Get Customers from Quora

You might not think of Quora as a marketing channel, and yet:

• Podia increased MRR by $X,000 in just 30 days from a few hours of work each week answering Quora questions.
• Clubhouse had 15% of their monthly signups come from just four Quora answers I wrote.
• Etleap saw as many demo requests (sales leads) come in from Quora in one month as from paid search ads.
• A few Quora answers about data science platforms helped Domino win huge enterprise deals.

This is a summary of what I learned about attracting users and customers from Quora. It’s written based on my experience in testing this with B2B software companies, but should apply to anyone who’d benefit from more quality traffic.

First let’s set proper expectations about Quora as a marketing channel: It has the potential to provide a high and steady volume of traffic, but the quality—their likelihood of becoming customers—could be lower than other channels. The low level of effort and high volume should make up for that.

Go through the following steps and measure the outcome for yourself.

How to Start Getting Customers from Quora

1. Create a list of potential questions to answer. Search Quora for relevant use cases, competitor names, and topics. Look at the “Related Questions” links. If you’re targeting search keywords as part of an SEO campaign, look for questions that show up on the first page of Google for those keywords.
2. Prioritize the list of questions by relevance, number of views and followers, and Google prominence. Don’t worry if a question has many answers; it’ll only take a few upvotes to bypass most of them.
3. Write answers for the top three questions in your list. See “What makes a good Quora answer?” below.
4. Ask your team and friends to upvote your answers. Quora does not forbid soliciting upvotes, within reason. Don’t downvote others’ answers and don’t use bots or mechanical turk.
5. Track results for a few days. If the return on time spent is good, then proceed…
6. Use the initial answers as templates for subsequent answers, modifying as necessary to fit the question. The more questions you answer the largest your answer back gets, thus increasing results while reducing effort.

What makes a good Quora answer?

Write as though you’re giving an explanation to a friend or colleague. That means keep it clear, substantive, and not overly promotional.

Aim for around 500 words, and include relevant images such as screenshots to break up the wall of text. Don’t hide your association with the company or product you mention.

Most importantly: Add a link to your site or product where applicable. It’s better to have the link at the very beginning or end of the answer, where it’s more likely to be seen.

Tips for Maximizing Traffic from Quora

• If you rank high in an answer, suggest a merge with a similar question.
• If you find a question that’s highly relevant and you know is getting lots of views from your target audience, bring in reinforcements: ask current customers to post an answer (and maybe mention your product).
• If your answer is stuck far down the page, create an “Answer Wiki”—which is shown directly below the question and above the answers—with a list of links to all the solutions mentioned in the answers. This way you get a link at the very top.
• Quora links have no SEO value due to their rel="nofollow" tags, so forget about doing this for SEO.
• The data I collected (from 100+ posted answers and 100,000+ views) shows that clickthrough rates from answers to the linked site are in the 2-10% range. So expect around 20-100 visitors from every 1,000 answer views. Their quality and conversion rates will depend on the question and what you’re selling.

Treat this just like any other customer acquisition channel and track its performance. It could very well be a low-cost, low-effort, steady source of customers for your company, just as it has for my clients.