora is a knowledge-sharing online community where anyone can pitch in.
It’s very simple. If you have a question and can’t find an answer to it, go to Quora, post your question and it will be visible to thousands of people, who are there to help each other.
Set Up an Account With Quora
If you already have a Quora account, the following might be something you have already done, so skip up this part (but you might want to read through it just in case). For those who have no idea how to start, I’ll show you right now!
The first thing you need to do is set up an account with Quora. You have 3 options for signing up: with Facebook, Google+ or an email address.
After signing up, customize your bio, credentials & highlights, and fill in the “Knows About” sections. Make your bio short, so people will understand who you are and what you do. Keep it to 2-3 sentences.
Fill in the Credentials & Highlights section to add more trust to your profile. You can add information about your employment, education, location, topic and language.
Upload a profile pic and include some entertaining information about yourself.
Add information about the topics you have knowledge of.
Complete all the fields and continue with answering the questions.
Find Relevant Questions About Your Business
If you want to promote your business, you need to know what questions your prospects ask, what common pain points they have, and the core reasons why your business solves their most pressing needs.
You need to find and answer as many relevant questions surrounding your business topic as possible.
Right! The more the better!
After a dozen of answered questions you may come up with an idea that there are no questions left. Nope! You are most likely mistaken when a thought like this crosses your mind.
There are several ways of finding relevant questions:
First is searching through keywords at the top. For example, let’s say you’re interested in answering such questions as: “Where people want to know which digital marketing courses are available on the web?”
Search for digital marketing courses.
On the first lines you can see related topics that include your search keywords and by clicking on the first result you can see all that keyword-related queries.
Here you can sort the queries by their type (questions, answer, post, profile, topic and blog), topics (from all people or topics that you follow), author and time.
If you want to find all the questions related to a certain topic, just click the topics section on the left, and you’ll see all the results. On the top you’ll see the topics with most followers. Let’s see what’s there.
Here you’ll find the topic information in detail. Click on the Questions tab and view all the questions sorted from newest to oldest, then pick a question and write a useful answer.
Try to find relevant questions, if you have difficulties finding the right topic. You’ll see topics assigned to your questions at the top.
Related: Good and Bad Reasons to Become an Entrepreneur
Write Useful & Trackable Answers to Your Questions
This might seem a little tricky sometimes because you’ll have to combine your business promotion with writing something useful for the Quora community.
Keep in mind is that by spamming and providing a non-relevant answer to the question isn’t the best strategy. Be sure to write quality answers, otherwise you’ll simply get banned.
Make your answers easy to read and easy to understand. Everyone wants clear answers to their question.
Always add formatting to your answer. Make important headlines bold. Add hyperlinks from third-party websites that might confirm your thoughts to the answer.
Don’t make your answers too short, deliver as much information as the question requires, and don’t make them too long to read where readers might getting bored.
Using videos and photos in your answers is a great idea. This simple trick engages the viewers and makes them spend more time reading your answer – which is a signal for Quora to consider your answer useful and rank it on top.
You’ll soon get upvotes and your next answers will rank even higher. As your account becomes trustworthy to Quora, your answers will start to rank easily on high positions and will get more upvotes.
Make your answers trackable. What do I mean by “trackable”? If you want to answer questions and also track the traffic that comes to your website, use Google Analytics UTM parameters for tracking traffic and conversions.
Tip: Use an engaging photo or a video at the top of your answer, because when someone scrolls through the answers, Quora partially shows your answer (only the first section).
As you can see in the screenshot below, the answer is collapsed and because there isn’t any visual element like a video, it isn’t that attractive enough to click for opening the whole version.
In the screenshot below we have the opposite. Undoubtedly, you are more likely to visit the answers containing visual content. It’s pretty much a fact, so no need to dig into human psychology :).
Use SEMrush For Finding High Ranking Quora Questions
Yes. You’re right!
SEMrush can be a great friend when it comes to finding relevant questions for your business. How?
I’ll walk you through the instructions step by step!
For example, if you want to target Quora questions that are relevant to software engineering, search quora.com domain on Semrush, and add Advanced Filter, where you should include the keywords: “software engineering.”
Sort the positions in ascending order.
Boom. And we have the list the questions that contain the term “software engineering”. You can also sort them by their search volume. This query contains about 3,377 results. Not bad, right?
So, you have all the questions in your hand that contains the keyword you want, but think about how many word combinations you can mix for getting more Quora questions.
Also, you can use SEMrush for finding relevant keywords and combinations of the keywords you are searching for. Pick the Keyword Analytics tab from the left and search for the “software engineering” key term there.
Then scroll down to Phrase Match Keywords section (ah, 5,266 related keywords!).
Click on the View full report button on the right, and you will see all the matching phrases. Repeat this several times and you’ll get tons of new ideas. Don’t forget to have your keywords on a spreadsheet.
Bonus Tip: If you want to target commercial intent keywords and find questions that rank first for that keywords, simply sort the results by their CPC (you’ll see this button right next to sorting options).
The Golden Rule of Marketing. Test, Test and Test.
As you’ve already put UTM tracking codes in your answers for every link that points to your website, it’s important to track visits, average duration that visitors stay on your website, bounce rates, conversions and any other analytic data that you have.
High bounce rate and low average time from Quora means that people are coming to your website and don’t find the answer that they’re looking for.
Maybe you have to change the format of your answers? Maybe you’re not answering the right questions. Or your page content isn’t good enough for making visitors stay longer.
When we started using Quora back in February, traffic wasn’t that great and neither were the conversions. For the whole month we got only 200 visits from Quora.
I started answering other questions besides the business-related ones so Quora wouldn’t ban my account. Quora marketing is a cool thing as long as you give value with your answers, so don’t forget to add some useful information too.
Month by month the traffic increased and today we get about 200 visits daily and the conversion rate is about 19%.
I always try to improve answers for getting more conversions, and it’s all about testing different versions of answers.
Yes, you can update your answers whenever you want and it won’t affect the upvotes you’ve already gained with the previous version of your answer. Pretty cool, isn’t it?
Compare all the data you have at the end of every week. That will help you understand what’s going wrong with your strategy. If your traffic goes down you might be answering non-relevant questions or if the visitors aren’t converting you might have some problems with your website.
Conclusion
I will start with the most important thing. Always test! Test everything!
Change your bio text and see if you get new followers.
Change the format of your answers and see if you’re getting more views and upvotes.
Testing is huge if you do it right. So start thinking of different formats of your answers.
You can divide your answers into several types:
- Answers Including images/videos or other visual content.
- Answers with quotations from influencers in your field.
Use trackable links (you can use Campaign URL Builder by Google Analytics for creating trackable links) and compare the traffic & conversions for different campaigns.
Share your answer on your social media accounts. Hey! Maybe your answer is really worth upvoting! Just make it visible! Maybe you are lucky enough to have some friends who will also upvote your answer!
Don’t forget to answer other questions along with promoting your business. You remember the golden rule of Quora, don’t you? Always provide value to Quora community! Sounds creepy? I am sure you don’t want to get banned either way.
Expect targeted audience and boost in your conversions if you are doing Quora marketing right.
You need to be patient. Don’t expect your answers to appear at the top in several days. It took me about 10 months to gain 1.2 million views and a looooot of answers.
Work harder and harder. And don’t forget that Quora has about 470 million active users and the number is actually growing. You want to take your chance in bringing value to the community and to your business right?
Go ahead and get on it now. Good luck!
About the Author: Roman Daneghyan is the Chief Marketing Officer of Renderforest. He is specialist in Content Marketing, SEO, Social Media Marketing and Link Building. Favourite quote is by Gary Vee: “I Love the people and the hustle”.
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Source: The Daily Egg
Amenorhu kwaku is an author, internet marketer, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of SuccessValley, a network community for students and aspiring entrepreneurs. He is also the founder of Republik City News and Whoop, a news portal and a business directory.
