eliquid
( Jason Brown )
EPIC CONTRIBUTOR
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User Power
Value/Post Ratio
519%
- May 29, 2013
- 1,876
- 9,731
Mind sharing the working put in versus the reward?
Anyway to know how much traffic you get from your links etc?
I feel the work put in, is very little ( overall ). And that the reward is pretty big.
I should also note that I am looking at both direct and indirect benefits too in this post.
The problem I see with how most people approach quora is, they look at it as an unstructured free-for-all. No real plan, no real process.
Kinda like PPC or social media. A lot of people just think if they show up and buy a lot of keywords and make generics ads ( PPC ), or if they get on Twitter and LinkedIn and start "connecting" and following, that magic stuff will just start working for them.
When it doesn't they get frustrated and leave.
But we all know, we need more than that. Right?
I was doing the same with Quora when I tested the waters years ago. Just to see what it had.
I would pick random Quora questions and answer them. Then I would answer the ones Quora would suggest to me to answer, etc. I was trying to use it to "network" with others and to answer questions in my niche I thought would help. I wanted to answer all the new questions and do that, etc.
I didn't get much from it. I pretty much wrote off Quora doing it that way.
But something kept drawing me back in.
So I decided to do what I end up doing in most all things in my life. I went back to it and turned it upside down and decided to do things the Jason Brown way. Typically this means doing things that don't scale and look absurd to normal people. Tinkering and asking crazy questions and just doing things differently.
What came out of that, was just looking at the questions in my niche that mattered the most.
Basically asking, what's the 80/20.
My thought process was this:
- What are the most important questions in my niche, here on Quora? Hint, what's "important" to me, might not be "important" to you. Also, important isn't limited to flat thinking like, "well it's important I answer only X topic questions." You need to dig deeper than that.
- Quora is using moderation AND machine learning/algo's. How can I game those ( think of it like Google and its moderation and algo's ) to my benefit? It's like SEO back in 2001 almost.
- Why are the answers at the top, at the top?. It's actually not what you think.
- Test and see if what I think works. If not, keep testing until I find something that works. Even if just a little.
- Now that I did find something that is working, how do I scale it?
- Track ALL of this in a spreadsheet and learn from it over thousands of questions and several years.
So the initial upfront put in, is a bit on the high side when I started out. I had to put in the work to drill down and figure out the 80/20 above.
Once established and working, the put in is very lite. Why?
- Because you are dealing with less questions total. You now are not answering every question presented to you and you know which ones are the most important ones you need to answer. Now you are not trying to answer 100's, but maybe 10's.
- You don't have to game Quora's moderation and machine learning/algo. However, to scale this in a way that I do it, I had to. You can largely skip this. It is not needed for you to have success. You more than likely won't spend time here like me.
- You will need to figure out why the answers are at the top though. Questions that have 20+ answers will be worthless to you if your answer is at the bottom most of the time. This is where most people end up. If you can't "rank" your answer at the top ( just like with SEO ), you won't see any benefit. Once you figure it out, you spend very little time getting your answers to the top.
- Once I got this process down, I handed it off to an offshore VA entirely.
The reward to me is very high for doing this. Why? I'll share 1 business I do this with.
One of my businesses does little to no marketing. It's basically WOM and people who follow and know me for years. Thus, this business is hardly known even though it has created some breakthroughs in it's industry. Posting on Quora allows me to spread the brand name and rank it among our more popular competitors. In doing this, we build our brand name which leads to things like:
- Us getting into more "review" articles when people compare our competitors. They found us on Quora during their research and now we get included in that research when we normally would not have been. This leads to SEO benefit and more customers, as well as authority in our niche.
- Journalist reaching out to us for articles or quotes. This leads to SEO benefit and more customers, as well as authority in our niche.
- Getting new customers directly from Quora, or people curious about us who start out as free trials but become customers in our funnel.
- SEO benefit directly from Quora. I have documented this at least 5 times over 2 years in various ways.
- I'm able to routinely see my competitors message over and over again in how they present their brand to customers. I get to see what they hone in on and how that changes over time and per question/topic. I get to see how they interact with sales questions and use support questions that I would never gain from just visiting my competitors homepage or signing up to their program and going through their onboarding. I prob. know my competitors more intimately than their own sales and support people do. I can predict what their answers will be on questions they haven't answered and structure mine to win the customer to me even if they later post their own answer. Think of it like an attorney prepping for a case and knowing the other side better so they can win the case no questions asked. You can't really do this type of research on Twitter, Facebook, or any other channel.
- When we get a new customer, the LTV is 4 figures. If my VA spends an entire month on Quora and we only gain 1 new customer, it has paid for itself and more and that's only the direct signup from Quora I am talking about here. Even if my VA got 0 signups I still gain SEO benefit, brand exposure, and authority from the postings which are hard to measure and bring in customers too that might not get originally attributed back to Quora answering, later on.
- These Quora questions many times rank in Google too. So if done right, you can not only get SEO benefit from the links to your website, but also SEO benefit as a traffic leak if the question ends up ranking in Google for your niche. More people now see your "answer" and brand. If you did your answer correctly ( and got it ranked at the top of the Quora question ), you will get all that free search engine traffic now too and potentially sales as well.
As far as traffic from Quora and my links, yes I know how much I get. They get picked up in just about any analytics package out there like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, PiWik, etc.
Right now, Quora is one of the top drivers of traffic and conversions for the 1 business I speak about above. It mimics the same in other businesses I am involved in too.
Quora does have its quirks and isn't for every business or application.
For example, I could not see this working for a local plumber looking to drive leads... or for a small ecom store on Amazon looking to get sales. I don't see it working for a PPC guy ( or consultant ) looking to drop answers and gain more clients either.
I think this method and approach works for specific topics and industries and you have to be able to look at the short and long game both.
It's works for me because my LTV is high and I can spot the indirect benefits as well which play into the longer game.
Hopefully this helps.
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