Hey guys, welcome to this one minute free traffic Quora guide. This is nothing revolutionary if i am being honest but I hoping it will encourage you to take full advantage of this untapped traffic source.
Using Quora to Get Traffic and Free Quality Content
I love Quora. It's a fantastic Q&A website that is, in my opinion, largely underestimated or misunderstood by people who just use it to quickly drop their links with generic comments. It's not how it works. The site is really well organized and not difficult to use at all, so it's worth taking a moment to understand how it works.
Here is a quick guide that will help you make the most of the site's huge traffic and generous content.
There are several ways to use Quora for your IM efforts:
1. Get content and keywords to increase search traffic for your money site
2. Get referral traffic by answering questions
3. Get more referral traffic by answering your own “questions” (=using Quora as a parasite site).
Do not limit yourself to one of these methods. Write quality content for your money site by recycling people's answers. Then get even more traffic by using your new content to answer questions.
Understanding How Answer Rankings Work
The way Quora ranks answers is more complex than simply counting up / down votes. It's closer to what Google does with its algorithm than how Reddit works.
Here is what their site says: “Creating an account out of thin air to throw your links and have them up-voted by random and equally low quality accounts is not going to work in most cases. You will need to become an expert in your niche and get up-votes from real people.”
How To Generate Traffic Quickly and Get Content For Your Site
You can get good traffic by answering new or very popular questions. I'll start by focusing on new questions and share a trick to find popular ones later.
First, you need to choose a couple of topics that you will check frequently. Quora has tons of it, from very general subjects to very specific ones. I generally try to find 2-3 topics relevant to my business with decent metrics (at least a few thousand followers). See what works best for your own products/services.
Then keep looking for the latest answers. They'll generate quick traffic because they're fresh, and if you answer quickly enough, you won't have much competition while the question is in the spotlight. That should also improve your chances of quickly getting up-votes and building authority.
Click on the number under above Questions on the right side of a topic page to get the latest questions. How frequently you should check this depends on your niche I guess. I try to check new questions at least twice a day, more often when time allows.
When you find an interesting question: If you already have content on your site that answers it, introduce your article briefly and link to it. Otherwise, see if you can reuse content from similar questions. Quite often, the same question gets asked many times with only subtle differences. Like, in the copy-writing niche, I see a lot of questions like “How can I make money with copy-writing”, “How do I get started as a freelance copywriter?”, “How to find copy-writing clients?” popping up all the time. They are the exact same thing in substance, so once you have an article about it, you can bomb it all over the place and still be relevant.
To quickly write those articles, you can use related questions (check the right sidebar when you look at a question) or browse Quora/the rest of Internet to find great answers and compile them in an article you'll post on your site. Some Quora posters really share awesome stuff. Depending on how good individual answers are, I'll either a. copy/paste the whole thing, add a couple of introductory lines to avoid duplicate content and credit the source or b. mix the answers and rewrite them just enough to make the final result seem 100% original. In any case, that's free and quality content for you that may generate links and traffic on its own. 🙂
Of course, don't forget to do keyword research and on-page optimization for those articles.
To save time, I have a stash of articles/answers for the most popular questions whenever they pop up again. There are always small variants, so sometimes your answers will need a more personal touch, but it should be a quick effort.
Here's A Nice Little Pro tip: consider mentioning people you take content from if they're not competitors. They'll appreciate the credit, and that's a great way to get free up-votes from authoritative sources
Another Little Pro tip 2: use the above trick on old and popular answers as well. Curate the answers, mention the respective posters and possibly get high quality up-votes. This way you may end up ranking pretty well on old, high-traffic pages, and it will boost your overall profile.
How To Structure Your Answers
As suggested by Quora themselves, your answers should have:
– Text: longer answers rank better
– Links: that one shouldn't be too hard
– Images: try to embed them where relevant
Freshness also seems to be a factor. For competitive questions, you may want to edit your answers every once in a while.
Now, as for the text, obviously you want people to click on your links. So you need to find the balance between writing too little and ranking poorly (that would look like spam too), and writing too much and missing on traffic. Generally, I have a summed up version of my popular articles ready at hand. This way, people get a general and helpful answer, but still need to check my website if they want the full details.
Like I mentioned above, I keep a small library of answers to common questions, together with their shortened versions. It's great content for my sites, and it means I can write relevant answers very fast whenever needed.
A small tip to find already popular questions
I use the following query in Google to quickly find popular questions:
inurl:quora “1..999 k Views” intitle:your keyword here
I suppose you can customize it with other metrics, but it works well enough for me. It's a great way to get started and see what content people are interested in. Typically, popular questions will already have lots very good answers, which you can and should reuse to your own benefit. Create your first articles based on the content you find there, then use them to answer new questions.
“Ask” Your Own Questions and Get Even More Traffic
As Quora has huge authority and great interlinking, its question pages also make great parasites for moderately competitive/long-tail keywords. So why not build those pages yourself? Things get a big black hat here, but I see lots of obviously fake users posting questions like “Who is the best XXX provider?”, answering the thing 5 seconds after and getting away with it. Include your keywords in your question title, add a short text to explain the details of your “question” (“I'm a small business owner looking for xxx services and I was wondering if any of you had recommendations” or something like that) and be the first to answer it.
If you're doing that and want to be on the safe side, maybe try to use a different IP/aged account to ask questions (not too many questions per account), then answer with your main account after a short while.
Ok guys so that's about it! No magic trick, just a couple of hours to get things set up and a few minutes a day to check new questions. If you take time to do it right, Quora can be a wonderful tool for your sites.
I you want some full on detailed video training that covers Quora in more depth, then check out the One Minute Free Traffic Course.
