Quora Marketing: Drive traffic, leads, and sales in 2023
This is the most complete guide on how to do marketing on Quora in 2023.
In this in-depth guide, you learn how to:
- Boost your personal brand and become a thought-leader
- Drive a huge amount of traffic to your blog
- Promote your product and get sales
- Build an effective Quora Marketing strategy
- Lots more…
Everything in this guide has been battle tested and verified by us. No BS.
I wrote this guide to fast-track your Quora marketing effort and avoid you the errors I made.
If you are serious about Quora marketing, let’s dive right in.
PS: A lot of guides out there are super long and verbose to impress you (and Google). This guide is very long too, but I’ll do my best to keep the idea to word-count ratio low.
The ABC of Quora Marketing
What is Quora first of all?
Quora is basically a Question & Answer website. A very good one. It was founded in 2009 by Facebook’s former CTO and Co-Founder Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever.
What distinguished Quora from all the other (crappy) Q&A websites like Yahoo Answers has always been the quality of the answers you could find there.
In the early days Quora was very focused on the tech and startup world. But this is no longer a problem.
Today Quora is a huge resource of questions and answers on any possible topic (400,000+ topics are currently covered on Quora). Moreover, they launched many local websites in different languages in all major countries.
You can safely assume that Quora can be a great marketing channel for you, no matter what’s your industry and where your customers are located.
I personally love Quora because no matter how hard or niche your question is, you can usually expect to receive very high-quality answers from real experts on the matter.
Just to give you an idea, you can randomly browse Quora getting lost on any topic and find answers by President Barack Obama, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, actors like Jennifer Lawrence & Jackie Chan and many others.
No matter if you’re looking for the meaning of life or the best tools to do email marketing, you’ll find a plethora of really useful answers and first-hand experiences from Quora users.
Is Quora a good channel for marketing?
Quora as of June 2017 was receiving 200,000,000 monthly unique visitors just on the main site (so there’s likely much more on their country specific websites). In December 2019 Alexa ranked Quora the 226th most visited website in the world (down from being the 90th in July.
It’s huge and it’s a great channel to use to market your product or services.
I’ve used it extensively to promote AdEspresso in the early days and not only it became one of our top referral sources. It was also the one sending the highest quality traffic with exceptional conversion rates.
What’s even better is that marketing activities on Quora provides long lasting results. Popular questions constantly receive traffic. Once you’ve provided good answers to a bunch of them, you’ll likely keep receiving traffic for many years, even without any additional activity.
Trust me on this. I’m still receiving traffic from answers I wrote 3 years ago.
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 every now and then links to your blog or product.
- Through advertising, by placing your ads on topics near your product. Their paid product is getting better and better every day and offers a plethora of options to fine-tune your message and audience.
In this guide, I’ll focus on how to do marketing on Quora organically, without spending a single cent. But stay tuned, I’m already working on a guide on Quora Advertising.
Overall I think Quora should absolutely have a spot in your marketing strategy, especially if you are a b2b SaaS business in the early days.
Where does Quora sit in the marketing funnel?
Great question! Glad you asked!
Quora is quite a peculiar channel and it’s tough to have a straight answer here.
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 shine 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 quora answer and thousands of clicks every month!
Lead generation can work as well, if you have interesting ebooks or webinar recordings or even free tools to use as lead magnets, they’re quite easy to plug into your answers. In one of my most viewed answers, I was pitching AdEspresso’s ads gallery tool to users looking for a way to spy on their competitors. It still sends meaningful traffic after 2 years and the conversion rate to leads was great.
We’ll cover the best strategies to do lead generation on Quora in Chapter 4
Finally sales… here’s the tough one. You can’t be too aggressive in pitching your product or it’ll be considered spam.
Quora users and moderators are very aggressive in shooting down spammers. Keep that in mind while planning your Quora marketing strategy.
The good news is that there are a lot of relevant questions on Quora that are specifically asking for product reviews or recommendations. Here it’s totally fine to plug your product or chime in to answer questions about your product.
Just last week I was literally going crazy looking for a tool to sync my many Google calendar. Right before giving up, I searched for tips on Quora and found SyncThemCalendars. Elad, the founder, is doing an amazing job showcasing his unique product to everyone asking on Quora how to sync calendars.
He’s also been so nice to answer a bunch of questions on how he used Quora to acquire new customers for his product which you’ll read across the next few chapters.
In chapter 4 we’ll go more in-depth on strategies to sell your products on Quora. For now, all you need to know is that:
- It’s possible to use Quora marketing to sell your products
- It’s likely not scalable to large volumes
- It’s likely better to go with Quora Ads if all you care about is driving sales
Setting up your Quora Profile
Create the perfect profile
It might sound trivial but one of the most important things to kick off your Quora Marketing activity is to have a good-looking profile, this is very close to social media marketing after all.
Remember profiles are personal. Don’t use your company name or logo. This is about you.
I have to admit that after 4 years on Quora my profile page still sucks:
I mean… it’s not horrible but for sure not as good as it could be.
And that’s really bad. Think about the context. Here you are answering questions and giving advices. 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 in a professional and engaging way, and since you’re here, try to maximize your opportunities to gain exposure, drive traffic to your website or generate leads.
Here’s what I’d recommend getting the most out of your Quora profile:
- Use a professional profile picture. If possible use a colorful, contrasting background. It will help you stand out among the other people answering questions!
- In the short Bio write what you do (Marketer, Entrepreneur, etc.), and your current company, and only add former companies if they are very well-known brands that provide credibility.
- In the long Bio … be as long as you want. If other Quora users are interested in knowing more about you let them.
- Only the first 600 characters will be visible. Add the most relevant links and information there for your target audience.
- 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 company does. Add a short pitch and a link to signup & learn more.
- Link your top articles … the ones that will really make you stand out as a thought leader in the areas where you’re gonna answer questions
- Link one or two lead magnets to capture contacts of those really interested in your work
- If you’re decently active on other social media networks, link your other profiles
- Use UTM codes in every link to track the results of your profile page. Attribution is critical for revenue marketing.
Based on these rules, here’s how I re-worked my Quora profile to be more effective for marketing and personal branding:
Looks much better isn’t it? And as you can see the final touch for your profile will be filling the “Credentials & Highlights” and the “Knows About” boxes on the right with your favorite topics, your education, workplaces, and so on!
Even if not strictly related you can find some inspiration for your profile also in my post on how to write a great Instagram bio.
Topics, Questions & Spaces
Before starting a deep dive into how to do Marketing on Quora, let’s be sure you understand the basics.
There are three important elements on Quora that you should be aware of:
- Topics
- Questions & Answers
- Spaces
Let’s go through each one of them.
Topics
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 that you’re interested in to promote your business.
To discover topics just start typing in the search box and let the suggestions guide you. As you can see in the image on the right, there’s an endless amount of topics on Quora.
Once you click on a Topic you’ll land on the topic homepage which is mainly composed of three areas:
Read is a selection of some of the most interesting (according to Quora) questions and answers on this topic.
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.
Most Viewed Writers is another interesting tab! It’s a list of the top writer in this topic. As we’ll see in the chapter dedicated to how to drive traffic to your site with Quora marketing, this is a very important page.
To understand how big is a topic there are two metrics you can use. The first one is the number of followers. As you can see in the image above “SaaS Marketing” has only 24k followers. For comparison, “Facebook Ads” has 286k 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 to their answers the top writers received.
Jason Lemkin, the top writer in “SaaS Marketing” got 4,174 views in the last 30 days. Even though “Facebook Ads” has a way bigger following, the top writers are not performing much better:
However the average views for all the top writers in “Facebook Ads” is way higher than in “SaaS Marketing”. This means the topic is way broader and diversified and there are more opportunities for more people to get exposure from it.
Questions and Answers
Questions (and their answers) are the pulsing heart of Quora and the are where you’ll focus the most from a marketing point of view.
Every Quora user can ask questions and anyone can write answers. Each question can have multiple answers and readers can upvote, downvote or comment each answer.
As you’ll see browsing through various questions, some of them can get a huge number of answers. To maximize your marketing reach it’s important that your answer will rank among the first few spots or no one will read it. In the next section we’ll discuss how Quora ranking algorithm works.
Here’s a list of things you should look out for when analyzing a question:
- Followers: The more follower a question has the more it’s likely to receive traffic over time (plus more people will be potentially notified of your answer)
- Number of answers: If it’s too high, it’s probably not worth writing an answer. The one in the image above already has 91 answers. It’s gonna be tough to stand out and rank high!
- Views: at the end of each answer you’ll be able to see how many time it’s been viewed. This is a strong indicator of how popular the question is. When analyzing this number also check when the answer was written. 596 views for a month old answer are way better than 1,000 for something that was written 2 years ago.
- Upvotes and shares: another strong indicator of how popular the question is and how tough will be to be among the first few answers highlighted. Get a lot of upvotes and you might be featured in Quora digest which is sent over email daily and can dramatically boost your views.
Spaces
Let’s finally analyze the last key element of Quora, even though it far less relevant than questions: Spaces.
Quora spaces are a mix between personal blogs and communities like sub-reddit and Facebook Groups. While they started out with a blogging angle focused on original content production, they didn’t get traction and in 2018 they were rebranded as Quora Spaces with a stronger focus on content curation of best questions and external link on a specific topic.
Anyone can start their own space and decide if other users can only read the space or propose links and questions to be added.
It’s really up to you. You can manage your space alone, promote other users to moderators or let anyone recommend useful content to be added.
A Quora space looks like this:
We’ll see in the next chapter how you can leverage spaces to drive traffic to your website but I have to admit right now it’s still unclear what’s the potential of Quora spaces for marketing and how much traction they’re getting.
To start discovering spaces in your industry you can just perform a search in top navigation bar (they are mixed up with topics) or head to the spaces front page.
How does Quora ranks answers?
Let’s conclude our walkthrough of the main concept you need to know to get the most out of Quora marketing with one of the most asked questions: “How does Quora ranks answers?”
The reason why this is so commonly asked is clear. With top questions getting hundreds of answers, to be sure your answer is gonna receive enough eyeballs and drive traffic to your website, it needs to rank among the top 10 at least.
No one knows exactly how the algorithm works. That said there are a bunch of deductions I’ve made by analyzing hundreds of different questions and reading everything I could from Quora engineering team.
In the early days of Quora things were quite simple. The ranking was based on the difference between Upvotes and Downvotes. It was so simple it clearly had to change. Gaming the system was to easy and marketers quickly started creating upvoting rings to rank in the highest spot.
So how does Quora ranks answers nowadays?
For sure there is a complex Machine Learning system that is able to analyze multiple factors and assign a rank to each answer. If you want to get technical, Quora engineering team wrote a very technical piece here.
As described in the article the first set of elements that the Machine Learning analyze are to determine if an answer:
- Answers the question that was asked
- Provides knowledge that is reusable by anyone interested in the question
- Answers that are supported with rationale
- Demonstrates credibility and is factually correct
- Is clear and easy to read
This is likely the first pass of analysis performed to rank answers. It’s not the only one.
My guessing is that other criteria are used to rank an answer and very likely they are:
- User rank: very likely a ranking is assigned to each Quora account based on how long they’ve been on the platform, how many questions they have answered, how many upvotes they received and more
- Topic expertise: Likely you’ll have a higher rank if you have answered a lot of questions on the same topic before and received some upvotes
- Upvotes, Downvotes and reports: Even tho’ they’ve been de-emphasized, up votes and down votes still play an important role. Likely Quora also takes in account the “user rank” of people who upvoted your answers. If there are a lot of people reporting your answer as spam, that’s gonna weight a lot too.
- Use of media: I cannot tell for sure but often answers with videos or images tend to rank higher
- Outbound links: Finally Quora could look for the quality and quantity of links you insert to your answer. A link to Wikipedia doesn’t raise any suspect. 20 links to your website do!
Driving Traffic to your website with Quora
Driving traffic to your website is the bread and butter of Quora. This is really where you’ll be able to create the biggest impact. Moreover it will be a long lasting impact that will drive you consistent and predictable traffic over time. Even once you’ll stop actively marketing on Quora.
As I’ve told before, after being very active on Quora for some months three years ago, I still receive thousands of clicks to my website from those answers. Here’s the exact framework I used to promote my website on Quora:
Find the right question to answer
This is by far the most critical step for success.
Pick a question that is too popular and your answer won’t be noticed among the hundreds of others.
Pick a question that is too niche or has been asked hundreds of times before and you won’t get any eyeball as well.
The key to success here is identifying questions that already have interest but not a huge amount of answers yet. This is not an exact science and unluckily it requires some manual work and a bit of luck. Trust me, it’s worth it tho’.
So let’s get started and analyze the 4 methods I use to find the best questions worth answering on Quora to drive traffic to my website!
1) Find questions that receive traffic from search engine
We all strive to get attention from Google and rank our website in the top spots. Well, for sure Quora already has a lot of questions ranking high for the keywords you care about. Let’s find them out and leverage them to promote our content.
One option is to do this manually… it’s gonna be long and tedious and for sure you are gonna miss out a lot of questions. How in the world could you think of the above question?
Luckily there are a lot of tools you can use to immediately surface hundreds of Quora questions in your niche that are receiving traffic from Google. I personally use SemRush. Other tools like ahref will work as well.
First of all in SemRush start analyzing the quora.com domain and then go in in the Organic research page from the left menu. Here you’ll find all the keywords for which Quora is ranking on Google.
Time to do some filtering to narrow down the ones in our niche that are receiving traffic!
As you can see in the picture above, in SemRush you can filter by keywords. That’s the first step, start filtering for a keyword that’s relevant for your business and you’ll likely get a lengthy list of results.
You’ll only want questions with a meaningful amount of traffic. It’s quite simple. What I usually do is filter by position to only get questions that are ranking in the top 10 positions 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.
Booomm 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!
2) Leverage smart insights from Quora Ads
Don’t worry, I promised this guide was about marketing on Quora for free… and it is! We’ll cover Quora promoted answer in another guide very soon.
Still, even if you’re not planning on spending a single cent on Ads right now, Quora Advertising can be very useful to understand how many views a question is receiving before spending time answering it.
Let’s check it out.
In any question you can click on the three dots and then select View Stats and Log to get some useful information:
However these few stats won’t give you the full picture.
1238 views sounds quite good. But when did they happen? Is this a question that got a lot of traction one year ago and is now dead? Is it an evergreen question with consistent traffic? Who knows for sure!
The stats box is a first indicator but not a reliable one. We can get way more accurate estimates on the traffic this question is receiving today through Quora Ads!
First of all if you don’t have an account create one here. Then login into Quora Ads Manager and click create a new campaign.
Whatever you add here is quite irrelevant. We’re not really creating a campaign. Just give it a name and a budget and proceed to the next step.
This is where you define the targeting of your Quora Ads. And where you can find way more detailed stata on the views a question is receiving.
First select that you want to do Contextual targeting and then that you’ll user questions for your targeting. Then click “Bulk Add”.
A pop up will open. You can insert the title of a specific question if you are researching a specific one you’d like to answer.
Or you can insert a bunch of keywords (one per line) if you’re in discovery mode and want to quickly find high traffic questions you could answer.
Then click “Continue” and the magic will happen!
Quora Ads engine will return us the views our question received in the last week. Plus a list of many other questions on relevant topics. Now these are meaningful stats!
As you can see our question, despite the 1,238 total views, is not really a hit recently. It’s receiving less than 50 views per week. Not worth answering if the goal is to drive traffic to our website through Quora marketing.
Bonus tip: You can also use Quora Ads to estimate how popular a topic is. In the second step, pick topics instead of questions as your Targeting type. Then write the topic you want to analyse.
On the right you’ll see an estimation of the amount of weekly traffic received by questions around that topic.
As you can see, even without spending a single cent, Quora Ads can be a powerful ally in finding the questions that are worth answering.
Now let’s craft the perfect answer!
By now you should have identified some good answers with a great potential to attract eyeballs and drive traffic to your website. None of this will happen if you don’t write an answer.
Since we want to drive traffic to our website the question we have selected should have one or more of these characteristics:
- Be around a topic you’ve already covered with a blog post on your website
- Let you easily plug an eBook, Webinar or any other kind of lead magnet you already have
- Let you mention your product in a way that doesn’t appear spammy
The most common scenario is the first one. And it’s also the most effective when it comes to pure traffic generation.
If you already have a blog post published around the topic of the Quora question you’ve selected things are gonna be fast and smooth. You should already have all the content you need to answer. Just find the right balance between what you’re writing directly on the answer and what you’re holding off to drive traffic to your post to learn more.
Let’s analyze the common trait of every successful Quora answer.
1) Use storytelling to engage readers
The main problem of most answers is that the author just thinks about what he wants, not what the audience wants.
Everyone wants a great story, not a Ph.D. thesis. The goal is not making you look smarter than everyone else. It’s about giving value to your readers in an entertaining way.
Check out this great example from Nicolas Cole, Quora’s Top writer for three consecutive years:
Looking at his profile you’ll see this is a common element of most of his answers: they start with a personal story, not with a generic bla bla bla.
Write in a way people can relate to you, not look up at you. Show you’ve been through the same struggles they are now and show them the path to overcome them.
2) Go in-depth
As we covered previously, the key to success here is to appear among the top answers for each question. Of course the best way to achieve this result is to write the best answer.
Every now and then there will be some tactics to trick Quora. I can assure you they’ll work for a while and then fire back at you. Trust me on this, the best way to succeed in the long term is always to align your interests with those of the platform you are leveraging.
Quora’s interest is to provide its readers the best answers to each question. There might be holes in the system. They’ll be fixed. Just this year Quora is hiring a team of 10 engineer in Vancouver fully focused on AI and Machine Learning. It’s just a matter of time before they’re 99% accurate in detecting and rewarding the best answer no matter how many upvotes it receives.
Take your time, prioritize quality over quantity, and write long, exhaustive answers. Especially now that you know how to pick the right questions to answer.
3) Be credible
With everyone and their dogs jumping on Quora to write crappy answers, is very important that you can stand out as an authority in your field.
The first way of doing this is by customizing your short bio that will appear on top of your answer:
When you edit your credentials, they can also be tied to a specific topic. This way, the next answer you’ll write on the same topic will automatically pick that credential.
Again, don’t use this to brag about yourself! Keep in mind that the goal here is just to state why you’re the most qualified to answer this question!
Once you have a killer credential line, let’s move to your answer:
Personal experience is key for both storytelling and being credible. When you tell a story not only you’re making your answer more engaging. You’re also looking credible because you’re showing that you’re answering out of first-hand experience.
Using data is another element that has been critical to my success on Quora. Anyone can claim to be a Facebook guru. But only very few people can analyze and share data from $1B+ in Facebook Ads to back their claims.
If you don’t have proprietary data that’s ok too. Just spend enough time doing research and mention someone else’s data to prove your point.
4) Include visual elements
I cannot stress enough how important this is.
Using images and videos inside your answer we’ll make it more appealing to readers and help attract their attention when they scroll their Quora feeds. Remember, no matter where you are publishing your content, adding media to it, will always increase its engagement.
If you have an image that is spot on… great! I’ve plugged infographics in many of my answers and they did work great. Often I’ve also added Youtube videos where I was public speaking on the topic of the answer: Double win! It increased the quality of my answer and my views on Youtube.
If you don’t have any specific multimedia material you can use, just use some stock photo that provides a good representation of the topic.
Keep in mind that human faces tends to perform better (according to this study Instagram images with human faces are 38% more likely to receive likes). Even better if you can use some celebrity in your image like in this example:
Of course don’t plug celebrities images randomly. It needs to have some hook with the content of your answer!
5) Interact with other users
Most of the users are on Quora to genuinely help. Don’t see other Quora users giving answers on your same topics as competitors… they could be allies!
When answering your questions always try to acknowledge users who have already provided valuable answers. It has two benefits:
- It creates a connection with other smart users in your space. They could follow you, they could mention you the next time they write an answer. You never know what could happen. I actually ended up hiring as a copywriter a guy who was providing great answers around Facebook Ads.
- They’ll be notified. This increases your exposure and if you add value could get you another upvote.
On top of acknowledging other writers, there are endless opportunities to use mentions. Here’s an example:
This user just missed the opportunity to mention the authors of his favorite books. Some of them for sure are on Quora and if they were mentioned they might have upvoted his answer.
Here’s how I would answer instead:
On top of upvotes, if you’re trying to connect with some high profile person and they are on Quora, mentioning them (with a good reason) every once in a while will put you on their radar and when you’ll reach out they’ll remember your name.
I’ve seen people successfully use this tactic other and other again to land writing opportunities on top magazines, get in touch with CEOs and much more.
6) Drive them to your website
If you have successfully executed all these steps, by now you’ll have a must-read answer to a question that potentially generates a lot of interest.
Well done. You’ve already achieved one goal: Great exposure and personal branding.
But we want more, don’t we? If you’re reading this guide, chances are you want to drive more traffic to your website through Quora.
There are a bunch of ways of achieving this goal. One is less aggressive the other more. Overall my recommendation is to always mix the two and actually sometime giving answers with no links at all (or at least no links directly tied to you).
The less aggressive way is to simply insert links to your content mixed with the text of your answer like this:
It’s a great way to plug a link when your blog post is not exactly answering the question but is providing some context or interesting data to validate your answer. Of course it’s also less likely to receive clicks.
The second way, the more aggressive one, is to provide a valuable answer but clearly stating that there’s a longer format version in your blog. Always remember to add some context to your answer so it’s valuable even without clicking on the link otherwise it may be removed from moderators.
Here’s an example:
You can place your link at the beginning or at the end of your answer. Quora sometimes show answers in the feed in a collapsed way, only displaying the first few paragraphs. Adding your link on top will guarantee more exposure and opportunities to get traffic.
Finally, my advise is always to properly add UTM tags to your links so you’ll be able to get a better view of what’s working in Google Analytics. You can use Google url builder to quickly generate your utm tags:
As you can see I use the “Campaign name” field to insert the broad topic I’m answering. This way in Google Analytics I have a high level view of what topics are driving the most traffic.
That’s it! Just remember to check your Google Analytics every once in a while to monitor how your Quora marketing effort is performing. There’s no shortage of marketing channels, but not all of them work for every kind of business. Measuring is always key to focus your energy where it’ll provide the biggest return.
7) Be consistent
Everyone wants results fast. I know. And you’ll get some results fairly quickly. But there’s no silver bullet. Consistency and hard work is always they key to nail a new marketing channel.
Personally I allocated a one hour slot every week in my calendar to do marketing on Quora. Based on your results you could allocate more time or less. It’s way more effective to work 1 hour on Quora every week for 8 weeks than working 8 straight hours in a single day and then disappearing for 2 months.
Being consistent your name will appear more often in new questions and people will start recognizing you, following you and trusting you more and more. The more you iterate this process the more it will become effective and create a snowball effect.
Generating Leads and Sales from Quora
Here comes the tough part. You’re like a shark. You smelled blood by sending traffic to your website through Quora and now you’re looking for more. You want your Quora Marketing effort to drive leads and sales.
Let me set the expectations upfront. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride with highs and lows.
When taking this road there are some important things that you need to know:
- You need to be careful. Quora moderators don’t like this and you might get banned if you’re too aggressive
- It will work on a more limited number of industries, based on the volume of questions with a high purchase intent
- Because of the above points, it won’t scale for sales. It’s a great way to acquire your first 100, maybe 1,000 customers, but it’ll never become your first source of customer acquisition.
Generating Leads with Quora
While generating sales is a bit harder, generating leads on Quora is possible and actually I’ve been extremely successful at it even tho’ the volumes are not huge.
Let’s get right into it.
It’s like driving traffic but with a twist
The reality is that generating leads is kinda like generating traffic from Quora with two major differences:
- The risk of down votes or abuse reports are higher because it’s perceived as more spammy
- Your reputation (or your company reputation) on the platform is even more important since you’re asking users for a bigger commitment.
Start with applying the same framework we discussed in chapter 3 to identify the questions that are worth answering. The only difference here is that you should focus only on topics for which you have a strong lead magnet to drive those leads. In the next section we’ll discuss the kind of lead magnets that I found more effective.
Once you’ve identified your questions proceed writing an excellent informative answer as we previously discussed. The only difference here is that instead of directing people to a blog post, we’ll pitch them our ebook to go more in depth on the topic.
If your ebook contains a lot of proprietary data… that’s gonna work amazingly. Share something like 10% of the data in your answer, possibly in a visual way (charts, diagrams and so on). Then let them know that there’s a way bigger treasure if they get the full ebook.
Another strategy for finding great questions to answer is to look for questions with a specific intent to find an ebook (or whatever your lead magnet is). The big advantage here is that you don’t need to go as in-depth with your answer as you did before. You can just pitch why you’re the right person to write on the topic and then link straight to your lead magnet. Here’s a good example:
This answer won’t be perceived as spammy because it’s totally spot-on with the question.
One final tip to avoid being flagged as a spammer: add all the links that you think are relevant for the reader. If all the links in your answer are to your site, it’ll be a strong red flag for Quora moderators. Try to balance links to your site with links to authoritative websites.
Best Lead Magnets for Quora
Not all Lead Magnets are created equal. And to be effective with your Quora marketing you’ll need to pick the right ones to have an impact.
In my opinion a great lead magnet worth promoting on Quora should be:
- Unique: there are not 100 other companies offering the same content or you have a unique advantage over them
- Valuable: perceived value is really important. A newsletter is unlikely to attract hordes of visitors. On the other side, a free sample of a physical product will be perceived as extremely valuable
- Evergreen: If you do your homework, your answers will keep driving traffic and leads for the years to come. Your lead magnet should remain relevant for a long time
- Specific: If someone is asking for great resources to grow orchids, you won’t be very successful promoting your “Beginner’s guide to gardening”
In the past years I’ve been experimenting with many different kinds of lead magnets to do lead generation on Quora. Here are some consideration on what you should and should not pick:
Free Tools
By far the most successful lead magnet I’ve ever used. Developing free tools is likely the most underrated marketing tactic in the world. Of course it takes time and money to build a free tool… but if you can build the right one it’s gonna be so powerful.
Free tools have an extremely high perceived value, people will be more than happy to leave you their email to use them and on Quora they look way less spammy than anything else.
But there’s more. If you really build a killer free tool for your website, you won’t need to promote it on Quora. Other users will. In AdEspresso we had built one of the first free Facebook Ads Gallery around. It was an overnight success.
While I wrote a bunch of answers on Quora to promote it, I quickly realised it was not needed. Most of the users answering those questions were already mentioning us anyway:
The amount of traffic that all these users drove to our free tool is terrific.
Ebooks (or email courses)
I have mixed feelings here. It’s becoming a bit of an overcrowded space with everyone releasing and promoting ebooks at a crazy pace. Still I had a lot of success with AdEspresso’s evergreen ebooks.
The key is to make your ebook really unique. We were successful because our ebooks were providing data analysis that no one else had.
Try to understand what unique data your company has and make a data driven ebook on a very specific topic out of them.
Webinars and Newsletter
Two big losers that I would not recommend promoting on Quora.
Newsletters have a very low perceived value and are usually not focused enough on a single topic to be interesting within a Quora answer.
Webinars are too time-sensitive. Quora is a long-term game, not a channel that will send you crazy spikes of traffic in a very short timeframe. Most of the users will see the link to your webinar when it’s already over.
Codeaxia Digital Solutions
July 1, 2021
thanks for giving me such a nice article about Quora marketing ...
July 4, 2022
This is by far the best guide on Quora marketing. You should share more knowledge about Quora as an online course. Btw, I took notes on this guides. Here are a few good things about your guide. * Thanks for explaining the difference between Questions, Answers, Topics and Spaces. * The trick on using Quora Ads manager is also really nice. * Semrush trick, I tried, I liked it too. Here are the things, not covered in the blog * Can you share 1 method, so that I can manually find some Quora questions ranking on Google. Not all people have access to Semrush. * Semrush gives me Quora topics ranking on Google. But, when I click those questions, most of it has 100's of answers. So, again, the finding the right question takes even more time. * You mentioned to ignore questions with 100's of answers. Can I answer a question if it has 30 answers? Or should I ignore that as well. You can clarify that. Apart from that, this guide is really good. Im going to share it in my known circles and maybe write about this in my blog as well. Thanks a ton.
July 5, 2022
Thanks for the great feedback Vaishak! There you go: 1) You can probably do the same with Neil Patel's Ubersuggest 2) Yeah that's the downside, the more answer, the more content, the better ranking :( 3) I would give it a shot with 30 answers. A lot depends on the quality of the answers, the amount of upvotes you'll be able to gather and your authority in the Quora topic you're answering. Hope this helps! Max