Find the Best Questions on Quora

Quora marketing consists of many parts:

• Deciding how Quora fits your marketing plan
• Setting up a good profile
• Finding the right questions
• Writing answers people want to read
• Actually getting traffic from your answers

This post focuses on why and how to find questions that make writing on Quora worth your invested time. Good questions will get you so much more traffic than the wrong ones, so the process of choosing them shouldn’t be overlooked. This is an excerpt of the free ebook “The Ultimate Guide to Quora Marketing”. This post assumes that you already know the basics of Quora and how to get started with Quora Marketing. If that’s not the case, you can request access to the book at the bottom of the page 😊

You already know why you want to market on Quora.
You also already know how to do it.
But what do you write? Which questions should you answer?
You can’t answer every question, and choosing them randomly isn’t what good marketers do.

If you’re a marketer, your work is probably driven by metrics. Quora is similar to writing a blog. When you write a blog, you research keywords for SEO, you track every step the reader takes. No matter what you write, you don’t just write for the sake of it. You write because your marketing strategy has goals to meet.

A great answer to a bad questions is worse than a mediocre answer to an excellent question.

On Quora, it’s tempting not to think too much about which questions to answer. Questions are all over the place anyway. But topics to write about on a blog are all over the place too. So the question is about how we can take a marketer’s approach to choosing what to answer.

Writing an answer to a mediocre question won’t hurt you. But you won’t benefit from it neither. Writing answers that don’t drive any meaningful traffic isn’t worth it. It’s not worth your time and effort. Also, if you don’t see good results from Quora, just because you don’t answer the right questions, that’s also extremely demotivating.

A good question is an important multiplier and only takes limited time to find.

So to start, you have to take a look at your strategy. What do want to achieve on Quora? If you already know exactly what you want to write, you should search for questions that fit your answer. Another reason to search for very specific questions is if you want to repurpose or promote other content, which is a very viable tactic.
If you’re open to answer anything that aligns with your goals for Quora marketing, you might find it even harder to choose which questions to answer, as you have infinitely more possibilities.

You don’t have to fall into analysis paralysis, where you can’t make any decision because there is too much data. You can also waste your time on finding the best questions. You should definitely spend more time writing than researching.

What Makes a Good Question?

A good question is one where you can write an answer that aligns with your strategy and that has the potential to generate the best possible traffic.

The most important metric about a question is, surprise surprise, the question. The question should convince you of your answer, even before you write it.

Now comes where it gets exciting. A question has many properties to it.

For starters, every question has topics. As I already mentioned earlier, you should try to stay within a certain set of topics to establish authority in them. That also helps the ranking for future answers.
You don’t have to spend too much time looking at the topics, as you should be able to guess them from the title anyway. If the title is relevant to your expertise, the topics should be fine.

Then come the stats. They are located at the bottom of the right sidebar, beneath the related questions. They show you:

• When the questions was last asked
• How many views it has
• The number of followers
• How many merged questions it has
  If two questions on Quora ask the same thing, they’ll be merged.

You can also find the number of answers on top of the a question’s page. If there are 100+ answers, you can find the exact number of answers by searching the question. The exact number of answers will show up beneath its title.

How to Compare Them?

First, you want to find many questions to compare. Taking that time is worth it, but you can’t compare tens of questions and all their stats in your head, so you should probably write everything down, or create a spreadsheet with the questions. Here’s one way to do it:

One of the most popular guides to Quora marketing, by Josh Fechter, even suggests that you should hire a virtual assistant to do that job for you. Since your own time is worth a lot, you should only spend it on writing good answers, and not doing that kind of research. There are actually people with whole teams searching and analyzing questions.

Since the beginning of 2019, you don’t see stats on the answer’s page directly. You have to click the “More” menu and “View Stats and Log”, or go to quora.com/question /log.

So, let’s suppose you have a table of questions, along with their stats. It doesn’t matter whether they are all relevant to your achieving your goal. We’ll figure that out now.

Let’s start by figuring out how to interpret stats. High views and followers are good, the last asked date should be recent, and the number of answers should be low.
A popular questions gives your answer a bigger potential to get many views, but if it has too many answers, all views are divided between so many answers, so you should aim for a high ratio between followers and answers. I found the number of followers to be more decisive then the number of views. Some say that the ratio should be 7:1 or higher. Sometimes you can’t find that ratio, which is okay. Remember, this is just one factor of your answers’ success.

A high followers / answers ratio isn’t the only thing to look for though. I once found this question: What specifically is Asana building? Can someone from the team share insight into their product plans?

It had one answer and 229 followers, so I just answered it to see what would happen. Not too surprisingly, I only received about 50 views in three months. What can we learn from that?

• A low number of answers indicates low popularity (if it’s already an old question).
• The last asked date shouldn’t be years in the past.
• Not all followers will view your answer.
• The other answers of a question can tell you where its traffic came from.
  In my example, the question had an acceptable amount of views, but they only came from the one answer already present, which was posted by the co-founder of the product in question. His answer naturally received a lot of traffic, but no-one cared about me, nor did I have any expertise about the product.

There isn’t a magic formula for what the perfect stats should look like, because even if you forget the question’s title, how successful your answers will be depends on your profile. A popular writer can for example answer a question with hundreds of answers and still land a top spot on the question page. If a newcomer would answer the same question, it would be way harder to climb to a top spot. So the longer you’re in the game, the more popular questions you can answer. You should always be confident in your answers capability to climb a top spot.

Once you have a certain popularity on Quora, you should probably aim for questions with 500+ followers and 100,000+ views. This also means that if you find a really great question, in which’s topic you haven’t answered many questions before, you might want to save it for later, to have a higher chance of success then.

If you want to take a little more risk, you can answer new questions with very few or zero answers.

A secret statistic

I told you how to get to public stats. But I didn’t tell you yet how to get to the most important metric. It’s weekly views. Total views of a question don’t help much. A question could have received tons of traffic in the past, but be dead now. You want to know how much traffic you will get.

In order to get weekly views, you have to set up a Quora ads account. That’s actually pretty straight forward. You don’t have to run any ads or anything, but just sign up at https://www.quora.com/business. From there you can create a campaign (you don’t have to active it). Under question targeting, you can enter the name of a question, and Quora will tell you how much traffic it receives.

They built this feature for advertisers, but you can also make great use of it by answering the questions with lots of weekly views. Compare these stats with all the other stats, and you’ll soon find success on Quora.

I know, this is a bit cumbersome, which is why you should hire the right virtual assistant. If you don’t want to hire anyone, I have an even better solution for you later ;)

Hiring the Right Virtual Assistant

You should be the one to decide which question to answer, since only you know which question you are comfortable answering. But creating a table of tens or even hundreds of questions is boring, time consuming work. Your time is too valuable to do that. That’s why so many people skip this step. But let me assure you, it’s worth it.

Hiring a good virtual assistant is a pain too. Yes, the whole process is a pain, especially if you “only” answer a couple of questions per month. That’s why I automated that task for you. I spent almost a year now, developing Find Better Questions, a tool that does everything a virtual assistant would do for you.

I realized that most people wouldn’t take the time to research questions, but at the same time, the people who did were having huge success. Find Better Questions makes the data available to all marketers, so that they can work with metrics like they’d do on any other platform.

It’s a desktop application that basically does exactly what a virtual assistant would do. You have to download the software first, start your trial (read further for a 30% discount), and you’re off to the races. You can create a new list by inserting a Quora URL, like quora.com/topic/marketing, and the tool will, like a virtual assistant, create a list of questions it finds on that page and then extracts all the stats of those questions.

Doing the job manually takes about about 20 minutes for 70 questions, and it’s so tiring. I get that not a whole lot of people do it. With Find Better Questions, it takes a minute.

Making use of the data is easy with the tool, as it allows you to sort the questions, or download a CSV with which you can analyze the questions in any way you’d want.

Find Better Questions allows you to take a marketer’s analytical approach to Quora marketing without the hassle.

You can download the tool on our homepage.

But no matter whether you download the tool or not, I hope you enjoyed this post and that it will help you in your Quora Marketing efforts!

Find Better Questions is a tool to help find better questions on Quora. Sign up here.