One of the best ways to build your online business is to establish trust with your audience. You won’t be able to sell your products and services or get more people to read your blog if they don’t trust you or know anything about you.
To bridge the gap between you and your audience, you need to present yourself as an authority in your niche by showcasing your knowledge. How well you know your industry from the inside and out allows you to separate yourself from your competitors.
However, it’s one thing to know that you are knowledgeable and passionate about your business. It’s another for your audience that this fact is indeed true. You need to show them how much you know about the industry and how articulate you are in explaining it to people.
Aside from publishing 10x content on your blog, you need to consider using Quora to help you gain influence in your niche and achieve your online business goals.
In this post, I will explain what Quora is and how to use for the benefit of your website or blog.
What is Quora?
Quora is a Q&A site in the vein of Yahoo! Answers. Users can ask questions to the public and answer questions submitted by others. However, unlike Yahoo! Answers, you can continue answering questions on Quora years after they have been asked. The questions are never “closed,” which leads to more engagement and additional answers.
Also, Quora encourages you to use your real identity and not an alias or a fake account. Since your true identity is on the line, you can expect authentic answers that provide value to the users who asked the question as well as those who want to know the answer.
As a result, Quora has become a breeding ground for online personalities such as Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia), Rand Fishkin (of Moz), Gary Vaynerchuk (of Vayner Media), and others. By answering questions directed to them, they can connect with their audience and continue building influence in their field.
While you probably aren’t on the level of the guys mentioned above, it shouldn’t stop you from leveraging Quora to your advantage. In fact, it’s an excellent way to build your authority from the ground up.
Why should you use Quora?
The idea of connecting with your audience is not a novel one. You can publish content on your blog and launch a blogger outreach campaign to help attract the right people to your blog. In fact, there are others tactics that are arguably more useful than this Q&A site. However, Quora marketing is meant to complement your existing promotion strategies.
The reason why you need to implement Quora marketing as part of your plan is the potential traffic that you can attract to your site. As it stands, Quora has over 200 million unique visitors every day, and a fraction of those visitors could be your target audience. Some of these users are looking for answers to questions relevant to your interests. Therefore, you should take this opportunity to share your knowledge with people in the hopes of attracting potential customers and readers to your site.
How to use Quora to your advantage?
To make use of Quora’s popularity to get your audience on board with your site, below are ways on how to do it:
Optimize your profile
If you don’t have a Quora account yet, you can sign up using your Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Once you’ve signed up, you can edit your bio to include your business title and branding. Whenever you answer a question, only the first 50 characters of the bio is shown. Therefore, you need to make your bio as concise as possible without compromising on your message. Simply stating your job title and business name should do the trick, although you can be as creative as possible to leave a lasting impression to your readers.
Since you can be doing more than what your job title suggests, Quora allows you to create topic-specific bios.
For example, your initial bio states that you are a business owner. However, you are also adept in WordPress development. You can create a separate bio for this so you can display it every time you answer a WordPress-related question.
To provide a better idea to your audience about who you are, you can edit the “Credentials & Highlights” and “Knows About” section of your profile. Filling these sections out with the correct details establishes what people should know about you. The latter section emphasizes your expertise, while the former offers social proof to validate your knowledge.
Lastly, you can fill out the other details of your profile such as the About me section, schools and colleges you’ve attended, and much more. The information lets users locate your profile and answers much easier if any of their search phrases matches your profile.
Follow relevant topics and users
To keep abreast with the latest questions and answers made in your industry at Quora, you can follow the topics by typing your industry into the search bar and following the topics that appear there.
For example, if you type “content marketing,” you will see these results:
You can follow any of the topics there since they are all related to content marketing.
Once you click on the topic, you will see the feed of questions asked about it, as well as related topics you might be interested in joining.
From here, you can see best answers for each of the most relevant questions asked over time. You can upvote the questions and follow the user who answered so you can keep track of their answers to other questions.
Finding the questions to answer
There are two ways to finding Quora questions to answer. The first is looking for questions with the most followers and the least answers. Normally, popular questions have the most answers. While you can still chip in with your two cents, there’s a chance that your answer will just be buried underneath the top answers that have racked up thousands of upvotes. While this won’t stop you from participating in questions already filled with excellent answers, you have to keep your expectations in check nonetheless.
If you do stumble upon a question with lots of followers but have a few answers, take this opportunity to answer immediately. We will tackle how you should compose your answer on the next topic.
The second way is looking for the latest questions in your fields of expertise. In fact, you don’t have to look for the new questions.
Once there’s a new question on your topic or a new answer from a user you’re following, you can expect to receive an email update from Quora. Assuming that the topics you following are relevant to your expertise, you can take the time to answer the questions as part of establishing your authority on Quora.
New questions neither guarantee that people will be following it nor will it attract lots of answers. However, the fact that it was sent out to you via email means that there’s an enormous potential of viewers of this question. Of course, you need to determine for yourself whether it’s a question worth answering or not.
Answering questions with authority
There is an art in answering Quora questions. The idea behind answering questions on Quora is to provide as much value as possible. If so, you can expect your answer to receive hundreds of thousands of upvotes over time.
For example, this answer by Pritam Kumar to a question about extreme poverty racked up 30,000+ upvotes from users. It was an answer straight from experience which caught lots of sympathy from users. On the other hand, you don’t have to tell a compelling story to provide a valuable answer to a question. Another answer by Pritam garnered almost 5,000 upvotes because he shared his Java knowledge in answering a question.
You can probably relate more to the second example since you want to be known for your knowledge and acumen in your industry. Taking a cue from Pritam’s second answer, you need to treat your answer as you would a blog post.
If possible, add images and links to resource pages to support your claims and emphasize your points. The number of words isn’t important, but making sure that you answer the question and cover all your bases should be good enough.
Once you’ve responded to the question, you can share them on social media to promote your answer and get more people to read and upvote it.
Sharing links in your answer
Assuming that you’ve already responded to the Quora question on your blog or have a tool that answers their concerns, you can simply reuse and link to it on the answer to the question. You shouldn’t just copy and paste the blog post in the answer box. You should make an effort to create unique content before introducing the link that contains the answer to the question.
However, You shouldn’t simply copy and paste the blog post in the answer box. You should make an effort to create unique content before linking to the page.
You can approach it in two ways. The first is adding a disclaimer stating that you are affiliated with the product or service whose link you are sharing. For example, in this question about social media tools, Gilles Bertaux added a disclaimer to his answer to make sure that people know of his affiliation:
Another way is to introduce the link and how it answers their question directly. A paragraph introduction to your blog post should be sufficient enough to give them an idea of how your article will help them. However, you can create a post-type answer to make it more helpful for viewers. Here’s an example by Imran Esmail about passive income:
Repurposing content on Quora blog
Quora has a blogging platform that allows you to further showcase your expertise by writing long-form posts. Even if you already have a blog, you can still leverage the Quora blog by repurposing your content.
Instead of coming up with new topics to write about on your Quora blog, you can simply republish a post on your business blog here. Since Quora receives lots of traffic everyone, you can attract some of those leverage to read the blog and drive referral traffic to yours.
Before republishing the content, make sure that you wait for at least two weeks before posting the article on Quora to avoid duplicate content issues. Also, place a canonical link back to your blog to inform search spiders that the post was originally published on your blog.
Aside from repurposing your blog posts, you can republish your Quora answers and elaborate them even more if possible. Maybe you failed to mention certain points or felt that you didn’t communicate yourself clearly in your previous answer. Quora blog allows you the platform to rectify possible issues by creating a much better content based on your answer.
Brainstorm for content ideas
Quora is a great place where you can mine for valuable insights and data to be used for creating new content on your site or blog.
For example, typing your expertise and following topics related to your industry allows you to find unanswered questions that you can answer on your blog.
While you can answer the questions straight to Quora, you can also take the approach of compiling all the unanswered questions in a single post so you can create a one-of-a-kind post in your industry that answers the hard-hitting questions nobody dares to answer.
Once you have written the post, you can answer the Quora question by linking to this post for their reference. Write a short introduction to help them understand how the post can answer your question. Not only do you increase your influence doing this, but you also potentially drive referral to your site or blog.
Wrapping it up
Quora is a valuable tool for people looking for answers to any question under the sun. For business owners, developing a Quora marketing tactic that they can implement alongside their current strategy allows them to promote their knowledge in their industry to a larger audience. Successfully doing so by following the tips above should give them the answers they need and the results you want. It’s a win-win for both parties!