If you are anyone who I have had coffee and talked digital marketing with in the last few years, you’ve most likely heard me ramble on about the potential of using Quora to find people who are interested in your product.
Quora is a question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, and edited by Internet users, either factually or in the form of opinions.
Spend five minutes on this site a and you will likely find people talking about something you are interested in, something your customers are interested in, and whatever else is going on in the world. Quora has been used to jump-start at least one person’s book (see Jordan Peterson’s book 10 rules of life, based on his Quora answer that blew up).
Here are a few steps to get started and keep going. I’m going to use a personal trainer with online courses as an example.
Find the topics that your potential customers are involved in, for example, Exercise.
Read some of the questions and answers to get an idea of how you can provide useful insight to solve your customer’s problems.
Come up with an offer. Think through how you could provide some helpful information or instructions for your potential customer. Using the exercise example, maybe it is a specific diet you found to be particularly successful or a workout that helped you to hit your target goals. I don’t have the answers for this, only you do. Your job is to provide them something that makes their life a little easier or helps them to accomplish something that THEY want.
Read that last sentence again. It is about what they want not about you. Your job is to help them, not sell them your product or service. It isn’t taking them to a sales page or to get them to sign up for anything that isn’t helpful.
Use Mailchimp or another landing page creator to set up a basic landing page for the visitor to enter their email and a delivery trigger with your helpful piece of content. This piece of content could be an article or a video depending on your area of expertise.
Take the link and place it in your bio on Quora.
Now start rocking and rolling. Answer questions. Don’t pitch your service, provide helpful answers. How many answers you might ask? If you want to take this seriously and grow your audience then 90 engagements per day. Following GaryVee’s 1.80 strategy on Instagram, do the same thing on Quora. Ask 90 answers, comments, or questions per day and watch your reach skyrocket. Yes, it will take time and yes, it will start slow. But it will work eventually.
What should you post on? Everything that stands out. It is impossible to know what will resonate or not. Here is an example of a post I didn’t know would work:
When people comment on your posts make sure and engage with them. Answer their questions and have conversations. This isn’t a self-promotion tour. This is your opportunity to get to know people who you could help with your product or service. How are they supposed to trust you if you don’t get to know them first?
Have fun. You should be enjoying doing this. It shouldn’t be torture. If it is, then find a different platform to engage with or a different subject.
Lastly, track your results. How many profile views result in a click? How many clicks result in an email submission? Track it all. Here is an easy template to use to track your results.
That should get you started on Quora. It isn’t extremely difficult. It is just showing up over and over again. Trying different methods, learning, and trying some more.
Just be yourself, don’t stress too much, and be as helpful as you can. Then, watch the email list grow!