THE STARTER S GUIDE TO QUORA Give your expertise the attention it deserves TODD BRISON
Why Quora?
It feels appropriate to start this guide off by telling you about an embarrassing misstep in my writing career. When I first started answering questions on Quora in late 2015, I stopped almost immediately. Where is the traffic? I wondered. Absolutely nobody is coming from my answers to my site! I wrote it off and moved along. There were more important things to do, I thought. Thank God I got a chance to overcome this short sightedness. After the slow start, my work on Quora has gotten millions of views. (Yes, you read that right. Millions.) Reviewing and answering questions there has become part of my daily routine. All on its own, the site landed me on Inc. Magazine, Apple News, and I swear this just happened the day I m writing this foreword The Huffington Post. You have an expertise. I know you do. You know you do, if you think about it. And if you re willing to use this guide to cut your learning curve with Quora, you are going to find yourself in the middle of a platform which helps you: Find exactly the people you want to target Know what is on those people s mind at any given time Give them answers they want to read Use their input to establish yourself as an expert, not just on Quora, but on any platform Generate infinite ideas for your blog Direct emails to those who you d like to get in front of Freely and easily recycle your best work
So before we dive into the wonderful world of questions and answers, I ve got to ask you one thing: What on Earth are you waiting for?
Step 1: Register on the right foot
The first (hopefully obvious) step is to sign up for Quora and follow the subjects you write about. Let s pretend you run a film blog. You talk about everything from the opinionated greatest movies of all time to the technical how to get the perfect shot for your scene. Quora makes you select 10 topics you are interested in, so knock that out first. After you get past this part, Quora will ask you what topics you know about so they can give you the best questions to answer. First, select the topics with the largest amount of followers ( Movies, in this example). You should also take a look at more targeted topics with a medium amount of followers.
In this scenario, you would definitely want your voice heard in the biggest category Movies. After a further search, you might also find section like Independent Film. With 70,000 followers you access a sizable but very focused audience. Quora is full of small, tight communities around specialized knowledge. The more you know about an obscure topic, the better your chance of making real impact in that area. Once you choose whether to add your Facebook friends (or not), Quora will create your personalized feed.
Step 2: Lurk like a pro
I d recommend taking a while to read the questions and answers. Quora is still pretty fresh, which means the community is still very wary of people who are coming to sell them things. Pitch too aggressively, and you will get eaten alive. Study everything, especially the most popular answers. Usually they have: A well thought out point (300 750 words or so) A picture Some kind of humor (especially sarcasm) A list of some kind or another The key to success in Quora is to become one of them. Read the top answers and get comfortable. As you scroll, also recognize how answers appear in the feed. Just because you re here to source ideas doesn t mean you shouldn t avoid making waves on Quora itself. Take a look at the picture below:
Both these pieces of are laid out pretty similarly. There s profile of the writer, the question, a picture, and then the start of an answer. But in this case, the cropping of the picture made 10,000 upvotes worth of difference! Who would want to click on a black square combined with a forehead? In order to master Quora, you have to think like a user. Pro tip: As you browse, take a look at how the best answers are formatted. Quora is unique because it only offers three types of formatting: bold, italics, and quote type. Robbed of the usual size and font changes you can use on your blog, you ll have to get creative to keep your answers from looking like a grey wall of text. Using the tilda (~), the less than (>), or the caps lock button (HELLO) are all acceptable methods of formatting. For optimal formatting in action, check out this answer.
Step 3: Answer questions to make your mark
Don t waste your time with the newest questions (at least not yet), go find the most popular ones. What you re looking here is the amount of followers a question has. This is where we run into Quora s unique mechanic: People follow questions, not answers or people. That means your writing has just as much a chance of reaching people as someone with thousands of followers. The best part? Even if a question been answered hundreds of times, everyone following the question will get an email when a new answer is posted (unless they ve opted out). So by simply answering a question, you send a direct email to a stranger with your content. What other social platform offers that kind of power?
Put answers on the popular questions first and watch the views roll in. Once you ve got down the culture and the atmosphere of Quora, move along to the newer questions and try to be the first one in on a potentially hot question. Pro tip: Okay, I thought this might be a little-known tactic, but I didn t know HOW scarce until I researched this post. Every topic on Quora has a topics page. If you take a look at that topics page, there s a very small button under the header that says Topics FAQ.
These are the questions topic moderators have considered to be most representative of the topic. They are always pinned to the page and always going to be seen if a person comes to that part of the topic. But look at this almost nobody is answering them!
If I were writing on a specialized topic like movies, I would definitely try to write comprehensive, long, helpful answers on every single one of these FAQs. In my mind, it s a no-brainer.
Step 4: Take your answers and use them elsewhere
Quora acts like a walled garden in most cases. Once you re in, you don t normally click things to go somewhere else. It does, however, give you a clue about what is resonating with your audience. The statistics on your answers will tell you which ones to republish on your other platforms. If you don t have that many followers yet, it doesn t matter how many upvotes you re getting. What you re looking for here is percentage of upvotes. If you see a few early upvotes (even if only 15 people have seen your answer) that s a good indication the idea is resonating. Here s a prime example of how that could work. I stumbled across this question one day: I can t find the right career, which upsets me. I m a 25- yearold introvert with too many interests yet too much ambition. What do I do? I knocked out an answer pretty quickly on my phone. Although the answer was pretty well thought out, I didn t edit or format it very much. Look at the stats on the bottom of this question.
Only 9 upvotes. This post is a flop! Right? Let s look again. Right at 1,000 views. Honestly, that s not many. Half of this views and all of those 9 upvotes came in the first 24 hours. This tells me the idea itself is not flawed. It just hasn t had enough eyeballs on it. I re-wrote the first couple sentences, expanded on a few more of the thoughts, and published to Medium, where it launched over the 500 recommends mark (a big milestone).
I have a much larger following on Medium than Quora, so that accounts for a bit of the boost, but still since you can give your work a fresh boost through another channel for no extra effort, why wouldn t you? And if it s really working on Quora, it will likely work elsewhere too. I wrote an answer on my phone riding to a hotel which did quite well on Quora, and then EXPLODED on Medium. To this day, it is my most popular post. Click on each of the links below to see a side-by-side comparison here. Notice I didn t just copy and paste each post, but have put thought into the introduction of each one. The Quora answer The Medium post
Step 5: Bring your existing work INTO Quora
In addition to using Quora to source content to pull out, you can also bring in work you ve done on another medium. Like I mentioned earlier, make sure you tweak what you ve said a little bit to answer the question asked directly. This is a great way to increase the impact of work you are already proud of.if you are afraid to recycle old content (like I was), ask yourself this question: Has every single person who could learn something from this post gotten a chance to see it yet? For me, the answer was a resounding NO. I finally got over the hump, and posted an answer to a question from a blog post I had written over a year ago. The result? Nearly half a million views, thousands of upvotes, over 100 comments. Oh, and one request from a Quora editor to republish the work on Inc. Magazine s website.
Not half bad for work I had completely forgotten about.
One final thought
Hopefully by now, I don t have to convince you Quora is an excellent way to further your impact, source ideas, and grow deeper roots into your niche. Still, I can t help but leave you with one last thing. The other day, I was scrolling through my feed looking for questions when I saw this post: That s odd, I thought. This post is dated November 2012. Wonder why I m seeing it in my feed in 2016 Sometimes, I am not very smart. A few days later, though, I was offered a chance to understand what was going on with this post:
Again, a post from 2012. This time, I got it. I m seeing this post because Quora s algorithm gives readers the best content possible, no matter when it was written. (For the record, Medium is starting to do the same thing). When you publish a post on your personal blog, it s gone in an instant. On Quora, new readers can discover your best work by chance, even if it s months or years old. So again, I have to ask: What are you waiting for? Dive in to Quora right now.