Quora is an excellent free resource for business information you need. Your questions will be seen by other professionals and experts, and unlike some Q&A sites, you’ll actually get solid advice from people that know more than a thing or two about your question.
Quora is much more than a Q&A site, however. With the right approach and practical knowledge you can apply to your contributions, you can drive Quora traffic to your website. If you have a small business you’re trying to develop, and also a wealth of information in your head that others might find useful, you can capitalize on both by applying your expertise to helpful answers.
Don’t Promote Directly, and You’ll Be Fine
A major no-no on Quora is direct promotion. If you’re joining the site solely to spam questions with your website or promotional copy as a “promotional tactic,” you’ll be looked down upon in the community and will potentially get yourself removed. You can promote your company indirectly through a number of different ways, however.
You can start a question anonymously asking about your own company. This is a sneaky strategy, but it works: users will give you genuine answers as to the worth and validity of your company’s services and the question will stay online for other visitors and search engines to see later.
For the non-anonymous approach, you can speak from your company’s experience in answers, and discuss how you have applied useful strategies at your business. This leverages your professional knowledge as well as your business, but if you are confident in both, you will gain authority in the process. Authority is a valuable asset on Quora, and will be the driving force behind building more valuable leads on the service.
The Power of Authority
On Quora, you can build a complete profile about yourself for others to see. This is one of the first things you should do after you join—build your profile so that it represents you professionally. Your business can be represented in your profile as a source of your expertise or a result thereof. No matter what your field, you can establish yourself with your business and promote yourself at the same time.
As you continue to use Quora and answer questions, the value of your answer will be determined by other users with up or down votes on your replies. If your replies are deemed valuable by the community, you’ll be respected as a more trustworthy authority on the website. This reflects in search engine results, as well; if someone researches a question you’ve answered and arrives upon your valuable answer through a web search, they will benefit from your posts outside of the Quora community and you’ll earn valuable name recognition for the future.
There Are No Stupid Questions
You can almost guarantee that if you’ve ever wanted to know something, someone else has wanted to know the same thing. If you didn’t find any information on the internet through search results, maybe there haven’t been any answers to your questions posted online yet. Quora is the best solution to this problem, and if you’re promoting yourself as well as seeking knowledge, it is doubly effective.
There is no such thing as a stupid question on Quora, and the likelihood that someone will eventually ask your same question or seek your answers in the future is very high. By participating on the site, you are producing evergreen content that is easily related back to your name and professional brand. From a marketing perspective, this is an excellent deal: long-term, effective content that will attract new leads over time, hosted offsite on a service that adds authority to your brand, with minimal overhead expenses and minimal effort involved in production. By helping others, you help yourself in the process.
SEOMoz founder and young entrepreneur Rand Fishkin is an active Quora member, and commonly answers questions on the service by speaking from his own experiences. Not only does he attract attention to himself online with his valuable responses, he also attracts interest in his company. Rand’s success with SEO strategies comes from an understanding that every social outlet is a potential lead-building tool for your business, and you can bet that Quora contributions are part of his personal SEO strategies.
Anyone that has anything worth saying can take advantage of this valuable service for their own business. All it takes is a quick sign-up, and some helpful knowledge that others would like to know, and the road to building new business contacts and leads through helping others can open up to your business as well.
Robinsh
No doubt services like quora will help the budding entrepreneurs from the experienced ones with the practical knowledge and everyone should use it to make their life easier in getting their problem solved in no time and also via expert advice.
Charleen Larson
I’m not so sure there’s no such thing as a stupid question on Quora. If you want a lot of participation, your question needs to be well-thought-out. Anything obvious gets voted down quickly.
Thanks for this post, Amie.
You wrote “If your replies are deemed valuable by the community, you’ll be respected as a more trustworthy authority on the website.”
But, how can your “authority” be measured outside of Quora?
These days, it seems like it doesn’t take much to be considered an “expert” in a topic-in certain web communities. The trick is leveraging it for results.
There are so many online communities to join these days. Heck, there are several being created right now…today.
Quora seems like a pretty good place to hang one’s hat.
But, only if it can be leveraged.
The Franchise King®
Michael
I find Quora good for link building.
Bonnie Rauwerdink
I was going to give it a try but it wants to go though my personal accounts and it wants me to give it permission to post on my behalf. No way. I’ll stick with LinkedIn Questions.
What I love about Quora is the profile of the person using it — usually more business-prone but moreover more C-level material than the folks answering questions on LinkedIn.