Quora Content Marketing: Your secret weapon to write great posts and promote them!

Content marketing is a highly effective method to increase your SEO standing, establish expertise in your field, drive traffic to your site, and even drive leads and sales. It’s no surprise that there is an endless number of high-performing tools designed purely to help you write better content and get more results.

Of course, the vast majority of these tools don’t come cheap, with the most affordable options costing $100-200 per month just for their base plans. While plenty of these tools can be valuable, and I’ve used many myself, there’s one free tool that small businesses on a budget should never overlook: Quora.

Quora can be, honestly, a great platform to apply your content marketing strategy. Not only does the platform keep to driving traffic directly to the relevant questions, but valuable answers on Quora provide long-lasting results.

The popular questions attract attention and constantly receive more traffic. All you need to do is stick to answering questions and providing your own links.

A good answer can be an outstanding contribution. Once you take the time to answer questions appropriately, you’ll likely keep receiving high-quality traffic for many years, even without any additional activity.

Trust me on this. I’m still receiving traffic from answers I wrote three years ago.

When you approach Quora with a marketing strategy, be aware that they have some complex rules to keep it from getting too spammy. They like to have quality user-generated content in place & too many answers in too short a time will send up a red flag.

So, why should you choose to add Quora into your marketing strategy? Because Quora works. I think it’s a great platform and will be exploring how you should and shouldn’t use Quora for content marketing.

In this blog post, you should find all the information you need to know, and by the end, you should be ready to put out answers on Quora.

Quora Content Marketing: What is it anyway?

Quora is a wildly popular platform, A question-and-answer website founded in 2009 by Facebook’s former CTO and Co-Founder Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever for those who are unfamiliar.

What distinguished Quora from all the other (crappy) Q&A websites like Yahoo Answers, though, has always been the quality of the answers you could find there.

Many questions on Quora are intelligent and intriguing, and users share knowledge by providing firm, insightful, honestly, well-written answers. You might even get an answer from the President of the United States.

Even though it’s not primarily a content marketing platform, it is highly regarded for the real value you receive for your marketing efforts. Even a simple, solid short answer can help drive traffic to your page and help you build authority for your brand online.

In Other words: It’s hugely connected, and it’s a great channel to use to drive more traffic with potential customers and market your product, blog post, or services.

Coming up with your content marketing strategy

Content marketing isn’t the easiest task for businesses to undertake, and I say that as an industry expert in content marketing. Coming up with interesting blog posts on a regular, frequent basis that is both original and valuable to the target audience isn’t an easy task.

In many cases, it’s the idea generation that’s the real challenge.

That’s why using Quora to develop your content marketing strategy can be so valuable: It’s an outstanding idea generation and content research tool if you know how to use it. You’re able to see what information people are actively looking for, where the need for new resources falls, and how you can step up to the plate to create them.

I used it extensively to drive traffic to AdEspresso in the early days, and Quora quickly became one of our top referral sources. Not only that, but It also happened to be the one sending the highest quality traffic with exceptional conversion rates.

As with most websites, you have two paths to do marketing on Quora:

• Organically, by providing great answers to questions in your industry and plugging links to your blog or product now and then.
• Through advertising, by placing your ads on topics near to your product. Their paid product is getting better and better every day and offers many options to fine-tune your message and audience.

In this post, I’m focusing on marketing on Quora organically, So, without spending a single cent.

Take a tip from Social Media Marketing and start with the perfect profile.

It might sound trivial, but one of the essential things you need to kick off your content marketing strategy is to set up a good-looking profile; this is still very close to social media marketing, after all.

The first thing people will think visiting your profile or reading your answers is: “Who the hell is this guy, and why should I trust him?”

Spend some time setting up your profile professionally and engagingly, and since you’re here, try to maximize your opportunities to gain exposure, drive traffic to your website or generate leads.

Remember, profiles are personal, especially with Quora. Don’t use your company name or logo. This is about you.

Here’s what I’d recommend getting the most out of your Quora profile:

• Use a professional profile picture. It will help you stand out among the other people answering questions! If possible, use a colorful, contrasting background.
• In the short Bio, write what you do (Marketer, Entrepreneur, Social Influencer, etc.), your company, and only add former companies if they are known brands (provides credibility.)
• Only the first 600 characters will be visible. Add the most relevant links and information there for your target audience.
• In the more extended Bio, let it be as long as you like. If you want to specify you’re a highly influential entrepreneur. If users are interested in knowing more about you, let them.
• Create social proof with numbers. Don’t just say you ran Facebook Ads but say, “I helped my company scale Facebook Ads from $1000 to $1,000,000 while doubling their ROI”.
• Promote your top Quora answers to attract even more upvotes.
• If you have interesting images or videos, add them!
• Don’t assume people know what your business does. Add a short pitch and a link.
• Link your top articles, i.e., the ones that will make you stand out as a thought leader or industry authority in the areas where you’re going to answer questions.
• If you’re active on other social media channels and networks, link your profiles.

Personally, I like well-organized bulleted lists of bio credentials over paragraphs in the Full Bio. Here’s my bio:

Now that we’ve got our profile out of the way let’s get the ball rolling on the valuable ways to use Quora.

1. Find your next blog post and target audience by exploring topics.

As we mentioned before, content idea generation is downright difficult, especially over a long period of time. Quora, however, is an outstanding content discovery tool even though it wasn’t created for that purpose.

You can follow different topics and users on the platform, helping you keep an eye on what discussions are happening in your particular industry.

You can think of Topics as categories. A topic is just an aggregation of all the questions around the same topic, of course! Therefore topics are your best friends to quickly find all the questions you’re interested in to promote your business.

To discover topics, just start typing in the search bar and let the suggestions guide you. Once you click on a topic, you’ll land on the topic homepage, which is mainly composed of three areas:

1. Read is a selection of some of the most interesting (according to Quora) questions and answers on this topic.
2. Answer is still a list of questions, but this time the focus is on writing instead of reading. Here you’ll find relatively new questions or those that no one has answered yet.
3. Most Viewed Writers is another interesting tab! It’s a list of the top writer on this topic.

There are two metrics you can use to understand how big a topic is. The first one is the number of followers. The other interesting way to understand the potential marketing exposure you can get from a Quora topic is by going in the Most Viewed Writers and checking how many views specific quora users answer received.

For example, on my account, you’ll see that I follow topics closely related to online marketing and writing: Behavioral Economics, Journalists, Newspapers, etc. This helps my feed to stay up to date with relevant questions in the industries that I’m following, which can give me new ideas regularly.

It’s common for people to ask questions about breaking news, which can alert me to potentially-trending topics that people would be interested in reading about. 

After reading the questions, I also might have an excellent idea for a blog post that I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. I once saw a post about “what colors work best on Instagram,” for example, that sparked the idea to write an article on the color of psychology in marketing. 

There’s no hard and fast rule on how you should use Quora for content discovery; just read the questions and answers and see if the inspiration strikes.

2. Find Questions That Users Need to be Answered.

I’m an enormous fan of using question-based keywords in content marketing. These will always be long-tail keywords that legitimately ask a complete question, like “how do I know if I can trust my lawyer?” or “how do I keep my houseplants alive without sunlight?” (I didn’t say that all the questions would be great, did I?)

Questions are so great for content marketing for two reasons:

1. They signal an immediate need for information, which is always worth responding to.
2. Their search intent is clear. 

Someone searching for the term “engagement ring” might be looking to purchase a ring, or they might want to find out about engagement ring care or customs or to figure out how much they’re supposed to spend. “How much does an engagement ring cost,” however, it is incredibly specific, meaning you can create content that is guaranteed to deliver precisely what they’re looking for. 

Since Quora is a question-and-answer site, this is an incredible place to go to discover what questions your target audience has and what sorts of information they need. You can then create content centered around these questions.

Keep in mind that your potential customers likely have questions you may have never even considered answering. You’re the career expert here, so things that are second nature to you may still mystify them.

These topics, in particular, can create super easy-to-write posts that your audience will love and almost certainly be looking for. 

If you’re unsure if you want to base an entire post around a single question, you can do keyword research first. Use a tool like SEMrush or even Google’s Keyword Planner and see how often the question in mind or those similar to it are asked.

You’ll only want questions with a meaningful amount of traffic. It’s pretty simple. I usually filter by position only to get questions that are ranking in the top 10 places in Google.

Next, I sort the results by volume to get the questions ranking for keywords with a high volume of searches and where Quora is ranking well.

Boom! Here are the questions you care about. From here, you can export in excel and start clicking in the “URL” column to find the question that is ranking for that specific keyword.

Just keep iterating for each keyword relevant to your niche, and you’ll likely have enough questions to answer to keep you busy for the next year!

3. Ask Questions to Find New Information For Your Content 

About six months ago, I saw a psychologist ask a brilliant question on Quora. He was creating a resource explaining to people why therapy was beneficial and overcoming objections. He wanted to ask why people hadn’t gone to therapy, if they felt like they may have otherwise benefited, and what roadblocks were in the way.

This is an outstanding use of Quora. Plenty of users started to answer within a day and a half, sharing all sorts of reasons that he may have never considered otherwise. I’m sure he could take that information and work it into his content, which would be more beneficial to more members of his target audience.

Ask questions that can benefit your content marketing. Go ahead and ask what people’s favorite resources are in your industry; use that for competitor research. Ask what they struggle with, their pain points, and questions, and create content to solve these problems and answer their questions.

4. Look For New Insights 

Sometimes, it’s easy to get stuck in our bubble, which isn’t always helpful once we’re on month six of content marketing and running out of ideas.

By reviewing questions and answers on Quora relevant to your field, you might come across new insights that you hadn’t considered before. 

Look at new ways of thinking. At the very least, it could give you insight into what you want to argue against in your post, strengthening your argument. And hey, you may even find pain points you’d never considered, like this one:

Note: Never make a direct quote or copy information from Quora answers, and you should give credit for original thoughts. A quick link back is all you have to do if you want to quote someone directly.

5. Share Your Resources, But Only When Relevant

Overall in my experience, Quora can be effective all across the funnel to drive traffic to your website, generate leads and sell your product. For sure, where Quora shines is driving traffic to your blog.

It’s a less spammy approach to marketing on Quora with lower risks of getting banned and way more opportunities to plug your content in hundreds of different questions.

With few questions answered in the last few years, I got 376,000 views, more than 1,000 upvotes on my answers, and thousands of clicks every month!

🚩 I want to flag this right now: Quora users and moderators are very aggressive in shooting down spammers. Keep that in mind while planning your Quora marketing strategy.

Quora has strict rules about logging into the site and plugging in your blog posts and website, especially when you do it too often. They will catch you (speaking from experience in my earlier days.), and they will suspend your account if it’s a repeat offense.

That being said, there are ways that you can promote your content on Quora in ways that align with their guidelines that will drive traffic and still don’t feel like spam. I cover this in my in-depth Quora marketing guide.

Pro-tip: Don’t forget to fill out your Quora profile with bullet points highlighting your experience (& maybe your landing page.) You, yourself, and others providing the answers are the real industry authority in place when contributing to Quora.

Final Thoughts 

Quora and content marketing may not seem like the perfect pair at first glance, but the question-and-answer site can be a vast wealth of potential information.

As a note, though, you should always verify the information you find on Quora primarily before using it in your content.

However, it’s relatively reliable, there is no vetting for correctness, and we all know that plenty of people like to think they know more than they do.