Generating Traffic From Quora
Can you get traffic from Quora? Is it worth the effort? You tried answering a few questions but got banned? It sucks, I should know. But it’s also the biggest source of traffic for a lot of businesses.
What is Quora
I assume you know, and probably dislike, Quora. It’s a question-and-answer site and it’s hard to miss it. It pops up in your Google results and annoingly has a policy of hoarding knowledge. Because it blocks scrapers and has no public API Syften does not support it.
I asked several entrepreneurs about Quora and they all said they’ve managed to get some good traffic from there. Say what you will about their policy, it’s here to stay so better learn to use it. So let’s see how to write just a few answers and get some reasonable results.
Spam detector
The first time I tried Quora I thought I figured out a clever hack: I’ll just repost my answer to other equivalent questions. My excitement was short-lived as after just one day of cheerful copy-and-pasting I found my answers hidden and marked as spam.
If you trigger the spam detector or get reported by other users your answers will be deleted or “collapsed”. This will prevent you from answering the affected questions, essentially banning you from them. There is an appeal process you can try, but it didn’t work for me. My account was new, so I deleted it and tried again fresh.
Here is how Cyril Nicodeme from PDFShift.ioworked around it:
Once it was live, I spent a fair amount of time answering questions on Quora. This is hard work and a commitment until you’ve done them all ;) What I recommend, if you go that way, is to limit your answers to 3 per day to avoid being flagged.
I searched for the questions that match my criteria (convert HTML to pdf) and answered… all of them. It took me around 2 or 3 months to do that and to be honest, it was sometimes hard to find a way to write originally a new post… And having to limit to 3 was hard too because, after the third post, you start to get used to it, get focused, motivated and… you have to stop.
Quora lets you pitch your product directly, provided it really is relevant to the question.
But even with all this caution, sometimes my answers get flagged. When that happens I contact the support team and they reinstate them.
Which questions to answer
We’ve just seen why you shouldn’t answer every question all at once. So how should you prioritise your work?
Frank Heijdenrijk from Early User Growth provides an in-depth explanation of how to post to Quora. He advises answering questions with a lot of subscribers so they get a notification with your answer. This way targets active Quora users.
Others suggest answering the questions that rank high in Google search results for relevant queries. This way targets people doing Google searches.
I like to check which answers my competitors' full-time marketers have answered, and stick to those.
How to post
Quora questions are just one sentence, but try to figure out what pains lie underneath them. Then try to address them.
Here is a great answer about online web forms. Someone looking for a free online web form obviously doesn’t want to spend any money. He probably found a few paid online web form services but was dissatisfied with their pricing. Have a look at how the founder of QuestionScout nails that intent and positions his product:
For non-product-related questions have a look at Ryan Holiday. He likes to make his answers look like blog posts. He’s answering the question, and he’s helping, but he’s also linking profusely to his website (which contains CTAs).
Should you ask friends for upvotes?
Probably yes. Quora shows the readers who did the upvoting, and often we can see a company’s entire marketing team doing the upvoting. There seems to be no penalty for it and I think Quora likes that (more active accounts).
How to get started
- Create an account.
- Do a Google search for a query related to your business, if a Quora question shows up answer it.
- Identify your competitors' accounts with a Google search for
site:quora.com yourcompetitor.example.com, then see which questions they’re answering. - Get an upvote or two.
What to expect
You’ll get an initial spike of reads from the people subscribed to the questions, and a slow drip of people coming from Google over time.