PR ON THE GO November 29, 2022

How Startups Can Use Quora To Generate Leads And Traffic

Growth How-To

Author: Julia Voloshchenko, Public Relations Manager at Usetech with 4+ years of experience in PR and marketing in IT.

Often, startups are faced with the question of a low-budget way to promote their products and services. For some reason, very few people use Quora, but it's an excellent and free platform for demonstrating your expertise and services, as well as for expanding your brand's reach. According to statistics, every day users post between 3,000 and 5,000 questions, and the site covers more than 400,000 topics.

I've been working with Quora for over 3 years from two accounts, one of which I created a community about photography with 66,000 subscribers. In this article, I'll answer a few questions:

• What is Quora?
• How to fill out a profile on Quora?
• How to ask and answer questions?
• About Quora statistics and content monetization;
• What should you learn to work with Quora;
• And, most importantly, why should a business have an account on Quora and how to generate leads and get traffic?

So, let's get started!

What is Quora?

Quora is a Q&A platform founded in 2009 where anyone can be an expert in any field. According to Similar Web, about 788 million users visit the site each month, most of whom come from the United States.

With Quora, you can talk about your business and product, get new customers, and share a variety of content. You may be faced with the question: maintain an account in-house or hire contractors? I recommend that you handle the account yourself. Firstly, it's not as time-consuming as you might think: one to three hours a day, depending on your KPIs. Secondly, you may encounter low quality work from contractors, which translates into identical, spammy responses. Such responses can get your Quora account banned.

Whether you're a small business or a large company, you can run a Quora account. First, you're working on your personal and company brand, and second, you're attracting new users to your site and your services. Questions and answers on Quora often flicker to the first page in Google results, and multi-million visits allow you to reach more users.

Filling out a profile on Quora

In fact, I've read about several approaches: someone created a fake account with someone else's name and photo to promote their services, and someone listed his real details. Quora has a pretty tough moderation system, so it's better not to take any chances and fill your profile with real information about yourself. The more details you give about what you do, the better the impression you'll get from the people who visit your profile.

To get started, sign up with your email and then fill out your profile. To do this, click on your profile picture in the upper right hand corner next to the search bar.

On the new page, you will see your profile and a pencil icon for editing. Here you can specify your position in the company, your affiliation, your place of study and residence, and your language skills. Notably, if you specify more than one language, Quora will give you questions in those languages. This is a great opportunity for marketers who market their products to, for example, European/Asian countries.

The first step is done, the profile is ready, now you have to mark the topics you are interested in. You can search for topics through the home page, in the search bar. After subscribing to a topic, you will see the latest activity on that topic in your feed, as well as receive questions.

To have your profile display topics that you can reply to, go to your profile and go to the edit tab.

The topics you specify will be displayed in your profile in the right-hand corner. The number of replies to a topic will also be displayed there.

In addition to answering questions, you can be active in communities (Spaces) on Quora, of which there are also many. You can either join a community or create one. When you join a community, there are several roles available to you: follower, contributor, and moderator, who monitors and culls the content you publish.

Having your own community on Quora will also allow you to engage stakeholders. You can interact with them either in the community comments or in private messages. I've seen many companies create themed communities and post answers to questions about their products or services there. Your communities will show up on your profile in the right-hand corner, too.

How to ask and answer questions?

Quora recommends that you start your question with “What,” “How,” “Why,” and the like, and if there's already a question identical to yours, suggests reading the answers.

To get started, just answer and ask questions in your industry. Don't forget to thank users for their answers: you can do this by clicking the “arrow” in the lower left corner. This allows the answer not to hide and brings it forward. Keep this in mind when you post your own responses. You can also thank users in the comments or ask them counter questions.

Providing the best answer is your key to success with Quora. Share your experiences, your success, or failure story, and give specific advice. Use visual content in the form of infographics or images, format paragraphs using bullets or numbers, put headings or subheadings in bold and something in italics. Quora's algorithms love long and beautifully formatted responses, so take the time to format. In such cases, users will vote for your answers and the moderation system will not hide them at the bottom of the page.

How often you could answer the questions? I've chosen for myself the best option: 3-4 responses per day. If you just registered an account and want to actively promote your company, take your time. Start by answering questions without active links, leaving comments and voting on other people's comments. If you put active links in your answers 5 times a day, you might get banned.

Quora statistics and content monetization

Quora offers a free internal analytics tool that shows statistics about your responses. It looks like this:

Below are detailed statistics for each of your responses: the number of views, votes (Upvotes), comments, and reposts. Use this information to publish content.

In 2021, Quora gave users the option to monetize their responses. You can read more about this by clicking on your profile, which will have a Monetization section. In addition to monetization, Quora offers to create an advertising account — Ad Account or Quora for business. You can find out more about them on the official page.

Courses for working with Quora

There are many articles on the web by foreign SEO and marketing experts who describe the algorithms for working with Quora. Also, the site is often written about as a method of free link building, which is impossible not to agree with. I want to recommend a few courses that I myself have taken to update my knowledge. But to be honest, from the very beginning I got familiar with the site on my own, without any additional materials.

1. Quora Marketing: Drive Traffic to Your Website or Sales Page (Udemy)
2. Power of Quora : A to Z of Earning from Quora & Quora Ads (Udemy)
3. Quora Marketing: 7 Steps to Increase Website Traffic Fast (Udemy)

These are basic courses to help you get familiar with the site and make your first steps for work.

Conclusion: What does it take to generate leads and traffic from Quora?

Correct, useful answers that don't advertise your product, but show its benefit is one opportunity to attract users to your site.

If you own a product (like video or photo development software or something else), look for questions about your products or services, and answer them in the first person. That way, the credibility of your brand and products increases, and you build a positive community around you.

Ultimately, you can use Quora for free: even without subscriptions, Quora's features allow you to reach a large audience. From personal experience: When I worked for a photo and video editing software company, working with Quora helped us get more organic and referral traffic, as well as transactions.

Quora has a lot to offer you: just take your time and make the most of its potential.

#PRontheGO