Today’s article is basically a simple guide on how to drive traffic to your blog using Quora. There are many ways for you to drive traffic (targeted or not) to your blog, be it through search engines, social media or paid advertisements. I would consider Quora as one of the most popular social media platforms.
“Traffic is the lifeline of all blogs“. Without it, you can’t effectively monetize your blog as you need visitors to make product sales, affiliate sales or even earn through advertisements, amongst other methods.
I have been using Quora lately to promote my blog posts and though I’m not getting much traffic, it’s almost always targeted traffic.
For those of you who are interested to drive traffic to your blog using Quora, read on.
What is Quora?
Simply put, Quora is a social media platform to connect everyone around the world in the form of questions and answers. You would have probably stumbled upon this website when you looked for answers using Google.
At the time of writing, Quora is ranked 142 globally and 62 in the United States according to Alexa’s rankings. This shows you how often Quora is used worldwide.
How it works is that you need to create a profile first before you can ask any question. Once you have done so, you’re allowed to ask virtually any question you want and most of the time you will get answers from other users.
If you’re shy, you can even ask questions anonymously.
Once you’re a member, you can answer any question as well. Furthermore, you’re allowed to insert images and add links into your answers, but not to the extent that it becomes spammy.
You can pretty much guess by now, how you can drive traffic to your blog with Quora.
Let’s get on with it.
How to drive traffic to your blog using Quora with these few steps
Disclaimer: I’m not getting thousands of visitors using Quora but I’ve at least had some targeted visitors.
I have listed a few basic steps to drive traffic using Quora which you can follow if you’re still new to the platform.
#1 Complete your profile page
The first thing to do after you have signed up for a Quora account is to complete your profile page.
As you can see on the image above, you need to fill in all of the information above. This is what others see when they decide to check out your profile.
Remember to update your profile picture as it’s easier to trust someone with a face. If you see an answer written by someone with no profile picture, what would you think? Do you readily believe what he has to say?
The next step is to write a brief description of yourself. There are two parts to this. The first are your credentials. Your credentials will appear directly below your name. This is where you should at least mention what your blog is. It’s really important as your credentials will show below your name whenever you write an answer anywhere. You might get some click-throughs from the curious minds.
The second part is to fill in your description. It only appears in your profile page, but it gives other users a better idea of what type of blog you’re running. The good part about this is that you can insert a clickable link, unlike in your credentials. As in you can see in the image above, only the link in my description is clickable.
On the top right corner, you will see “Credentials & Highlights”. That is where you insert even more details (e.g. education) so that you would be taken more seriously. It’s also a good place to show others that you may be highly educated, and therefore it reflects on the quality of your answers. As Quora is only based on questions & answers, people tend to look at your profile in judging your answers. Completing your profile is the least that you can do.
#2 Choosing the right questions to answer
Quora is divided into many different categories, for instance, you can find individual topics on restaurants, WordPress, freelancing or even Korean dramas. Whatever you can think of, it’s probably there already. As a blogger who blogs about blogging, I normally look at topics on “Blogging”, “Blogs” or even “Bloggers”. The topic “Blogs” alone has had 29,200 questions and 758,000 followers overall. Each of those topics alone have had thousands of questions asked since the beginning of Quora.
As there are so many questions pumped in daily, you should choose the right questions to answer.
If you look at the image above, you will see the column “Question Stats”. You can see how many people are actually following the question, indirectly meaning how many people are interested to know the answer. You can also see the number of views the question received. From there, you can roughly know whether the question is “worth” answering for the purposes of gaining targeted visitors. If you see many interested followers, you should attempt to answer (only if you know the subject well). It can lead to targeted visitors which in turn results in conversions.
There are also questions which are just absurd or doesn’t make sense at all. You can generally avoid those.
#3 Providing lengthy and relevant answers
In Quora, users “upvote” or “downvote” answers, based on how useful and relevant the answer is. Providing short answers like one sentence answers may be downvoted by other Quorans. This means that your answer might collapse for receiving too many downvotes. When your answer collapses, others can’t view it unless they manually choose to do so.
What this means is that Quora values lengthy and relevant answers. A great example would be Neil Patel’s answers on Quora. I’m sure all bloggers would have heard of him as he’s one of the best out there. His answers on Quora is insane, even longer than my blog posts. He includes a lot of images in his answers as well which helps to make his answers more engaging. Having said that, the length of your answer is only one of the factors in determining whether your answer appears at the top.
Read his full answer here. It’s not even his longest answer. I’ve seen answers of 4,000 words and above. Crazy!
I’m not saying that you have to write 2,000 – 4,000 words on a Quora answer (although that would be epic). As long as your answer sufficiently solves the question posed, you’ve done 90% of the job. This brings us to the next part which is the most important for traffic.
#4 Remember to drop a link to your blog post!
All of your efforts in writing quality answers will not bring in direct traffic to your blog unless you leave a link or so in your answers.
Instead of writing a super comprehensive answer, you can also summarize them into points. For example, if one of the questions is “how do you drive traffic to your blog using Quora?”, you can write brief steps on how to get traffic. Insert a link to your blog at the end of the answer so that interested users check out the full article at your blog.
Another way is to write a full article, and leave some links within the content, and you might get some clicks as well.
The above is an example of how I leave my link at the bottom of my page, and I do get some click-throughs.
#5 Find questions that are new or have only a few answers
If you have used Quora before, you will notice the huge difference in terms of views when you scroll from the top answer to the bottom. This means that you want your answer to be at the top, or at least top 3. Some of my answers which went down below only had like 6 views? And the top answer had more than a 1,000 views.
As you can’t ensure how well your answer will rank due to many factors, you should try to at least appear at the top for a certain amount of time. One way to do that is to find questions that are new.
How do you do so?
If you look at the red box in the image above, that’s where you can find the newest questions. When you click on it, you will see all of the questions, starting from the most recent. This means that there’s a good chance that nobody has answered the question yet, or maybe there are only two or three answers.
Skim through their answers and if you can produce a better answer than all of them, do it. You might rank right on top.
#6 Only write answers if you are knowledgeable in the subject
Although there may not be any direct repercussions if you answers are not good enough, it’s still a waste of your time.
You could have done other productive things like promoting your blog posts on Facebook, instead of writing a weak answer. The more quality answers you produce, the more you will be seen as an authority. You may even get more followers on Quora. Having more followers may help in getting your answers ranked higher.
The above steps are all I can think of for now to drive traffic to your blog using Quora. I’m sure there are many other ways to drive traffic with Quora but I’ve listed only what I know of based on my personal experience. You can refer to this super long article on using Quora to generate traffic as it’s really well written.
How do you get your answer to rank well?
Some of you may wonder then, what are the factors that are taken into account to get your answer right on top? There is no one answer as Quora takes into account many factors, but the algorithm behind it is only known to them.
Quora’s official account answered this question as well. To summarize, they listed down the following factors as examples:
- Upvotes and downvotes, and also whether those who voted are actually trustworthy in the particular topic
- Previous answers written by the author
- Whether the author is an expert in the given subject
- The type and quality of the answer including words, photos and links
- Other signals
It may not give you a direct answer, but it gives you an indication of how answers generally rank.
Conclusion
This article on how to drive traffic to your blog using Quora is based on my personal experience. I’m sure many of you have been doing this for a long time and it’s not a novel idea. Nonetheless, there are always bloggers who may be unaware of this and I hope that this has helped some of you.
If you have not started a blog and you wish to do so, you can read my guide on how to start a WordPress blog.
