What is Quora?
Quora is an online platform founded in 2009 by Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever, where knowledge is shared and questions are asked and answered by a community of users. Here's what makes Quora unique:
- Social networks: Users can follow topics, questions, and other users, creating a personalized, learning-focused experience.
- Diverse expertise: Quora attracts experts and enthusiasts from different fields, offering a variety of opinions and detailed answers.
- Content quality: The site values high-quality contributions through a positive vote system that makes it possible to filter and highlight the most useful answers.
- Direct interaction: Unlike search engines, Quora offers direct interaction with the authors of the answers, allowing for a richer exchange and clarifications if necessary.
- Access to niche knowledge: The platform is particularly useful for finding specific information and varied opinions on niche topics.
Quora stands out as a space where the exchange of information goes beyond simple research to integrate human expertise and personal experiences, thus enriching understanding on a multitude of topics.
Features
There are a lot of reasons. Basically, it gives us great opportunities to promote our businesses.
If you're curious about why you should use Quora and beyond, here are some of the biggest benefits of using Quora.
RECOMMENDED READING: How do I advertise with Quora Ads?
1. Source of Inspiration for Blogging
For a blogger looking for fresh, relevant topics, Quora is a gold mine of ideas.
It is a platform where inspiration is constantly renewed by the curiosities and concerns of Internet users from all over the world.
- Diversity of topics: Find ideas on a wide range of topics, from the most general to the most niche.
- Real-time interactions: Find out what people want to know now and what questions are most interesting.
Quora excels as a brainstorming tool for bloggers, turning content curation from a chore into a captivating adventure through current audience questions.
2. Establishing your expertise
Quora is not only a forum, it is an arena where you can build and demonstrate your expertise, thereby gaining credibility and visibility in your field.
- Creating an expert profile: Showcase your qualifications and share answers that highlight your expertise.
- Public engagement: Receive positive votes and comments that strengthen your reputation.
The influence gained on Quora can transcend the platform, establishing users as trusted authorities across digital borders.
3. Sales Boost
Quora can be a powerful lever for conversions, offering a platform to reach a target audience with compelling responses that may include discreet calls to action.
- Affiliate links: Integrate affiliate links into quality responses to encourage purchases.
- Content strategy: Direct users to in-depth articles on your site that complement your answers.
If used wisely, Quora can act as an indirect sales channel, but care should be taken to maintain a balance between providing value and promoting products.
4. Improving Writing Skills
Quora is a gym for writers; each response is a chance to refine your style, try new formats, and receive constructive feedback from an engaged community.
- Daily practice: Use Quora as a daily writing challenge to refine your art.
- Immediate feedback: Evaluate the impact of your writing through user interactions.
While Quora can help improve writing, staying open to criticism and continuing to learn is critical to truly benefit from this exercise.
5. Discovering New Audiences
With a massive and diverse user base, Quora is the perfect playground for exploring and engaging new audiences interested in your knowledge or services.
- Exposition: Access a vast network of active users to expand your influence.
- Targeted segmentation: Join specific groups by answering questions in particular niches.
Exploring new audiences on Quora requires a specific content strategy to ensure you're reaching the right users with the right message.
6. Connect with influencers
Quora is a springboard for connecting with leading influencers and thinkers in a multitude of fields, opening doors to potential collaborations and mutual learning.
- Influencer network: Interact with opinion leaders and build professional relationships.
- Cross-visibility: Increase your own visibility by interacting with popular profiles.
While Quora offers valuable networking opportunities, success in this endeavor requires an authentic approach and a meaningful contribution to discussions.
7. Continuous learning
Quora is an unofficial learning institute where every question and answer broadens your knowledge horizon, keeping you up to date with the latest trends and information.
- Learning resources: Enjoy unlimited access to knowledge shared by experts.
- Interactive education: Ask questions, get answers, and engage in meaningful dialogue.
While Quora is a fantastic learning platform, users should remain critical and seek to verify information because not all answers are created equal.
8. Finding Reliable Answers
Quora serves as a centralized hub for finding in-depth, well-informed answers, often provided by professionals and enthusiasts who truly understand the topics covered.
- Reliability: Trust a community of professionals to get accurate answers.
- Diversity of perspectives: Benefit from a range of answers offering different perspectives on the same question.
Quora is a valuable resource for quality responses, but constant vigilance is needed to separate the chaff from the chaff in a sea of varied content.
9. Visibility on leading platforms
Exceling at responding on Quora can open unexpected doors, such as being quoted or republished on leading media platforms, at no additional cost.
- Publishing opportunities: See your best Quora answers being reposted on reputable sites.
- Professional recognition: Increase your credibility as a writer published on renowned platforms.
Publishing on prestigious sites via Quora is a golden opportunity, but it requires consistency in the quality and originality of the answers provided.
10. Earn money
The Quora partner program proves that the platform is not only a space for exchanging knowledge, but also a potential revenue generator for those who ask engaging questions.
- Monetizing questions: Ask engaging questions and take advantage of the views they generate.
- Partnership program: Help share advertising revenue through your contributions on Quora.
The earning potential on Quora is real, but it requires strategy and persistence because compensation is linked to the real added value you bring to the community.
How do I use Quora?
To use Quora, you need to create an account. Then you can learn the basic functions of the website. Don't worry, creating the account and navigating the site is very easy. Plus, it's free!
1. Create a Quora account
When you visit Quora For the first time, you will be asked to log in or create an account on this colorful screen:
On this screen, click “Sign Up With Email.” After completing this page, you can complete the other usual account creation requirements, such as adding a photo to your profile and connecting with friends on the site.
You can then start following the topics that interest you. Quora is the perfect blend of a search engine and social media. You follow things on the site, but the focus is on topics, like the ones shown below, rather than on people. Regardless, what you choose to follow will be the content of your feed.
2. Ask questions on Quora
After creating an account and choosing what topics to follow, you can start using Quora. This includes asking questions about the site.
To ask a question on Quora, click on the red “Add a question or link” option in the top right corner. A box similar to the one below should appear:
Enter your question and click “Add a question.” Quora will ask you to select and review topics that are relevant to this question. After that you just wait for people to respond.
3. Answering questions on Quora
On the other side of Quora, it is possible to answer questions from other users.
Before explaining to you how Answer questions on Quora, let's see why you should do it.
The only reason you should answer someone's question on Quora is if you have a high-quality, honest, and accurate answer. Don't answer user questions with nonsense. The only way a website like Quora can thrive is if all users respect each other's requests and responses.
That said, answering questions on Quora is easy. Your feed will be composed of questions related to the various topics you have chosen to follow. Click on one of these questions that you have a solid answer for, then click the “Answer” button.
Feel free to submit answers on Quora as you please, but make sure they're accurate and helpful to the user who asked the question.
4. Vote the answers on Quora
Another Quora feature that is useful for users is the upvote and downvote option. If you see an answer on Quora that you think answers the question asked perfectly, you can rate it. On the other hand, if you see an inaccurate and uninformative answer, you can downgrade it.
The number of positive and negative votes on a given answer affects its visibility. If a response has a lot of upvotes, it's considered valid and Quora will put it at the top of the list of responses. If a response has more downvotes, users consider it invalid and Quora won't put it at the top of the list.
This is what the screen under the answer section on Quora looks like. The positive vote button is shown on the left. The negative vote button isn't labeled, but it's the one that points downwards on the right. I circled it for reference:
5. Create an intriguing bio!
It's only the first step, but it's critical to your success on Quora. When other users start coming across your answers, the first thing they're likely to do is visit your profile page. You need to impress them, intrigue them, and give the impression of a thought leader who knows the ropes.
Choose a profile photo where your face is clearly visible, with bonus points for the big smile!
Add your job title and don't forget to add a few words about yourself. You can talk about your professional responsibilities, but also show your human face and include a few words about your hobbies, etc. Here's what it looks like on my profile page:
Gloria, who taught me a lot about Quora at the beginning, is another good example of a good bio. She even has a video!
The “Top Quora Writer” and “Published Author” badges add even more credibility to your profile. You can't control everything, but if you've achieved these titles, a bit of bragging wouldn't hurt. Take a look at the “References and highlights” section of Magda's profile, our brand manager:
Once your profile is ready, there's nothing stopping you from finding those questions that you can't expect valuable answers to!
Don't just shoot blindly and start answering every Quora question you encounter. While there are many that get hundreds of thousands or even millions of views, there are also some that don't get as many views, let alone drive traffic to external sites.
But above all, prepare a list of keywords related to what you want to market. Keywords that are related to your product or service and the benefits it provides to users.
A tool like Answer the Public can be very helpful if you're having trouble coming up with keyword ideas.
Simply type in your keywords into the search bar on their site and you'll discover various charts featuring long-tail keywords related to your main keyword.
In addition to that, I've already mentioned the benefits, and in our case, it would be about discovering customer feedback, for example. While it's not a primary keyword that would come to mind when you think of a media monitoring tool, it's certainly worth exploring such topics, and I'd recommend that you think of keywords that apply to your product in a similar way - not directly but more relevant to what your product brings to people.
Searching Quora is obviously your best bet when it comes to finding relevant discussions. You can filter your keywords by:
- Type
- Topics
- Author
- And the weather
You can also take advantage of the fact that Quora ranks exceptionally well on Google. Just type your keywords into Google and add the formula site:quora.com, and the majority of results that will appear will be different Quora questions that contain a given keyword.
A few tips concerning the questions themselves. Each Quora question is assigned a number of followers and views. Ideally, you want these questions to already have some commitment, as in the example below:
This question has a following that should allow you to get a reasonable number of views once you're in a good position, and those 57,000 views indicate that the question itself is getting significant Quora traffic that your business could benefit from.
On the other hand, there are questions like the following:
Very few followers and low views won't get you very far at this point. There is a huge difference between these two articles, mainly due to the time that has passed since they were published. The first was published 5 years ago, while the second only appeared on Quora last month. While the most recent question may generate some traffic over time, it's questions like example #1 that you should target first. 1 that you want to target first.
6. Tips for editing
That's what I really like when it comes to creating content for Quora. It offers you a large number of possibilities to personalize your answers. Besides the obvious elements like bold, italics, or bullets, you can add images and videos, quotes, lines of code, or even embed tweets, like I did in the example below:
You want your answers to stand out and using some of the things I mentioned above will definitely help you do that. The three things I use most frequently are fat, images, and videos.
However, don't overload your answers with any of these items. Using too many bold characters reduces the readability of your answers, and using too many images or videos causes someone to scroll and scroll through your answers while losing sight of the purpose of your response.
My recommendations would be as follows:
- Use bold for the titles of different paragraphs or at most twice per paragraph
- 3-4 images maximum per response
- no more than 2-3 videos per answer
While I don't know exactly how the Quora algorithm works, based on Gloria and my experience, I can say that enriching your answers with visual content helps them rank higher.
We've both written over a hundred responses in the last two years, some with images and video, some without, and I must say that responses with these additional media are ranked higher.
Keep in mind that some Quora questions are very competitive and have already been answered hundreds of times. There will be cases where, even if you've written the best possible answer and added the best quality photos and videos, you won't be able to make it to the top of all the answers to a given question. But don't worry, because you'll still be able to generate traffic to your site.
FAQs
How does Quora work?
When you ask a question on Quora, it goes to the community of experts who can answer it. These experts can provide thoughtful, well-informed answers to help you make better decisions.
Is Quora free to use?
Yes, Quora is a platform that is completely free to use.
Can I add a link to my website?
Yes, you can add a link to your site where a user can find more information on the subject. The link should be relevant to the question.
Final review
Maybe I haven't mentioned it yet, but the key to reaping the benefits of your Quora business is to be consistent. Find time to answer at least one question per day, if not more. Above all, be authentic and share your knowledge as best you can.
When trying to promote your business, don't be too pushy and don't try to make too many promises. Also, remember that it's helpful to mention the pros and cons of what you're offering. This will make you more trustworthy in the eyes of readers and indicate that you are not only there to promote your product.
To successfully use Quora for business purposes, mix your professional knowledge and hobbies, and you should be on your way to fame.
As I mentioned at the beginning, you won't succeed overnight, but a snowball effect will start to work in your favor as you contribute to the platform.