Although it’s not usually considered a valuable resource, Quora can be a fantastic way to boost your sales.
Quora, for those not familiar with the platform, is simply a question-and-answer site. Users ask questions; other users answer them. However, instead of decaying into the depths of something like Yahoo Answers, Quora has become an amazing place to get real, in-depth answers.
In fact, you can get your questions answered by all the big names in business, finance and politics, even
Today well look at exactly how you can achieve gains in your sales and business by using Quora.
#1. Increased Reputation
The #1 reason for Quora to exist is for experts to honestly and thoroughly answer people’s questions.
Because of the way that Quora is set up (the more views, upvotes and comments, the more your answer is seen and the more popular it becomes), you can become the most viewed writer in topic X.
It is a very easy connection to make, and most people make it, from “most viewed writer in topic X” to “Renowned Expert in Topic X.” In fact, by doing that, you can easily find yourself standing head and shoulders with industry leaders and influencers.
Although the views rank up over time, you don’t need to spend every minute on it. In fact, the more relevant your topic becomes, and the more people upvote it or comment on it, the more it is shown.
So it is absolutely possible that your answer will continue to rank up the views even after a few weeks, months, or years. That can push you closer and closer to the top of the rankings.
When people see you as an expert in your industry, they are more willing to take your advice—and your product.
#2. Long-Term Traffic
Of course, in this modern, always-online world, one of the most important things for any business is to drive traffic to their website. With greater traffic, you can convert those visitors into subscribers and eventually into buyers.
Quora is perfect then for business.
By posting a thorough, useful, quality answer on the platform, you can get a steady stream of traffic. This isn’t just the short-term, click-bait type traffic that many content marketers are subscribing to.
That kind of traffic usually leads to visitors who do not fit the profile or ideal customer avatar (ICA) your business has set up.
Instead, a high-quality Quora answer will lead highly-qualified users to visit your site. They will most likely already be motivated by your answer and will be much more likely to subscribe or check out your products than someone who randomly stumbles onto your site.
However, there is one important thing to remember: a high-quality answer doesn’t mean it should be a 100% complete answer. You must strike the balance between giving a lot of information, but only as much as to hook your readers.
If they want more, they’ll have to visit your site.
#3. Attention from Major Publications
What happens when you get more and more visibility from Quora? You eventually move up on the ladder of fame on the internet—the way something goes viral and ends up on the front pages of leading newspapers.
The more people view your answer, upvote it and comment on it, the more your answer increases in rankings.
Many popular publications scour Quora to find fantastic answers that they could turn into a full article. There are even others like Huffington Post and Forbes that publish the entire Quora answer verbatim on their website. Talk about an increase in traffic and reputation!
Even better, if you’ve been hoping to appear in those publications, it’s much easier now that they’ve published your answer. Because of the authority of those publications, whenever anyone types in the keywords in Google, they’ll find those articles and find you. And that means more sales and more business for you.
#4. Find People’s Pain Points
One of the great things about Quora is that it is actually a very good research platform.
It is often very difficult for small businesses to get the adequate resources to do large-scale research on what their customers or ICAs really want. Meaning: what is the pain point that you can solve?
If there are such resources available, it usually means spending extra money that most businesses just don’t have.
That’s where Quora comes in. You see, the more people are asking questions about a topic, the more that topic is important to them. If many people seem to be having the same type of problem in your niche, it probably means it’s a pain point that continues to irk them.
Either the solution doesn’t exist, or the existing solutions aren’t adequate. Now, you can use that information to fit your product or service to providing them with the perfect solution. And, of course, increase your sales along the way.
#5. Learn Something New
Finally, there’s one thing we shouldn’t overlook with Quora: it’s a place for anyone to ask questions and read very good answers, including you.
As I mentioned above, Quora has such a status at the moment that it attracts almost all of the industry leaders, in any industry. From celebrities, to activists, to politicians, entertainers and of course business folk. You never know what kind of useful answers you’ll come across.
While you are browsing through questions you’d like to answer, you will probably come across a lot of useful information that can help you improve your business and brainstorm new project ideas.
This most often comes from the big names, but it could also include very relevant and useful information from relative unknowns that have lots of great, practical, actionable information.
With these answers, you may find yourself actually learning something. And when you learn, you can grow your business, help it become more efficient or increase your focus and productivity. With the extra money or energy saved, you can invest that back into your business, streamlining and fine-tuning it, and eventually increasing your sales.
Get on Quora Today
Of course, the only way to really use Quora to your advantage is to actually start using it. I recommend getting on there right now and creating your profile.
Remember to optimize it for your business, including necessary information to get people interested in your company. List your business name and site address (may not be clickable, but people will know where to find you).
It is also important, as I said above, to give enough but not too much information. The most successful Quora answers are usually those that are more personal, so you should really tone down the marketing pitch and just speak like a real person who happens to have expertise in topic X.
Lastly, one Buzzsumo study found that blog posts that have lots of pictures (one for about every 100 words) gets double the amount of shares compared to others. This also applies to Quora (although there are of course many high-ranking answers with few or no images). If the images are useful, use them. If not, reconsider.
With these tips and attitude to this gold-mine of a platform, you’ll be able to quickly increase your traffic and see great increases in your sales and business.
Image: Shutterstock
