SOP 042: How to get traffic from Quora

Goal: 
Directing traffic to your website using Quora.

Ideal Outcome: 
You’ll draw consistent qualified traffic, leads, and email subscribers to your website and business from Quora.

Prerequisites or requirements: 

Patience, a knack for writing and helping people, and, yes, a Quora account. 

Why this is important: 
Quora is where the smart kids go - some ask questions, others answer them. Using the right words on this playground can help you attract more website traffic, as well as generate more leads.

Where this is done: 
In your browser, on your Quora account.

When is this done: 
When you want to drive more traffic and leads to your website - or, in other words, anytime and all the time.

Who does this: 
You, your copywriter, a VA, or a combination of these.

1. Create at account at Quora.com.

• • You can either create a brand new account on Quora, or use your Google or Facebook account to sign in.

• • Get used to it - chances are you will spend quite some time around here, so it’s best to be on good terms with the platform and how it works.

  • If you are completely new to Quora, you will be walked through a brief profile setup process that includes selecting your interests, your area of expertise, what other language you want to use (aside from English), and so on.

Note: You only need to do this once. Change your profile only when there is something new you would like to add or edit - like a new achievement you would like to include in the bio, or a new picture that’s more relevant to your personal brand.

1. Write a detailed, compelling, and attractive About Me/Bio section

Go to your profile icon → click “Profile” → Write a description about yourself.

A good Bio/About Me will always include the following elements:

Social links.

Links to other pieces of content you have published (e.g. on different publications, especially if they are famous).

Any special offer you might have right now. DO make sure it’s something relevant to your areas of expertise and interests on Quora!

2. Add a good, professional picture. This will help you earn users’ trust.

3. Write a short description/tagline as well.

You can add this in the Add profile credential section of your profile.

This description should not be longer than 50 characters - but it DOES need to be very compelling and attractive.

Remember, your tagline will show at the top of each answer you offer on Quora. Therefore, you should be extra-attentive when you create it.

You can also customize taglines according to the different types of topics you want to cover in your answers. To do this, click on the two opposing arrows you will find in the upper right side of your answer → Edit Credential.

HOWEVER, the general advice is to stick to one tagline for all of your answers. Doing this will help you increase brand awareness.

4. Include your areas of expertise.

5. Include the cities you (have) live(d) in.

6. Add your education.

7. Include where you’ve worked/ are working right now.

 8. Connect your Social Media profiles.

To do this, go to your Quora settings account → Account → Connected accounts.

Follow the on-screen instructions to add each of the pages you want (you can connect your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts).

Do this once a week. It will help you ensure a streamline of questions to answer, and you will not miss out on any of the new questions popping up in your areas of interest.

Here are two methods you can follow to increase your odds of finding good, relevant questions in a short amount of time:

THE STALKER METHOD

1. Search for topics that are relevant to your business.

Use the search box to look for keywords that are relevant to your business and expertise.

You can learn more about running a proper keyword research by going through SOP 011 (web version).

2. When you created the profile, you selected topics that are of interest to you. For this reason, Quora will display questions pertaining to these topics in your newsfeed.

To speed things up, you can select the particular topic you want to find questions in from the bar in the left side of the screen.

3. Find the top Quora writers in these niches.

Open each question that is relevant to your business.

Read the answers and see who was voted best. This might be one of the best quora writers.

Repeat with every question that’s relevant to your business, regardless of how you found it (via search or via feed).

4. Go to the profile pages for these authors.

5. Click on Topics (in the list you’ll find under the profile picture).

6. Follow the topics they do that are relevant to your business.

7. Select questions to answer using the following criteria:

There’s a 7:1 followers to answers ratio. So, if there are 100 followers for the question, you should probably see somewhere around 1-2 answers.

The top answers don’t offer real value to the reader. If you feel it doesn’t actually answer the question, it is of no value to the person who asked the question (or other readers, for that matter).

The top answers are too promotional. Generally, if there’s a promotional link in the first couple of sentences, chances are the answer was offered for promotional value.

You can provide a personal take when you answer this question. If you have a personal story or a tip you’ve learned on your own skin and could help the user who asked the question, don’t hesitate to formulate an answer!

You can add an emotional element into your answer. Of course, you should only do this if it makes sense (e.g. insert a “first job” tip connected to the question into an emotional story on how you broke into Advertising).

The question is relevant to the offer you make in your Bio. Clearly, you can use your offer to answer the question - but make sure you are not overly promotional in any way.

When you find questions you would like to answer, click on the three dots in the top right side of the question and tick “Answer Later”.

THE KEYWORD METHOD

If you haven’t done this already, go through our Keyword Research and Mapping SOP .

Once you have a list of keywords you want to target, take each one and search it on Quora.

Save all questions that meet the criteria described in “The Stalker Method” using the same steps as above (point #7).

Do this once a week, once you have collected all the questions that are relevant to you and your business.

1. To answer all of the questions you’ve saved for later, go to your home page, click “Answer” → “Answer Later”.

2. Crafting excellent answers is, obviously, crucial if you want to use Quora to drive traffic. Here are the most important rules to remember when creating the lead-generating answers on this social platform:

Be personal, create a dialogue and appeal to emotion. Some might say digital channels have de-humanized communications - but studies say otherwise, actually. Using emotion and writing as if you were telling a story can actually boost your results.

Sumo has put together a list containing more than 400 “power words” (that use the emotional factor to increase engagement among readers). Check them out when you create your Quora answers, but be sure to use them carefully - too many of these can also make your content feel less substantial and useful.

Pain, contrast and motivation tend to work best in the “emotional” category.

Use figures of speech to exemplify your arguments - they add “color” to just about any answer, in any niche.

Use bold and italics to nuance your answers. For example, you can use bold to emphasize the most important parts of your answers and italics to mark the questions.

Avoid using “filler” words, such as “really” and “very”. They are very distracting and don’t offer value.

Use bullet points and numbers - they’ll make your answers more organized and easier to digest.

Don’t use more than two-three sentences per paragraph. A lot of your readers will be on their smartphones, checking out your awesome answers.

Develop your own style. People don’t come to Quora to see copy-pasted answers from articles they’ve already read on large publications. They come here for the humanity of the entire experience. They come here for the dialogue, for the originality, for the personal experiences of other people.

Use images. People on the Internet tend to be very visual, so adding pictures to your answers will only bring benefits.

Optimize your answers. Remember the keywords we were talking about before? Use them when creating your answers too. No need to go overboard with this, though - keyword stuffing is never a good idea, not on Quora, not anywhere else.

This is an optional step, meant to be applied for answers that gain a lot of traction.

1. Check your stats on Quora. To do this, simply go to the “Stats” section of your Quora profile.

You can select the timeframe for the stats you want Quora to display.

Stats are not everything when it comes to Quora - what really matters is that you drive leads to your website. However, keep in mind that, in general, stats and a high number of generated leads are quite tightly connected (the more traction you gain on Quora, the more likely it is you will boost the number of leads as well).

2. When you see one of your answers attracting a lot of attention, write a follow-up answer to lead readers to your website:

Include a link to your website (or a special offer you have one).

Make sure this is not too promotional - avoid hard asks (“Learn more about it here”) and click baits (“There are 10,000 more tips on this here”).

Avoid using the backlink right at the beginning of the answer - do it after the second paragraph at least.

Remember, it is very important to avoid being overly promotional. Not only will this make readers trust you less, but it can actually get you banned from Quora as well.