Quora is the 60th most visited website in the United States, where thousands of potential customers are asking questions every single day. If you own a business, there’s a good chance you are a subject matter expert in your industry, and answering questions on Quora is a great way to build awareness, generate leads, and increase sales. It’s easy to get started, there’s no time commitment, and it’s a great way to supplement existing content marketing.
In this guide, we’ll take a look at how to create an effective profile, find the highest-traffic questions, post the most engaging answers, and measure the results.
Getting Started
Quora requires free registration before posting or answering questions. The easiest way to sign-up is using Google or Facebook – especially because it will automatically pull in your profile image and related personal data – but you may also register with a work email address.
There are several key elements that make up an effective user profile:
- Full Name – Quora requires users to use their real full name (unless you happen to have a well-known stage name like Bono or Marilyn Monroe). If you don’t, you may be flagged by users and potentially banned from the website, so it’s a good idea to stick to the rules.
- Profile Image – The best profile image is often a simple headshot. Why? A recent Georgia Institute of Technology study found that Instagram photos showing faces tended to get 38% more likes than photos not showing faces.
- Profile Credential – The profile credential is a brief one-liner that appears on all answers that highlight your expertise when answering a given question. There is a generic credential in your profile, but you can customize this for each answer.
- Biography – Your biography should be a simple sentence or two that mentions your areas of expertise and company name. This section can also include outbound links that may be helpful in generating some traffic to a website or blog.
After signing up and creating a profile, you should also complete the “Credentials & Highlights” section with employment, education, and location information, as well as add topics of interest under the “Knows About” section on your profile page. This will help build trust with readers and ensure that you’re seeing relevant questions.
Finding Questions
The next step is finding questions to answer that will have the biggest return on your time investment. In short, the goal is to find questions that are generating the most ongoing search traffic with the greatest number of followers and the fewest competing answers.
The best way to accomplish this is using Google search with queries formatted like “site:quora.com [keyword phrase]”. This technique will return a list of relevant questions for a given topic ranked by the amount of likely search traffic from Google.
For example, a startup providing meal planning services may use a Google search query that looks something like this:
After creating a short-list of questions, you should look at each question’s number of followers and competing answers. The number of followers can be found just below the question on Quora. Followers will receive an email update whenever a new answer is submitted, which means that your answer will receive some immediate views from highly-targeted users.
The ideal questions have a high number of followers with relatively few answers, which increases the likelihood of your answer being viewed.
Finally, it’s helpful to setup a Google Alert to track any mentions of your own company on Quora. This can be done using the search query above along with your company name instead of a keyword phrase. For instance, Audience Ops may create an alert for “site:quora.com audienceops”. This way, you can proactively respond to questions related to your brand over time without having to constantly visit Quora’s website to search for them.
Crafting Answers
The best approach to answering questions on Quora – or anywhere, really – is prioritizing education over sales. Try to address readers’ pain points with words before addressing them with a product. If you demonstrate a deep understanding of their problem, readers will be naturally inclined to want to learn more about your products or services. A simple link or mention should be enough to spur a click-through and a potential lead or sale.
Here’s an example answer for the question “What are the best apps for meal planning?”:
There are several elements to note in this answer and include in your own answers:
- Subject Matter Expertise – The profile credential makes it clear that the author is a subject matter expert as the founder of a company in the space.
- Demonstrate Understanding – The answer begins by demonstrating a deep understanding of the problem while remaining impartial using phrases like “it depends.”
- Educational Link – There’s a link to a relevant company blog post that’s designed to generate inbound traffic that could, in turn, convert into e-mail leads or sales.
- Address Pain Points – The content of the blog post is reiterated below the link to provide real value to the reader on Quora without forcing a click-through.
- Brief Mention – The end of the question (not shown) states that the author is the founder of a meal planning app while providing a brief overview and link to the website.
It’s also helpful to include images and other media to differentiate your answer from others when readers are skimming the page. If the image is custom-designed and branded, it may even be used by bloggers searching Quora for content marketing ideas.
Measuring Results
The final step is measuring the results of Quora outreach efforts to make sure that it’s worth your time investment.
There are many ways to measure the results of marketing campaigns, but the most straightforward is using Google Analytics with UTM codes and goals. UTM codes are simply benign parameters added to a URL to track different types of information, such as a campaign name or source, while goals track what percentage of visitors take an action like signing up for a newsletter or purchasing a product.
Here are some UTM parameters that are helpful when tracking Quora answers:
| Campaign Source (utm_source) | Required. This should be used to identify the source as Quora. Example: “quora”. |
| Campaign Name (utm_campaign) | This is used for identifying a specific promotion or campaign. Example: “winter_sale”. |
| Campaign Content (utm_content) | This is used for A/B testing. For example, you may want to see if an image performs better for similar questions. Example: “withimage”. |
A Quora link with UTM parameters may look something like this:
http://my-website.com/my-blog-post?utm_source=quora&utm_campaign=winter_sale&utm_content=withimage
While setting up Google Analytics is beyond the scope of this guide, the core idea is to create a custom URL for Quora links to track click-throughs and then determine what percentage of those click-throughs are converting into email leads and/or sales.
Takeaways
Quora is a great way for founders to reach a highly-targeted demographic. Unlike blogging, it doesn’t require a large time investment or writing skills, and it can be done sporadically as a way to complement other content marketing efforts. The keys to success are picking the right questions, effectively addressing pain points, mentioning your company, and then tracking the results to see what works.
