Quora has generated for us at least $1m GMV for 2 years

Quora has generated for us at least $1m GMV for 2 years.

It’s losing value for us now, but for an early-stage startup, it’s a great source to get customers and learn more about them.

Below I’ll list 16 tips that worked for us:

1. Your profile is a landing page. Optimize copy, images, the pinned answer for the action you want your readers to take.

2. Important to understand: spamming on Quora will not work. They have received $226m in investment and I’m guessing most of that is spent on delivering genuine content. This equals detecting and downgrading/blocking spam.

3. For the same reason, Quora will love your answers better if you respect those who you write for and format your content so it’s easy to read.

4. It’s better to update answers that are important for you from time to time, as Quora wants to deliver relevant information to its users.

5. Link to reputable resources in your answer. Not only your website.

6. In general, I would not put a link to your website in every answer. I have an assumption that Quora detects this as spam.

7. For every “marketing question” try to answer at least 3 questions that are not related to your company. You could participate in highly popular conversations, like “When did you realize that you’re old?” or “What irritates you?”

8. A lot of users don’t read the full answers and just skim through them. We try to put the name of the company in the first paragraph.

9. Credentials are underestimated. You should optimize them and use custom credentials for different answers. We got a lot of direct and branded search traffic when we were active on Quora.

10. If you have well-known competitors, you want to answer the questions, where users look for their reviews or alternatives. They are highly convertible.

11. Don’t trash your competitors. The community would not appreciate this. Tell what you really think and how you compare yourself to them. In one of the answers, I said that I think that TopTal is a great company to hire developers from and we look up to them. We got a lot of clients from that answer and they were thanking me for being fair.

12. Check which questions are ranked at the top of Google search. For example, if you search ‘Upwork alternative’, one of Quora’s questions is in the top-5 results. Users trust Quora and will check it out for answers.

13. Buying upvotes is a short-term game. You can do it, but in the long run, Quora will probably detect it and you’ll lose your positions.

14. If you have a relatively fresh account and want to rank in important questions, it’s better to ask your friends, who are active on Quora, to upvote you and initiate conversations under your answers. Also, there are FB and Slack communities where Quora users support each other. Members there most likely have active and reputable accounts and this will their upvotes will help your rankings.

Not the most white-hat methods, but I don’t think we would be able to get as many leads if there was no boost from the friends and the community.

15. Answer Wiki is the first thing that users see, make sure you add your information there but don’t be spammy. Quora answer Wiki can only reflect the information from the existing answers, so answer the question first.

16. If you see that some answers are performing well, try boosting them through the Quora ad network. It's still cheap and they have great targeting tools. The only thing, we were not able to figure out was their conversion tracking, so it’s a "spray and pray" game for us. But I’ll keep investing there.

I hope this was helpful.