5 Insights: How Do I Get Free Traffic from Quora.com to Blog?

Hi there, quora guys! I am a blogger taking the first steps in gaining the community and getting buzz around my project. With a couple of friends we’ve launched a blog on how to create a website for non-techies — Startup Hub. Some of the tactics worked, but I discovered Quora.com was all of the talks recently and for almost any niche — people keep asking questions about anything. So how does one use Quora as a source of gaining the relevant traffic? What are the ways to use it effectively?

That’s what you see on Quora.com everyday. Short question, some details to it and if you’re lucky — 60, 000 subscribers who are itching to know the answer. They could be itching to know your answer, too.

1

Quora.com is a Question & Answer website, where anybody can ask any question. And I mean ANY question:

Like this — What’s the fastest way to make situation awkward?

Or this — Which superpower is better — the ability to talk to ducks or to have the best parking place wherever you went?

Or even this — How do they get the horses in the water to play water polo?

And the greatest thing about Quora is that for any silliest question there’s an authoritative expert in the particular field, who’s played water polo for 10 years and explains you step by step, with living examples and long rich history of the game there are no horses in the water polo (sorry for spoiler).

You are an expert as well. You’re blogging about a narrow topic for some time, have some insights about this and that, so now it’s time to use Quora.com to attract up to 30% more traffic to your website (that is the number for my website, I’m sure you can do better).
[Tweet “It’s time to use Quora.com to attract up to 30% more traffic to your website”]

The algorithm is simple:

• Search for the questions connected to what you know about.
• Write interesting and valuable answer.
• Insert the link to the article from your blog which is about the same topic and can provide more information.
• Press “Submit” button.

And if you’ve done everything right, wait for your answer to go viral.

2

There are two possible approaches to choosing a perfect question:

By the time of publication.

This approach takes a little of fortune telling, you know. When you search a question by a certain phrase, there are some criteria you can filter questions with. My favorite tool is by time. Choosing “past day” or “past week” you will get fresh questions which need answers. And here comes predictions – try to guess which one can go viral. In any case if you’re the first one to answer the question, you will be cool Christopher Columbus, only the one who knows what he’s doing — all views are yours.

By its popularity.

Each question has got a certain amount of views and subscribers. With 20-30 subscribers you can get pretty good results. So look at the numbers of subscribers and views on the question — that is the index of its popularity. Like this question — What can I learn now in 10 minutes that will be useful for the rest of my life? with 35,064 Followers and 12,226,417 Views (God do people love self-improvement that takes no efforts).

NB! Only pay attention: any time somebody answers a question he/she is automatically subscribed to it. So if there are 40 answers and 30 subscribers, there’s no point to answer such a question.
NB!-2 Pay attention at the existing answers: it is better to be the most talented and detailed guy in the “group”, so don’t write about something already mentioned. And if you still do — write it damn well.

Actually another life-hack is that even if you write about WordPress you can take this question about self-improvment mentioned above and answer it. Don’t stay in one topic, be like “You wanna some self-improvement? Why don’t you read one short article about creating a website from my blog and create great ones in a month or two? It’s 2016, man, sites are everywhere”. With a pitch of creativity you can connect tractors and sky, anything you want.

And one more thing! From time to time one can ask questions with the link in details. But do not abuse with this one too much: the text is short and your link is for all to see, so make it natural way and better ask something you’d really want to know.

3

Quora loves detailed answers like Captain America loves America, like George Martin loves killing Game of Thrones characters, like people love knowledge… The point is Quora gathered people who seek knowledge together and wants you to write long, valuable, rich blog posts with good links full-scale as an answer. It’s worth to mention, sometimes short answers of 2-3 sentences get their fair share of views, don’t throw such format away, but the most popular are those detailed ones.
[Tweet “Quora loves detailed answers like George Martin loves killing Game of Thrones characters”]

These are some must-haves of persistently viewed and upvoted answers:

• Divide your answer into sections: That is the catchy introduction (2-3 sentences), here numbered and logically ordered tips come, there are a joke and nice wishes in conclusion.
• Use underlines, bold font, numeration and any other ways to distinguish what’s the most important in your answer. Readers won’t look through the whole answer, if he/ she is not attracted to it visually and can’t see the short overview of what you’ve written for him/her.
• Don’t go too complicated and “I’m-such-a-cool-professional-here” like. The person which asked the question might not know all those terms and stuff, that is why he/she asked — for simple explanation.
• Add links to useful resources. To enrish your answer and to not look too promotional, try to collect real useful stuff. I’m sure you have your tools and sources, so don’t be meanie — share with friends.

But I think for you as an experienced blogger there won’t be any problems with writing good texts, will it?

Another approach is a personal story. You can use this as a part of the big answer or go solo with your experience only. This answer is considered to be the most upvoted on Quora.

What’s all the buzz about? No big deal, girl was impressed too much and people say silly things all the time, but the guy was upvoted 40,5k times. Why? People love other people being awkward, they love 3D movies and most important — people love sincere stories they can’t help believing. So, “I’ve experienced the same”, “I were in your shoes” and “Let me tell you my funny story” are to evoke sympathy and feeling of being close friends right away.

4

If they can’t I don’t know what can.

You should use all visuals possible (really, any visual you can imagine is okay). Search “Infographics” on Pinterest, you’ll find thousands of them about anything in the world — from cosmetics to ways of bathing your cat. Google gives 80,100,000 results for the same inquiry. Visuals, visuals, visuals, feed them with something easy to comprehend and remember, and they will beg for more. Eventually, who has time to read texts? People read 28% of any text, not more.

My top 3 formats are:

• Infographics, old fellas. They are your choice if you still aim to convey some important information, but want it to be more memorable. Scientifically proven, our brain understands symbols better and more quickly than texts and 70% of sensory receptors are in our eyes. That means their eyes should work on us.
• Charts. Infographics for those who are not that fan of infographics. Quora likes asking about comparison of some items or pros and cons of something. Can you imagine the pros and cons list without two columns and chart. That’s how we roll — even a simple chart created in Microsoft Docs can do a great job as visual.
• My favorite format I constantly use myself is GIF. God do I love cat gifs. I believe they’re more engaging. Like if it’s video or gif, you have to click “play” button to see it, that is the first interaction we need, and then it goes on. And if gif is funny, here the positive emotions and associations come — the guy wants to see, what else this funny guy wrote in his answer.

5

Not that long ago Quora added rel=”noreferrer” parameters to its outgoing links. It means the traffic is shown as direct instead of referral (though some still will come through as referral traffic, but at a much lower rate). So, there are two ways I know. First is where you simply enjoy your direct traffic and don’t bother yourself with distinguishing Quora’s indicators.

Or you will have to add a UTM to the link you post in your answer. UTM is a special word/sign/tag embedded into your regular link. So, you add unique UTM for your email marketing, for Quora, for other blogs you’re writing for. And when users click one of the links with UTM, the unique parameters are sent to your Google Analytics account so you can see how many users click on every particular link.
There’s no point to type those marks manually, you can use URL Builder, where you should insert the word “quora” to the “Campaign Source” field.

Conclusion

Take it as an established truth — Quora is a cool guy which everybody wants to be friends with: there are real Facebook developers and famous actors, Star Wars filmmakers and top politicians sitting there.
[Tweet “Cool guy came and went away, but we stay and work hard everyday to give the best answers”]

It’s hard for an average blogger from a narrow niche to succeed — real David and Goliath battle going on there. We are David: cool guy came and went away, but we stay and work hard everyday to give the best answers — for the benefits it give us:

• It’s a never-ending source of traffic. Once you’ve published a successful answer, people will keep coming to read it a month or a year later. Now, I’ve got around 35% of my traffic from Quora solely.
• You’re growing your expert value this way, people will subscribe to read your answers, and you will get your constant audience on Quora, too.
• You can read cool guys’ answers there, too. There are around 5593.7 questions coming daily, use all the ideas flying around there for your blog posts and stuff.