Marketing businesses were never this easy, thanks to the internet. No one can complain about the lack of opportunities to promote their brands & meet their business goals. When it comes to promoting business online, one platform that comes to my mind is Quora.

My favorite & go-to place to promote my own content, find blog ideas, find the target audience’s problems, and most importantly, get leads. Other than sharing my knowledge, I also get to learn so much from Quora, both technical & non-technical stuff (I’ve discovered myself on Quora).

In this guide, I will be talking about Marketing on Quora in detail & hence this will be the complete guide covering everything you will ever need to win at Quora marketing.

I have a ton of content to cover in this guide, without further ado, let’s begin. But before that, get something to eat, you’ll be hooked to this post for quite a while.

First things first, What is Quora?

As a one-liner explainer, Quora is a question & answer platform. Quora has every topic under the sun & has a ton of questions related to that topic. This means, that there’s room for every single niche and you can market your product & services related to any topic under the sun.

If you are just starting out as a blogger, Quora is a great place to practice writing too. I’ll talk about this later but now that you understand Quora, let me share some stats about Quora in a beautiful infographic.

What Are The Benefits of Marketing on Quora?

Sure, Quora is a great place to learn and gain answers to questions that bother you the most. However, Quora is a marketing gold mine if you want to get leads & generate referral traffic.

I still get 30%-45% of referral traffic from Quora to one of my blogs.

This is coming out of the experience, Quora has real people seeking advice from real people, no search engines or bots get in between. You can reach a very large audience if you just hold onto a habit of helping people out.

[check out the About Quora page]

With that said, let me share some benefits of marketing on Quora.

#1 Get referral traffic

Referral traffic is more important than backlinks in terms of the medium & ways it is generated.

When you get traffic from other than a business website/blog or a personal website/blog, it’s called referral traffic. It’s needless to say that referral traffic is one of the ranking factors search engines consider to rank web pages on SERPs.

With Quora being a highly authoritative website across the globe, getting referral traffic from Quora means great value for your website/blog. According to Alexa Quora gets ~50 of its traffic from the search engines. Furthermore, take a look at the screenshot below, the Global rank of Quora is 82 & it ranks 46 in the United States.

Referral traffic from a website of this stature is nothing but a gift.

Above this fold, there’s another cherry on the cake that awaits you. With traffic from Quora, the bounce rate is very less as only qualified visitors hop onto your blog webpage.

#2 Boost Your Authority & Brand Awareness

Quora is a platform where people come with their queries and look for solutions that are practical and simple(at least simply put) & easy to digest. Basically, Quora is a platform where people look for advice or opinion on any topic under the sun.

So it doesn’t matter what’s your expertise, you’ll always find people with questions that bothers them.

One important point here is that Quora is not a fair that can get your more business directly. First, you should add value to the platform and then the platform will return you the favor.

How?

Say, you’re a fitness expert and want to share your knowledge on various fitness tips. Now, if you start promoting yourself with your in-depth answers to high follower questions two things will happen.

First is that you will rank higher algorithmically because Quora’s algorithm is meant to rank answers that are in-depth higher than those which aren’t in-depth. Because that’s what it’s supposed to do.

Second, mods will find your answer, mark it as spam, send you a message that the moderation has found your answer to violating Quora terms, and your answer will be collapsed. The algorithm ranks content blindly and mods audit the content and approve for further ranking.

How is your content ranked on Quora?

To understand the ranking mechanism, visualize this.

Your answer will be shown to a small portion of users following the topic or directly the question you’ve answered. If they interact well with them, i.e upvote or share or the best – comment. It is a green signal for the algorithm. Your answer will be shown to more people in their feeds who follow that topic and the related ones.

If it resonates with them too, it will be shown to even more people. This way, you’ll start reaching more and more people and in parallel, you’ll start ranking higher & higher, eventually at the top-unmovably at the top.

#3 You Can Get to Know Your Audience Closely

Quora is a platform that has real people asking questions and seeking real answers(advice and/or opinion). This means you have an opportunity to get closer to your target audience without even knowing them. They post their questions, which are a reflection of the problems they face.

Attention to detail and presence of mind is the key to winning in this situation. Pay very close attention to the question, understand the intent, and think about how your products and service can solve their problem, and answer it.

This doesn’t mean writing a blog post as an answer. The tone should be very friendly and soothing. As if, you are talking to that person face to face & helping him out.

Above this, Quora can be a great source to get content ideas. Simply enter your target keyword(s), look for topics and questions related to that keyword, group’em up, and start writing your heart out.

Like in the example above, if you don’t find anything worth spending time on, click on the search <keyword> button and you’ll be taken to the search results page containing all questions containing all variations of the entered keyword.

One of the most important things that will happen by continuously doing this is you will establish yourself as an authoritative profile for your niche.

Note: Spend some time on the search results page and find questions that are highly specific and sense the urgency and intent of the person asking that question. If you can provide good answers, you’ll not only earn followers & upvote, but you’ll earn respect and take one more step towards establishing as a brand. Don’t answer just because it has too many followers, answer it because the person needs an answer desperately.

#4 Consumer Can Find & Learn About Your Brand

Now that Quora has a foolproof Ad platform up & running, many brands have hopped on to Quora to run ads and bring more awareness about their brands. There’s hardly any brand on this planet that doesn’t have a mention on Quora. According to a Huffington Post, 84 out of the top 100 brands have at least one mention of it on Quora.

This means, there is a wide opportunity for you to establish yourself as a brand. Quora bio is a great way to promote your brand while people are reading your answers.

Take a look at this answer from Marius Kramer, who’s a blockchain expert & cryptocurrency investing consultant.

Give me one reason to not click on his answer when I’m desperately looking for this information, I’ll wait.

That’s how you should promote, (of course, while being helpful) yourself r your business in Quora bios.

#5 It Can Improve Your Search Rankings

Did you know that almost ~50% of all the traffic Quora gets is from search engines, globally?

Quora marketing: Search traffic of Quora from Google

Now, imagine your answers ranking number for those questions. Imagine the exposure you’ll get from the search engines and the leads.

Now I don’t intend to say that you should place your links everywhere in your answers ranking well on search engines and within Quora. This is an open invitation to the mods to collapse or delete your answer.

Keep in mind that like every other social platform or any business for that matter, Quora also wants its users to remain on their platform. The more time the user stays on the platform means more ad revenue. Help Quora to retain the users on their platform, it will help you by ranking higher & higher.

Key to winning on any social media platform 😉

#6 Content Marketing Works Well On Quora

Did you know those B2B businesses that blog consistently generate 67% more leads than those businesses that don’t?

Well, how about blogging on Quora?

With so many benefits of Quora I’ve already mentioned (more to come ahead), you can imagine the multiple folds of ‘67% more leads’ you can get from Quora Marketing(if done right).

Content marketing traditionally has a different tone than I recommend having for Quora marketing. I’ll say again, Quora is a community of real people, so keep your answers that way. People turn to Quora to get answers from humans, or else search engines do a way better job at spitting “somewhat” relevant links in SERPs.

Don’t be like search engines.

When people look for answers on Quora, they are looking for personal experience, not copy-paste jargon that is easily available on the web. Add value to the platform & to the user’s time.

You’ll be rewarded for this, lately but surely.

#7 Solve Problems of Your Target Audience Directly

Here’s a story.

I wrote an answer on the best time to post on Facebook while I was commuting to work. Turns out I made it to the top and this answer is the 4th most popular answer on my profile. It’s a simple answer & is less than 300 words long, and it still ranks #1 for that question since I wrote it last year.

I admit this was serendipity at first. But since I noticed this answer ranking so well I analyzed it I realized a couple of things:

No self-promotion
The on-point answer, no bluff whatsoever
Easy to understand & simple to digest &
Bang on credential for the answer
You can try this for your answers, this will work like a charm.

The best part? This is a blog topic I’m working on currently. Sure, worthy serendipity now!

#8 Earn Mentions in Top Publications

This is the most fruitful reason to spend time on Quora Marketing. Getting featured on top publications that are read by millions across the globe.

A simple Google search would tell you I’m not bluffing here.

Hacker Noon, Forbes, Huffington Post, Foss Bytes, Entrepreneur, INC magazine, you name it. All these publications are pulling top-notch content from Quora.

Isn’t that amazing?

That’s how Nicolas Cole became a sensation and reached the front page of the ‘front page of the internet’ – Reddit, he also has columns on all major publications including those I mentioned above.

I said Quora is a gold mine. I said right!

That was a little bit about the reasons to have Quora as your marketing prime. I’m sure you’re convinced in favor of Quora by now.

But how do you make it large here?

Let’s see how!

Best Practices & Tips to Win at Quora Marketing

While these best practices I’ve mentioned herewith are open-ended and may not work for all businesses. But I’ll share what I’ve learned in all these years of being an active Quoran.

#1 Write highly targeted content

As I mentioned above, Quora has an audience that looks for solutions, not self-promoting blog posts. Develop a style that’s unique. Maybe a unique closing line or writing style that people would remember & get addicted to it(that’s how fictional writers rule Quora)

Furthermore, have an active voice tone while answering your question. Write as if you’re talking to that user in person and help solve the problem.

You can find highly specific questions on Quora and hence it will be a highly targeted audience that has a very high chance of conversion(if any). The downside of highly specific questions is that it mostly has a very thin followership initially. But once you answer and as it starts reaching feeds of people who follow those topics, that’s when traction begins.

If you have an online business, you can use Quora to generate leads. Here’s how.

Find questions that are unanswered and are highly specific.
Answer it in detail without bluffing much
Don’t self-promote like a desperate horny dog, stay calm and leave a decent CTA at the end of your answer.
Writing half answer and leaving a link to your blog post to continue reading is the deadliest crime you can commit on Quora.
Have your business logo as your profile picture to spread awareness.
Include a link to your homepage strictly only in ‘FOOTNOTES’, nowhere else.

#2 Brew your Quora profile neatly

When people find your answer really helpful, they are highly likely to hop onto your profile. That’s when your conversion skills come into play. This will be like closing sales deals. Once a user arrives at your profile, they should either convert or become a loyal reader across your presence on the web.

Here are some tips to create an outstanding profile on Quora:

Highlight the essentials on your profile ‘above the fold’. Earlier the better. Don’t include CTAs in the middle, users are more like to skip it. Either have it at the beginning or the end.
Add links in the bio. Be it your business website or personal website/blog. Have a funnel on your website to convert users once they’re on your website. Once they arrive on your website, you own them completely(unless they abandon your website)
Mention your area of expertise on your Quora profile. One liner, but a powerhouse of your skills & expertise.
Link social profiles on Quora so that people can communicate on their preferred channels. Above this, you can easily share your answers on those social profiles with a click of a button.

#3 Utilize Quora as a repurposing platform

Repurposing on Quora is as tricky as it is on any other platform. It takes time & patience to first come up with topics where you can plug in your already published content.

You need to find questions that aren’t directly inclined to the topic you want to repurpose. You need to find the question(s) that intersect with the topic and not parallel.

That’s the trick.

This way, you will not only create awesome content but also create new content that you can use as a reference for your blog posts or other answers.

The key is to hold the user to your work. That’s it.

You can also join spaces (or create your own, if you have permission) and repurpose your content there. Quora is genuinely a beautiful place to market your business. But make sure you don’t overdo it. If you create content only for getting traffic from Quora, you’re mistaken. Quora will not only collapse your answers, but it will also ban your account.

#4 Find the best writers in your niche

Quora has 40 million active users in the US alone and 300 million active users worldwide. Finding an authoritative profile is a piece of cake.

Simply head over to the topic of your interest & find the most viewed writers. If you are planning to grow & establish your presence on Quora, you can turn on the notifications and keep an eye on the questions they answer.

Use the sky scrapper technique & build content on top of that. Questions that influencers answer get high-volume traction, you can reap the benefits of that exposure.

Also, writing magnetic content is an important aspect you should consider. No, I don’t mean clickbait. You will lose before even you begin the race.

Write authoritative & original content that does nothing but help the users. Content with little to no self-promotions. Even if you include links to your blogs, leave them in the footnote, Quora loves when you leave your links in footnotes as they depict professionalism in your answers. Also, footnotes show that you are not imposing your blog links on the reader & Quora itself.

Start doing this for all your answers, if you are just starting out, you’ll see the difference.

#5 Writing Ethics on Quora

Quora is getting more and more professional with each day passing. I remember days when Quora had an impression of a Q&A forum, it was also compared to Google Answers(which was a huge flop) and people predicted that the same thing will happen to Quora.

That was in 2014. I did not lose faith then, I won’t lose faith now.

Quora has gone past that clingy nickname and has become a one-stop solution to reach a highly targeted audience either for free or affordable ads.

This is an off-topic point, but I’ll say it anyway. The best part of Quora Ads is that the Ads appear just like questions. I don’t find the ads annoying as on other platforms, say YouTube or Google Adsense.

Here are some best practices for writing top-quality answers on Quora:

Use listicles (list-based articles), Quora loves it, Google loves it.
BNBR (Be Nice, Be Respectful), do not spread hatred on Quora by any means. This includes not talking ill about brands and people related to that brand.
Making your answers more helpful for people who’re seeking information.
Don’t write duplicate content. Unlike Medium, Quora doesn’t have an import feature(to avoid spamming). Therefore whenever you use content from other websites, including your own, make sure you mention the credits nicely and boldly.
Have helpful credentials that are related to the answers, else the default credential will be shown.

Here are some more resources officially from Quora for your reference.

#6 Break the visual pattern

This is a psychological trick I’ve used and observed across many top answers. Normally, when I open an answer to read answers to a question, I scroll through the answers as Chandler Bing does(not always).

Do you know what catches my attention? A broken pattern. If I see pictures at the beginning of all answers and suddenly if there isn’t, I stopped.

This has happened to you too, I know.

We, humans, are weird!

So if you see the top 10 answers have images at the beginning of their answers, you don’t have that way. If they don’t, you have it.

That’s a simple trick to gain attention on Quora, thank me later!

#7 Understand ranking strategy on Quora

These tips may not work the same for all answers, follow these plus your instincts, you’ll be good to go.

Don’t always answer a high follower question unless you have the best content that can beat all other existing ones.
Host sessions on topics you are familiar with and share the session details across your social networks. Hosting sessions may not be available for all users. Go to the Answers tab, if you have access you’ll see the ‘Start taking questions’ section as shown in the image below.

Spend time on Quora regularly. Fix a day & time and dedicated it to Quora, create batches of questions you will answer in a sitting. Create a spreadsheet and include links to the questions you want to answer. This way keeping things organized will be helpful in the long run.

How to Not Get Banned on Quora?

There’s a ton of content on Quora published by the mods on Quora, but I’ll mention a few that I realized in my active years on Quora.

Do not fake expertise, it won’t last long. Your content will speak for itself
Don’t over-promote
The one-liner is just a crime on Quora. Better don’t answer it at all
Drop a link to your website/blog & nothing more.
Ridicule language in comments or in answers. Quora has zero tolerance for this crap
Copied content without credits
Fake profile & details
Content like adult videos, racist remarks, fake news, etc

You can refer to this & this answer for more information. Also, go through Conduct Policy for more detailed information.

Final Thoughts on Quora Marketing

Did you know that the highest followed topic on Quora is Technology, with over 57 million followers? I’m yet to find a topic that’s both directly or indirectly ‘NOT’ related to technology.

300 million monthly active users asking billions of questions every single month is a pure gold mine for opportunities. I’m on my way to building authority on Quora with all that I knew about it, which I’ve mentioned in this post. I’m sure I’ll add value to your time and if I’ve missed mentioning anything that has worked for you? Share that in the comments section, let’s learn & grow together.

Do you know someone who’s looking for this information? Share this post with them. I’m active on Quora and answer questions related to digital marketing. Let’s connect & keep in touch on this beautiful platform.