How to Leverage Q&A Sites to Generate Traffic

There are many types of sites with which you can generate traffic.

But there’s one in particular that is great for small, and even some medium, sized sites:

question and answer sites (Q&A).

These sites consist solely of users asking questions and other users answering those questions.

Because they are “natural” questions, they contain long tail keywords in most cases.

Because of that, these sites quickly amass search engine traffic in addition to their regular user base traffic.

There are hundreds of Q&A sites out there, but for this post, I’m going to focus on two of the biggest: Quora and Stack Exchange. 

Yahoo Answers is also large, but it’s not friendly to marketers (links often get deleted), and I find that the quality of the questions and answers is low.

You’ve probably at least heard of or seen Quora by now. It’s about the 140th biggest site in the world:

It covers just about every topic imaginable.

Stack Exchange, on the other hand, has separate mini-Q&A sites for many different topics (mainly related to technology and education).

Like with every traffic generation method, you need a strategy when using these sites.

That’s what I’ll be giving you here: a step-by-step plan to capitalizing on these question and answer sites.

While I’m going to focus on those two here, this strategy will work for just about any Q&A site. So, if you can find a niche-specific Q&A site, you’re set.

Which businesses should drive traffic from Q&A sites? Before we get started, you need to figure out whether these types of sites can work for you.

While you can drive a significant amount of traffic to your website (thousands a month), you’ll be hard-pressed to ever generate truly huge amounts of traffic.

That means that this strategy is best for sites that only get a few thousand visitors a month. To them, this new traffic source will make a big difference.

If that sounds like you, let’s get started.

Step 1: Identify topics, categories, and search phrases

First, know that you won’t be answering the first questions you see—that would be a waste of your time.

Everything you do on these Q&A sites should be to maximize your visitors/time spent ratio.

If you’re answering questions no one cares about, you won’t get many visitors, and that ratio is going to suck.

The ideal questions to answer have a few common factors:

• They’re not very old – on Quora, the best questions aren’t more than a few hours old. The older the question is, the more other answers you will be competing against.
• They have a relatively high number of views - if they get more views than other questions, many people must be interested.
• They have a low number of other answers - the more answers there are, the more likely your answer will get buried at the bottom.

There’s one attribute that ties the 2nd and 3rd factors together.

If many people are interested in a question, why aren’t there many answers?

Because the question is difficult to answer.

It’s important to understand this because you will be tempted to dodge these questions, thinking it’s easier to do a quick answer to a simple question.

But simple questions get tons of answers.

Expect to put some serious work into your answers to these difficult questions. It might take you 15-30 minutes sometimes to answer them, but if you get a few hundred visitors (or thousand), it can be worth it.

I’ll walk you through the steps of finding these questions on both sites.

Finding great questions on Quora: To start, go to your profile. There will be a section called “knows about,” where you can describe your areas of expertise.

In the text area, start typing major keywords (e.g., “marketing”, “SEO”, “jewelry”, etc.) that reflect your niche.

Quora will suggest relevant and popular topics. Choose them, and press “add.”

The more topics you add, the more potential questions there will be to answer, but keep the topics relevant.

Once you’ve done that, click the “Answer” link on the top toolbar.

That generates a list of questions that fit the topics you just chose.

The annoying part about Quora is that you can’t sort the questions.

By default (the only option), the questions are sorted based on an algorithm that considers the posting date and the number of other comments and views.

Your only real option is to scroll through them.

Take a look at the above picture to see what information is available for each question.

As you can see, it’s not perfect, but it’s a good start. For each question, we can determine:

• the number of answers
• when the question was asked
• the number of people following

You can find more useful data inside each question. If you click on any of those titles to go to the question page (with all the answers), you’ll see a “Question Stats” box in the right sidebar.

That box will show you the most important stat we’re looking for: views.

Typically, the views will correspond to the number of followers, but not always, so you should check both.

Now that you know what we’re looking for and where to find it, you just need an efficient process to identify which questions are good.

Here’s a good start:

• screen out questions that were asked over a day ago
• screen out questions that have zero followers or fewer than 100 views (this does not apply to very recent questions, of course)
• screen out questions that already have over 10 answers (you could go lower)

This will leave you with a few good questions to answer. These questions will:

• be recent
• have a good amount of interest
• have little competition (more on this later)

Most Q&A sites are similar: Some Q&A sites, like Stack Exchange, are easier to use for this purpose.

Like I said before, Stack Exchange consists of a ton of mini-Q&A sites divided by topic.

You can find one that’s relevant to your niche using the dropdown menu at the top:

All sites on Stack Exchange can be sorted by tags.

If you click on a tag, you’ll get a list of questions that have been marked with that tag.

That’s not very different from the process we used above. However, you now have the ability to sort these questions by a few different filters:

You can see the filters on the top menu above.

Additionally, Stack Exchange sites show you the number of views right on this page.

You should mainly use the “votes,” “newest,” and “unanswered” filters.

The “votes” filter will sort all posts with your tags according to the number of votes those posts received (indicating interest).

If you see a post with thousands of views but very few answers, you may want to add one. Even if a post is old, it’s likely still getting views from search traffic if it’s this popular.

You’ll want to spend most of your time sorting by “newest.”

You can either jump on questions with no answers yet that you think might get more popular or stick to questions that are a few hours old that already have a good number of views.

It depends on how much time you have available to answer questions.

Step 2: Here’s how to structure answers for maximum effectiveness

Now that you know how to find good questions to answer, the hard work begins.

On most Q&A sites, including Quora and Stack Exchange, answers are ordered by the number of “upvotes” you get.

In theory, the best answer should rise to the top.

This means that your answers have to be the best.

However, you also want to be able to drive traffic to your website.

There are three main methods to do this, but they all hinge on one key criterion of question selection:

Only answer questions related to content you’ve already written about.

Otherwise, there won’t be a natural way to drive traffic back to your site.

Method 1 – A brief answer with a link to a post: Once in awhile, you’ll get lucky and come across a question that you’ve addressed almost perfectly in a past post.

For example, when someone on Quora asked whether content marketing was effective and whether it was worth spending time on over SEO, I had to answer it.

I already had a post that answered this question exactly.

That made my answer simple but credible.

I did provide a brief answer, but I was able to point the person asking the question to a more detailed answer.

In cases like these, your link will fit the situation perfectly, and it won’t seem like you’re trying to jam it in there.

Method 2 – Reference posts in your answer: Most of the time, questions will be on related to your past content issues.

In this case, you’ll have to provide a detailed answer on Quora itself.

It takes a lot more work, but if it gets you a few thousand views, it’s worth it.

As far as the linking goes, just put in 1-3 links to your closely related content whenever it makes sense. You won’t get an amazing click-through rate, but you’ll still drive a good amount of traffic.

Here’s an example of an answer by Eli Rubel, where he cleverly slipped in a link to a blog post about measuring results:

Method 3 – Recommend your product directly: You need to be careful not to spam these sites with promotional links and answers, but if you sell a product, you’ll occasionally get the chance to recommend it directly.

The key is to do it in a transparent and authentic way.

Start with a disclaimer saying who you are. Here’s an example answer:

The key thing to keep in mind is that your answer still has to be valuable if you want it to get upvoted.

So, if someone asks for a product that lets them do “x, y, z,” make sure you explain in great detail all the ways your product helps them accomplish those tasks.

Point out honestly where your product is strong as well as where it’s weak because readers will appreciate it.

While these questions don’t typically get as many views as others, they can lead directly to sales, which makes them much more valuable.

Step 3: Track and modify your approach

The final thing you need to do is track your results to determine whether answering questions is worth your time.

Overall, this is a simple 2-step process.

Fair warning: your first 5-10 answers probably won’t do very well. You’ll quickly learn what does and doesn’t work on the Q&A site you chose to start with.

Track (1) the time you spend on each answer and (2) the number of visitors you get from that time (even better—conversions).

You can track views directly on the Q&A site, but views to your actual website are more important.

In Google Analytics, go to “Acquisition > Overview > All Traffic > Referrals” in the left side bar:

You’ll get a list of all the different sites that referred visitors to your site, hopefully including your Q&A site:

Next, you can click on that site in particular, and you’ll see a list of the pages that it sent traffic to:

Give each post at least a week to see what kind of traffic it is driving (both immediately and on a consistent basis).

Once you have a sample size of at least 20-30 questions, you have enough information to determine whether using Q&A sites is an effective traffic generation strategy for your business.

It usually will be if you’re good at picking questions and getting top answers, but in some industries it will be harder than others. That’s why you need to measure and evaluate your results.

Conclusion

Q&A sites present a huge opportunity for marketers looking to grow smaller sites—even if using them isn’t scalable.

I’ve shown you a simple but effective 3-step process that works on almost any Q&A site.

If you’re still with me at this point, chances are that one (or more) Q&A site might be a great traffic driver for your business.

Start by using this process to answer at least 20 questions, and adjust the process from there if needed.

If you still have questions about how to drive traffic using Q&A sites, now is the time to ask. Leave your questions below in a comment, and I’ll try to answer them.

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How to Turn Quora into a Traffic-Driving Machine for Your Blog

Frustrating, isn’t it?

You work tirelessly on your content – but no one reads it.

It’s like giving a presentation to an empty room. No matter how much insight you have to share, nobody’s there to even notice.

You feel certain that if you could only get some more traffic to your blog, the content love would flow.

But even when you promote the heck out of your latest post, the following week you have to start the process all over again.

It’s exhausting.

But what if there was a strategy that could drive traffic not just to your latest post, but future ones too?

And what if that same strategy was as effective as guest blogging for getting new visitors, but was quicker, easier and didn’t require you to pitch your ideas to anyone?

What if by using that strategy you’d be rubbing shoulders with some of the biggest names on the web?

Wouldn’t you want to know what that strategy is?

Quora – The Surprising Traffic Driver for Savvy Bloggers

Have you heard of Quora?

It’s the Q&A platform where anyone can post a question and get answers from experts in the community.

Here’s what it looks like in action:

Even though Quora was launched way back in 2009, you might not have encountered it until recently.

But make no mistake, these days Quora is a big deal.

Everyone from Ashton Kutcher to professors at MIT and even Barack Obama have taken their turn answering questions.

However, if you’ve spent any time on the platform, you might wonder how it could help you as a blogger.

You may even see Quora as a potential threat – yet another distraction dragging you away from the serious work of running your blog.

If so, you might be surprised to learn that Quora can be a major source of traffic for bloggers.

Don’t believe me?

Right now, Quora is the number-one traffic driver for my blog.

Along the way, my answers on the platform have hit over 1,000,000 views, and I’ve been featured three times in the Quora Daily Digest that goes out to up to 2,000,000 people.

And all of this has happened in just six months.

The Benefits of Quora for Smart People with Answers

When you think about it, Quora is the perfect platform for bloggers to demonstrate their knowledge and expertise.

After all, most of us blog to help our readers with the problems they wrestle with, and a Q&A format is the purest expression of helping people with their problems.

As a blogger, not only will you find Quora a natural community in which to participate, but you’ll get several benefits from doing so.

Benefit #1: Quora Is a Source of Long-Term Traffic

I’ve already mentioned the traffic potential of Quora, but an additional benefit is that answers posted on the platform can continue to drive traffic months after being created.

For example, I still receive significant traffic from one post I wrote back on August 23rd, 2015:

Nearly three months later, people are still finding my answer to this question about passive income,  and when someone “upvotes” it (the Quora community’s way of giving support for an answer), my answer appears in their feed and is visible to all of their followers.

The result? More traffic comes back to my blog as well as a ton of new opt-ins for my email list.

Quora’s Stats page shows how my answer has received 83K views from the community.

In practice, the traffic generation effect can last much longer than just two or three months.

Tony Stubblebine, the founder of Coach.me, reports that a Quora post he wrote about meditation last year continues to bring him traffic to this day.

Remember, each answer you write can become an asset that brings you traffic for years to come.

Benefit #2: Quora Lets You Establish Yourself as an Authority

How would you like to be known as the most viewed writer in your topic area?

That’s what I was able to do in Self-Improvement, a seriously competitive topic.

Now my name stands next to James Altucher in the Quora rankings:

You might think you need to post regularly to maintain your ranking, and while that’s somewhat true, rankings last longer than you might think. My colleague Kevin Lee (who co-authored mybook on Quora) has been ranked as the top writer for the Product Manager category for the past 2 years –  even though he only posts occasionally on that topic.

Quora also gives topic badges to top writers. These appear next to your name for everyone to see.

When you appear in the most viewed writers list and start to earn badges, you’ll find that people begin to ask you questions (called Ask to Answer – A2A) on the topic under which you are featured. And that’s the true sign of authority, right? When people approach you for your expertise completely unprompted.

Benefit #3: Quora Can Get You Noticed by Major Publications

Continue writing on Quora and you also have a good chance of being featured on a big site like Forbes.

That’s because major publications are now sourcing content directly from Quora and publishing selected answers verbatim on their websites.

Here are some examples from Google:

This has happened to almost all of Quora’s top writers. One of the most successful is Nicolas Cole, who has been featured in TIME, The Huffington Post, Business Insider, Forbes and many others.

How to Start the Engine on Your Quora Traffic Machine

At this point, you must be asking how can you tap into all this Quora goodness.

Fortunately, there’s a simple three-step process you can follow to dominate Quora in your topic and start driving traffic to your blog.

Step #1: Create a Traffic-Optimized Profile

New writers on Quora often don’t take the time to fill out their profile in its entirety. But that’s a big mistake because you’ll fail to stand out from the thousands of other profiles on Quora.

The perfect Quora profile starts with the perfect profile bio.

Give Yourself a Killer Headline with the Profile Bio

Your profile bio is the “headline” that appears immediately beneath your name in your Quora profile.

When completing this, you need to decide what topic you want to be known for and consider the type of questions you’ll be answering.

Your bio should signal to your audience that you’re qualified to answer those questions.

Choose your words wisely because space is limited – you only have 80 characters to express yourself.

One popular format is to give a list of descriptive roles separated by a “pipe” character.

Here’s Leonard Kim’s profile bio, which uses this format:

Your profile bio is important because it appears next to your name in any context where your profile appears, e.g., above any answers that you create.

Note that any links you put in your bio will not be rendered as clickable links, so you might want to reserve those for your profile summary.

Add Detail Using the Profile Summary

Under your profile bio is your profile summary, where you can provide more information about yourself.

The summary field is only shown when people click to view your profile in full, but on the plus side it is far less restricted in length and format than your profile bio.

Rich formatting like bold, italic and underline is supported, together with lists and blockquotes. Web addresses will also be correctly rendered as clickable links, so this is the perfect place to link to your blog.

Here are some of the ways you can use your profile summary field, inspired by top Quora writers:

• Tell the story of your life and professional experience.
• Link to your blogs and social media profiles.
• Mention publications you’ve written for, to build social proof.
• Share any quirky or interesting facts – this is your chance to be different.

Above all, don’t bore the reader. Try to be interesting and inspiring – humor works well too.

Here’s a preview of Brandon Lee’s profile:

Notice that Brandon cleverly constructs his summary from his past answers on the site.

Doing this not only helps give you credibility (once you’ve created a few successful answers) but also provides an opportunity to get more upvotes and views on your top answers.

Finally, you can also tag other writers in your summary, but more on that later.

Claim Your Core Topics and Add Custom Bios

Quora allows you to add specific topics to your profile and provide bios for each one. (These bios override your main bio when answering questions on these topics.)

To add a topic, simply click on this panel in the sidebar of your profile:

Then search for relevant topics to add to your profile. In this case, we’re adding Blogging as a topic that we know about:

Once you’ve selected a topic, you can edit the bio that’s used when you answer questions on that topic:

Creating a custom bio for each of your main topics allows you to highlight the most relevant aspects of your experience for each topic.

Once you’ve added some topics that you know about, they’ll appear in your public profile.

Here’s a preview of Nicolas Cole’s list:

So those are the building blocks of a perfect Quora profile.

Remember, your Quora profile is key to gaining credibility with your audience and must not be overlooked, even if you’re keen to start answering questions.

If your profile fails to persuade people you’re qualified to answer the questions that interest them, you’ll struggle to get views and upvotes.

Step #2: Go Hunting for “Big Game” Questions

This is the step that 95% of Quora writers miss and it’s the difference between getting 50 versus 1,000 views on your answers.

Are you ready?

Before you write a single answer, you need to find the answers that are attracting the most views and upvotes within your topic of interest.

So start by looking for a relevant topic. You can use this list of the most followed topics on Quora for 2015 to find the ones getting the most traffic and views from the community.

As as example, we’ll use the Self-Improvement topic.

As you can see, this topic is very popular, with over 400K followers. So you know that it will attract more traffic and will lead to more views than a less popular topic like, say,  Taxidermy.

Now, look for the Topic FAQ – this will show the top questions being asked at the moment.

You’ll notice in this example that 1,613 people have answered the question, “What can I learn/know right now in 10 minutes that will be useful for the rest of my life?”

So if you were in the personal development space, this would be a great topic for you to target.

Answer this question in detail, and you have a good chance of getting 1,000 views on your first attempt. (We’ll look at specific tips for writing popular answers shortly.)

But where do those views come from?

Click through to the question’s answer page and you’ll find out:

Notice the number of people following this question – over 35,000!

And many of these folks will be notified as soon as your answer is posted.

It’s like having a huge mailing list at your fingertips.

How awesome is that?

Since you’re just researching questions at this stage, not answering them, click the “three dots” icon and select “Answer Later.”

This will help you build a database of questions you want to answer. When it’s time to dive into the writing process you can take a clear run at it, rather than go looking for new questions to answer each time.

As you browse Quora, whenever you find a popular question you could answer, be sure to add it to your “Answer Later” list.

Step #3: Carefully Craft Your Answers

No single formula exists for writing the perfect Quora answer, but certain tactics will considerably increase your chances of success.

And you’ll improve with practice. Just like best-selling authors take time to hone their skill, the same applies to writing answers on Quora.

Luck plays its part too. One answer may bomb while another goes viral, without any obvious explanation.

But if you use the following tactics, you’ll experience success much sooner.

Tactic #1: Tell Stories

Stories are so powerful that Seth Godin devoted an entire book to explaining why you should use them – it’s called, “All Marketers Are Liars.”

It’s been scientifically proven that when we hear a story our brain activates the same areas it would if we were experiencing the events of the story ourselves.

For instance, if I told you a story about a delicious, rich, velvety piece of chocolate cake that I devoured last night, your sensory cortex lights up – you partially live that experience!

This is why personal stories of tragedy, struggle and personal perseverance do exceptionally well on Quora.

Don’t believe me? Check out all these answers with thousands of views about Dashrath Manjhi – the man who, following the death of his wife, spent 22 years carving a path through a mountain using only a hammer and a chisel.

Even if your topic doesn’t lend itself to big emotion, you can usually package up at least some of your points in a story.

Tactic #2: Get Visual

According to a Buzzsumo study of two million articles, those that showed an image once every 75–100 words got double the amount of shares of articles with fewer images.

You only need to look at the success of apps like Instagram to realize just how visually driven we humans are.

On Quora, using images is the best way I’ve found to quickly stand out from all the other answers.

The majority of writers do not bother looking for images. Their answers end up looking like a sea of bland text and are easily skipped over by readers.

Here’s a great example:

Tactic #3: Don’t Sell the Farm

When answering questions, make sure you provide enough value to get upvotes and views but not so much that you give away all the details.

This tactic is the key to driving traffic to your blog.

It’s also given me a massive uptick in my email opt-ins.

As an example, I used this tactic when I answered the question about how to earn $500 per month in passive income through an online enterprise, the one that garnered 85,000 views.

In my answer, I explain a four-step process for building a niche business by starting with e-booksand casually hint that I earn money writing books.

This piques the reader’s interest. Then, in Step 2 of my process I link to a post on my own website giving further details.

The same day this post went viral – September 11th, 2015 – I received 78 new email subscribers.

Here’s my Google Analytics data below:

Tactic #4: Go Deep

When you approach a question, you should set out to create the best answer for that question.

There is no point creating a quick 200-300–word answer on a top question because you will just get lost among all the other answers.

You need to spend time writing a long, thoughtful answer. One that hopefully incorporates a story from your life.

If you want your answer to withstand the test of time, make sure it is memorable and can hold its own as other writers continue adding answers.

Oliver Emberton, hailed by some as the Michael Jordan of Quora, has made a career of this.Answering only 127 questions but garnering 9.8M views, he was named a top Quora writer in both 2013 and 2014 and has used Quora as a springboard to launch his blog.

You can read more of his story here.

5 Domination Tips from Quora’s Most Successful Writers

I interviewed a dozen top Quora writers for my book Quora Domination*. Here are a few of their best tips for success.

* For a chance to receive a free copy of the book, leave a comment at the end of the post. The best comment submitted between now and Thanksgiving (26 November) wins!

Tip #1: Post Late at Night or Early in the Morning

If you are living in North America, consider posting early in the day or late at night.

Since a large portion of Quora’s user base is from the Indian subcontinent (38.5% according to Alexa), you can get a lot of views when they are just waking up or going to bed. (When it’s 8:00 a.m. in New York City, it’s 6:30 p.m. in Mumbai; 10:00 p.m. in NYC is 8:30 a.m. in Mumbai.)

For me, early morning answers work much better than afternoon ones, for instance.

Tip #2: Target Trending Topics

Another way top writers have grown their view counts in a short amount of time is to target topics appearing in Quora’s trending topics section.

Similar to Twitter’s Trends, these are hot topics that are getting a lot of views right now.

Robert Frost absolutely crushed it recently when the movie “The Martian” came out and was turned into a trending topic.

Here’s one post that took off:

Tip #3: Go Against the Herd

One tactic many top writers recommend is going against the herd when answering a question.

Most answers tend to be repetitive, causing readers to think, “Been there, done that.” So when someone comes along and says something truly different, everyone listens.

Be that someone.

If you can, make your first few lines controversial. When readers who are following the question get notified, they will receive a preview of your answer, and if the intro is intriguing, they are more likely to click through to find out more.

Tip #4: Tag Your Competition

When writing an answer, tag other writers who have answered the question before you.

This accomplishes two things:

1. It acknowledges that you respect their answers and want to give them credit for what they have already said.
2. It causes Quora to notify them and let them know you have mentioned them in an answer.

Despite being a heavily trafficked website, the group of people actually writing answers on Quora is relatively small.

And by getting on people’s radars, you’re more likely to attain top writer status as you’ll have a better chance of being spotted by the group who pick the top Quora writers every year.

Tip #5: Become a Writing Machine

Almost every top writer I spoke to has made a regular commitment to writing on Quora.

Many recommend that you write every day.

That’s right. Every single day.

Not only will your writing improve significantly but each answer acts as a form of promotion for your previous ones – reader will view one answer, and if they like it, they’ll check out others you’ve written.

The effect is a snowball of views.

And that’s the real secret to dominating on Quora.

Want More Traffic? Quora Has the Answer

Let’s face it, every blogger is hungry for more traffic.

But few of them are looking for it on Quora.

And that’s a huge reservoir of opportunity just waiting to be tapped.

The good news? You’re perfectly positioned to take advantage.

The skills you’ve learned as a blogger are the same skills you need to make your answers stand out on the platform.

So create an account, craft your profile and start hunting for those “big game” questions on which you’ll build your Quora reputation.

The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll dominate.

And once you do, your traffic will soar.

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