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Quora as a marketing channel, anyone?

MJ DeMarco

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Has anyone successfully used Quora as a marketing channel, either in

A) Advertising (they now offer advertising)

or

B) As a person who answers questions?

to effect leads, sales, or website traffic?

Quora is pretty stiff on their rules in trying to keep marketing objectives to a minimum.

Also, anyone get invited to this? And if so, does it have an impact on your marketing? I'd imagine for "more than $1000 a month" you'd have to spend HOURS writing content, to the tune of $5 an hour type of stuff.

Screen Shot 2019-05-09 at 9.59.54 AM.png
 
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Timmy C

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Interested to hear about anyone having success with this also.

I am currently doing it with Facebook groups answering questions and offering people help, trying to get a funnel going as part of a strategy.

I jumped on quora for a bit the other day to try it out but the UI is annoying and couldn't find much on my subject matter.
 

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I talked to someone before who runs an interesting Quora service...

Most of the top answers on Quora are there with just a few upvotes. Basically, his service was asking questions that fit perfectly into what you offer. So for you MJ it would be something like "what is a book that teaches an actual system for wealth creation?".

You then come along and answer the question (including a link or product plug) and his service also manages to get it the highest amount of upvotes. So you end up with an exact question and Google loves to show for searches and the most visible and liked top comment.

In the end, I didn't go with it cause it is kinda shady (and you can do pretty much this same thing on Youtube in a legit way) but it does show how easy their system can be gamed.
 

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Not that I have used it as a marketing channel successfully myself (or really tried for that matter - I've always preferred Medium.com). But I used to read a lot of content by "Nicolas Cole", a writer who has essentially started his writing career on Quora. Today, he has somewhere around 30 million accumulated views on his Quora posts alone.

He used platforms like Quora and Medium to build up a massive following, then used that popularity to get into many of the world's biggest publications like Inc., Forbes and whatnot.

Today he runs a branding agency for business executives and entrepreneurs, pretty much helping them to get featured in those big media outlets and build a following for themselves.

I think the point with these platforms is that they only really pay off when you invest huge amounts of time into them. Once you've got a following over there, then your answers will naturally get more views and thus get picked by the editorial team to be featured. Then oftentimes other publications like Inc. etc. pick them up and syndicate them on their website.

Posting the occasional answer or two probably won't do much.
 
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ideasunlimited1

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I'll have to look into this, MJ. Maybe try my hand at testing it by answering questions. I think Quora is a great place for answers, but in my experience, I don't tend to see a lot of people within my demographic flocking to it as much.
 
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For me, Quora is an excellent site for evergreen content.

Yes, I answer marketing questions and try and provide much value as possible. It's important to also have a bio that drives people to your different funnels, social channels, or w/e offer you might be promoting at the time.

I have done limited ads with them. It ripped through my budget very quickly the first time, so perhaps I didn't set something up properly. I am however going to give it another go at it.

If you routinely go into Quora to answer questions, make sure to document and save all your answers/questions. This content can be repurposed for later use on other sites or social media channels.

Why document it? Because it's easily searchable inside Evernote (the tool I use to save all articles) and won't be trying to figure out what content you posted where.

Hope this helps/answers your question a little bit.
 

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Not really good experience with Quora.

I used to use Quora to help people to lose weight from my own knowledge and experience. I spend hours of time to write the answers and advises. As people ask the same questions over and over again, I created an online health educational portal and directed people there.


Last week I was banned for spamming without any warning. Many people liked my answers, however, Quora has its own point of view, that is probably it for me. I will not use Quora anymore.
 

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I had a bad experience with Quora . I did not promote anything however I found few things which had negative effect on me . I quit Quora and do not plan to ever join it :
1. The red sign when you get a like in quora was so addictive. I would check my qoura page multiple times of day just to see who liked my answers . (This is before i understood how addictive social media can be) .I would get angry if anyone disagreed with my answers ha ha I was really childish. It was very unproductive time .
2. There was so much negativity and irrelevant questions . I got so scared reading about cases of false rape, false domestic violence case against men . There were few disturbing details about Bangladesh Liberation war, WW2 war etc. May be I was looking for negativity or may be not . But reading those answers made me feel scared and non-energetic .
3. I found most of the answers were not well researched and were written on whim and fancy of the writer . They were shallow to be honest.
4. Instead of writing answers I was reading answers (tons of them)and I found my self bombarded with information . I felt uneasy and negative .It was a feeling of Information over load .

Thankfully I deleted my Quora account and plan to never go back again .
Maybe I did not use quora wisely but I have no regrets of leaving that platform.
I am much more productive and making daily progress .And yes happy too !!! . Its as if a dark cloud has gone away and sunny days are back :)
 
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eliquid

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I think we chatted about this before in another thread @MJ DeMarco about Quora, but yes I use it and gain traffic and seo benefit from it.

Havent been invited to the partner program though.

I do things a bit differently, similar to what @Fox mentioned but I don't write the question.

Many of my answers are top answers, and many of my profiles are the top profiles in their category.

But yes, traffic and sales and seo benefit.

.
 

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Has anyone successfully used Quora as a marketing channel, either in

A) Advertising (they now offer advertising)

or

B) As a person who answers questions?

to effect leads, sales, or website traffic?

Quora is pretty stiff on their rules in trying to keep marketing objectives to a minimum.

Also, anyone get invited to this? And if so, does it have an impact on your marketing? I'd imagine for "more than $1000 a month" you'd have to spend HOURS writing content, to the tune of $5 an hour type of stuff.

View attachment 24595

I have told about my many failures. Something I tried back in the day. I became part of PIPS (Plug In Profit Site) *their 30-day guide has some valuable information* but I wouldn't recommend anyone to join to build a business around it. Most programs offered are made to target the novice and inexperienced people when it comes to online marketing. *Note I am also the novice*

Either way, I joined and I tried to build a profitable blog. I wrote 40+ blog posts and used a bunch of different strategies to direct traffic to the site including traffic exchanges. One of my strategies was to answer posts on Quora that had to do with digital marketing, e-commerce and services I was trying to promote. Some of those posts would get thousands of views. The most popular ones performed at 6000+ views in a single week. Here are the stats in that account. Screenshot

Honestly, I did not use link trackers in order to see how many people were actually clicking the links I was posting but assuming a 1% rate. That's 390 clicks. To write my answers it probably took me 15 hours in combined time and then a bunch of extra time I spent researching subjects and concepts to write the actual blog posts. Probably I could of done better if I used nice images and better formatting on my answers but I only used raw text. It seems the posts which contain high-quality images about the topics being discussed combined with fairly concise and informational text are the ones that get upvoted most and seen most.

I think quora can work for those who actually have a service or offer which is really valuable to the person asking the questions. Some quora questions rank #1 on Google for long-tailed keywords so I seen people use it to zap some of the highly targeted traffic landings on the question. I used to know a Google command to find such posts that ranked really well but I forgot by now. Maybe someone else here knows it?

All in all. My experience with Quora. If you actually help the person asking the question solve their problem with a REAL solution. And you write your answer to educate them and add nice images to the post then it may be worth your time doing it. Building a good and trusted reputation is key to succeed like in most other places.

I may give this a try again later when I have something real and no PIPS bullshit.
 

Fox

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I think we chatted about this before in another thread @MJ DeMarco about Quora, but yes I use it and gain traffic and seo benefit from it.

Havent been invited to the partner program though.

I do things a bit differently, similar to what @Fox mentioned but I don't write the question.

Many of my answers are top answers, and many of my profiles are the top profiles in their category.

But yes, traffic and sales and seo benefit.

.

Mind sharing the working put in versus the reward?

Anyway to know how much traffic you get from your links etc?
 
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eliquid

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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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. Why are the answers at the top, at the top?. It's actually not what you think.

  4. Test and see if what I think works. If not, keep testing until I find something that works. Even if just a little.

  5. Now that I did find something that is working, how do I scale it?

  6. 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.

.
 
Last edited:

eliquid

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I wanted to add this too...

I don't write questions to then just later go back and answer them ( with a 2nd account ). I answer questions other people have already wrote.

Why?

Because I see almost no benefit from it.

The only benefit I see from it is possibly getting your question ranked on Google. But here is the downside.
  • You can't gaur. a ranking of your question on Quora with Google.

  • If you did get it ranking on Google, it might only be there a few days, weeks, months, etc.

  • You miss out on a lot of what I mentioned above writing your own question that potentially only you and 3 more people might answer.
As someone that has done a lot of SEO in their life, I just don't see much upside to writing your own questions, knowing how both Google and Quora work.

You will gain more answering questions already wrote by someone else.

If you really wanted to, you could always rank the questions someone else wrote, that you hold the top answer to, too.

.
 

DaDream

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I wanted to add this too...

I don't write questions to then just later go back and answer them ( with a 2nd account ). I answer questions other people have already wrote.

Why?

Because I see almost no benefit from it.

The only benefit I see from it is possibly getting your question ranked on Google. But here is the downside.
  • You can't gaur. a ranking of your question on Quora with Google.

  • If you did get it ranking on Google, it might only be there a few days, weeks, months, etc.

  • You miss out on a lot of what I mentioned above writing your own question that potentially only you and 3 more people might answer.
As someone that has done a lot of SEO in their life, I just don't see much upside to writing your own questions, knowing how both Google and Quora work.

You will gain more answering questions already wrote by someone else.

If you really wanted to, you could always rank the questions someone else wrote, that you hold the top answer to, too.

.

Tons of great insights from what you wrote. I have to agree in nearly every scenario is best to answer questions posted by real users with real problems. Those are warm leads if they perceive your account as a trusted source of information. At the same time, I think catching up on trends is also a big competitive advantage. So posting a question around a viral topic exploding with engagement and there is nobody talking about it on Quora yet... could result in a posts that ranks in the first page on Google and steals some of that traffic being engaged. I haven't tried this myself. I think posting questions like that in a different account to answer them is a scummy tactic but sometimes this is the only way to win.
 
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I'm in the partner program but yeah you need to be writing for hours. I think I've make around $5 a month off it.

Quora is pretty strict on outgoing links these days, so it's not as beneficial as it used to be. Nevertheless, it's still something I do for a few minutes every day.
 

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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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. Why are the answers at the top, at the top?. It's actually not what you think.

  4. Test and see if what I think works. If not, keep testing until I find something that works. Even if just a little.

  5. Now that I did find something that is working, how do I scale it?

  6. 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.

.
You had me at “doing things that don’t scale” Mr Brown.

Super interesting. Thanks for sharing.

I don’t use Quora at all. I may look at it because answering questions and responding to other people’s comments seems to be what pulls content out of me. “Blogging” bores me. Interacting in communities doesn’t.

My whole business has grown by just bouncing around in forums and Facebook groups and dropping tips every now and then. I’ve not been systematic or intentional about it at all, so I wonder what would happen if I was...
 

Andy Black

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I don't see it working for a PPC guy ( or consultant ) looking to drop answers and gain more clients either.
You had to say that... that’s like a red rag to a bull.
 
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Solais

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Has anyone successfully used Quora as a marketing channel, either in

A) Advertising (they now offer advertising)

or

B) As a person who answers questions?

to effect leads, sales, or website traffic?

Quora is pretty stiff on their rules in trying to keep marketing objectives to a minimum.

Also, anyone get invited to this? And if so, does it have an impact on your marketing? I'd imagine for "more than $1000 a month" you'd have to spend HOURS writing content, to the tune of $5 an hour type of stuff.

View attachment 24595

I've answered like 20 questions so far and nobody has replied to me despite the good amount of effort I put into each post (and the fact that I'm answering questions well within my expertise). I could be using a very small sample size, but I don't think that's the problem.

Quora seems inferior compared to Yahoo! Answers even back when that was a popular option (God, that was like 15 years ago), cuz at least you'd find some humor. Meanwhile, there seem to be a small cadre of Quora fanatics whose sole job is to write walls of text that nobody will read, but will somehow garner a lot of upvotes.

I know you've had a couple of answers that garnered many upvotes, but that's probably more due to the fact you're already a semi-well known author in the field of entrepreneurship.
 

eliquid

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I've answered like 20 questions so far and nobody has replied to me despite the good amount of effort I put into each post (and the fact that I'm answering questions well within my expertise). I could be using a very small sample size, but I don't think that's the problem.

Quora seems inferior compared to Yahoo! Answers even back when that was a popular option (God, that was like 15 years ago), cuz at least you'd find some humor. Meanwhile, there seem to be a small cadre of Quora fanatics whose sole job is to write walls of text that nobody will read, but will somehow garner a lot of upvotes.

I know you've had a couple of answers that garnered many upvotes, but that's probably more due to the fact you're already a semi-well known author in the field of entrepreneurship.

What kind of questions were you answering?
 

eliquid

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That's not what I mean.

Were these new questions with no other answers, old questions from 3 years ago with Wiki Answers, etc.
 

Solais

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That's not what I mean.

Were these new questions with no other answers, old questions from 3 years ago with Wiki Answers, etc.

I filtered by

- Within Last Week

and I looked for questions with 0 - 3 answers in them.
 

eliquid

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I filtered by

- Within Last Week

and I looked for questions with 0 - 3 answers in them.

That's the problem.

If I am a Quora reader and I have a question about "how to sell blue widgets" and I look on Quora for that, I will get back like 2,300 questions where someone else has asked the same question as me already.

Which question do I choose to now read?

The one created 4 years ago with 100+ answers ( some of which might be top experts that answered ), or the one created last week that 2 people answered... of which those 2 people might only have a history of answering 8 other questions on a similar topic ( basically look like amateurs ) that no one has even upvoted?

You gotta start where the reader is even hanging out first.

People are attracted to crowds, sheep follow sheep, social acceptance and group think/wisdom of the crowds draw people in. Our brain's shortcut our thinking that way. It's one of the basics of marketing. People are going to hang out and do what everyone else is doing ( going to the popular questions and "trusting" what others have already blindly trusted and upvoted ).

Right now, you're going to the empty water holes and trying to help out. That will get you nowhere. No one else is there, so those won't draw people in ever.

This is what I mentioned earlier in this thread that most people go about this like it's an unplanned free for all ( Quora as a marketing channel, anyone? ).

There is a saying, "Profit is made on the purchase". That applies here too. The traffic is made on the right selection of question.

.
 
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Solais

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That's the problem.

If I am a Quora reader and I have a question about "how to sell blue widgets" and I look on Quora for that, I will get back like 2,300 questions where someone else has asked the same question as me already.

Which question do I choose to now read?

The one created 4 years ago with 100+ answers ( some of which might be top experts that answered ), or the one created last week that 2 people answered of which those people might only have a history of answering 8 other questions on a similar topic ( basically look like amateurs ) that no one has upvoted?

You gotta start where the reader is even hanging out first.

Right now, you're going to the empty water holes and trying to help out. That will get you nowhere.

This is what I mentioned earlier in this thread that most people go about this like it's an unplanned free for all ( Quora as a marketing channel, anyone? ).

.

I'll give it another go, but wouldn't your answer be buried underneath an avalanche of existing answers?

Or do you just play the "long game" and wait for views to accumulate? Hmm...I didn't consider that.
 

eliquid

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I'll give it another go, but wouldn't your answer be buried underneath an avalanche of existing answers?

Or do you just play the "long game" and wait for views to accumulate? Hmm...I didn't consider that.

Go back to my blue widgets example, there are 2,300 similar questions.

Maybe your niche is different. There could be more, or less, questions for your niche example.

Regardless though, do you keep answering new questions that no one else is reading or finding.. that you will get no eyeballs on?

Do you really think ( and hope ) trying to be the 3rd or 4th answer on a new question that others will come in and answer below you making it one of the popular questions ( with more than 100+ replies )? Because that won't happen. Even if it did, you won't keep your 3rd or 4th spot. Someone like me will come in and answer and take over your spot. Multiple that by 90 more people and you're at the bottom of the answer now even if your answer is better than mine.

You wind up at the bottom just like if you would have answered an already popular question.

Except in your strategy, you have a long shot of a change of your new question ever even getting popular and getting traffic. It's almost a lottery purchase.

On the flip side, answering already popular and important questions already gets you on a question with traffic.

Half the battle is now solved with the same amount of work put in.

Instead of giving great information on questions that no one is looking at and reading, you are giving great information on questions that lots of people are looking at and reading.

Sure you won't be at the top or anywhere near it at first. But people do read those popular questions and lots of people read all of the answers all the way to the bottom.

Plus answers and questions get merged all the time. Many of the answers get removed. Based on this alone, you could find yourself closer to the top any moment depending on lots of factors.

The question that has 100 answers today with you at 18, could be a question merged with another tomorrow that has 10 answers removed and puts you at 8th place. This goes on all the time and happens more than once on questions.


.
 

Solais

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Go back to my blue widgets example, there are 2,300 similar questions.

Maybe your niche is different. There could be more, or less, questions for your niche example.

Regardless though, do you keep answering new questions that no one else is reading or finding.. that you will get no eyeballs on?

Do you really think ( and hope ) trying to be the 3rd or 4th answer on a new question that others will come in and answer below you making it one of the popular questions ( with more than 100+ replies )? Because that won't happen. Even if it did, you won't keep your 3rd or 4th spot. Someone like me will come in and answer and take over your spot. Multiple that by 90 more people and you're at the bottom of the answer now even if your answer is better than mine.

You wind up at the bottom just like if you would have answered an already popular question.

Except in your strategy, you have a long shot of a change of your new question ever even getting popular and getting traffic. It's almost a lottery purchase.

On the flip side, answering already popular and important questions already gets you on a question with traffic.

Half the battle is now solved with the same amount of work put in.

Instead of giving great information on questions that no one is looking at and reading, you are giving great information on questions that lots of people are looking at and reading.

Sure you won't be at the top or anywhere near it at first. But people do read those popular questions and lots of people read all of the answers all the way to the bottom.

Plus answers and questions get merged all the time. Many of the answers get removed. Based on this alone, you could find yourself closer to the top any moment depending on lots of factors.

The question that has 100 answers today with you at 18, could be a question merged with another tomorrow that has 10 answers removed and puts you at 8th place.


.

You are a reminder that if I was slightly more active here in one of my previous 2 ventures, they might not have completely crashed even before I got started.

You are right. I will do what you suggest.
 
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James Fake

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As a Quora user every now and then for; I'll throw my 2 cents in. It was mentioned before that I often cringe away from marketing masked answers, however it depends on the nature of the answer too. I think Quora won't work for everyone, but in certain niches and industries where a DEEP answer is needed; I will be drawn towards really good thorough no BS answers. When I am impressed with someone's true deep expertise (including their intent or thoughtful'ness), I definitely look briefly at what they do or represent. I also think think giving away 'free' info always works well (the info or industry tidbits that are usually 'guarded')
 

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I used it last year with Investor Junkie and may again this year with my personal brand as it ties in better as well.

Results we meh at the time, but they have improved their algos.

I think organic still does better with them.
 

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