GUEST BLOG
My best definition of ‘a pain in the neck’ is sitting down for hours to eventually craft great informative content, and ultimately get no one to read them. It sucks to see my ‘intellectual property’ go down the trenches of my blog without success – in terms of views and comments.
Anyone would readily agree that the most important thing to any expert is building an audience. Unfortunately, building an audience has also been identified as the major problem of ALL bloggers; even veterans still seek ways to get more traffic. I strongly believe that anyone that can come up with a solution to this general problem, even if only to an extent, will be worth the attention and respect.
The hairs behind my neck still rise when I remember the blogging.org infographic that says “An unbelievable upwards of 81% never makes $100 from blogging” out of “an estimated thirty-one million bloggers in the United States alone”. How much more third-world bloggers! The major reason for this failure is not far-fetched; they fail to get (and keep) sufficient traffic enough to be tagged ‘a successful blogger’.
Newbies in the blogosphere, like me, still see getting the deserved audience for our products as a myth, and a thing to yet be dreamt of. We try everything possible, from SEO to content marketing, and so on, still we seem not to get any traction in trying to push away from the ’81 percent’. If I get anyone to make the ‘traffic myth’ a reality for me, I’d take my hats off to such person – permanently.
Now let’s imagine the situations of internet marketers that have no blog to showcase their expertise or promote their products, or great writers that have no blog to exhibit their prolificacy or readers to enjoy and benefit from their resourcefulness.
The good news is that, with the advancement in internet technology and information distribution, all these problems are gradually coming to an end.
Introducing Blogs on Quora
Before going deep into ‘Blogs on Quora’, I think it would be a great idea to first do an introduction to Quora and dispel the feeling that almost anyone would know so much about Quora.
Quora is a questions and answers site (Q&A Site) – just as Yahoo! Answers – in which members can ask or answer any question which anyone visiting the site can also benefit from. The best answers get voted up or down as readers deem fit.
Quora can safely be regarded as the revolution of Q&A sites, as it makes things a lot easier for answer seekers and writers or professionals, who love to share their knowledge and show their expertise, alike.
Quora is being used by millions and has a reputation for ranking high on search engines for many keywords. Smart internet marketers take good advantage of this platform for exposure and traction-gaining purposes. A lot of traffic can be driven to a site through giving highly informative and resourceful answers on Quora, and it makes you easily perceived an expert in your niche. If you yet don’t have this great invention in your marketing arsenal, then you should consider it sooner.
Now let’s talk about blogging on Quora.
On 22nd January, in a good attempt to realize its mission of ….., Quora launched its latest invention; ‘Blogs on Quora‘, a platform on which Quora users can create as many blogs and posts, with rich text editors and images, either from the web or mobile.
This serves as a replacement for Quora boards on which non-Q&A posts were being posted.
Blogs on Quora serves to allow writers share their knowledge with the world where they do not have an established blog, and also great for bloggers who do not have an audience, or who have an audience but want to reach more people.
While, introducing Blogs on Quora, Kah Keng Tay writes that “Blogs on Quora are great for people who (1) don’t have a big, established online presence already and (2) don’t want to do the time-intensive, heavy lifting of marketing their blog and slowly building an audience. If you are a good writer but don’t have thousands of Twitter followers or a big audience for your blog, Quora is an ideal place to write. Your blog will be discovered quickly without you having to do any work besides writing. Writing one great post on Quora will attract a big audience, no matter how many people already know or follow you.“
She goes further to state that…
Personally, I use my Quora blog as a replica of my original blog, and I repost my best posts and guest posts on the Quora blog. To know what a Quora blog looks like, you can check out mine; it is called LucrativeWriter.
Quora’s distribution method is a great advantage of Blogs on Quora; it expands your readership beyond those who follow you personally. The power of Quora distribution is driven by the relationship between topics and feed.
Just as in questions and answers, each blog post on Quora is categorized by relevant topics. These topics are in form of people’s interests, and each topic is followed by thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people. This ultimately means that anyone who shares your topic interest may see your post, whether they follow you personally or not.
This is the most interesting part of it all as Quora knows who wants to read what via the topics people follow, and this goes a long way to help in getting targeted traffic.
I re-published one of my guest posts titled ‘How to Best Use Writing to Boost Your Traffic and Sales’ on my Quora blog as a test-run of the features of the blog, choosing related interests, but without a picture and any serious optimization – even with an incomplete Quora profile, and the post got about 40 views in less than a day.
I later added to the selected interests of the post and the views increased to 40+ in few hours. The views further increased to 85+ in just few minutes after wasting all my credits in promoting the post to 100 people. The post was published 4:19 pm on Friday, 25th January, and on Monday, 28th January, it had 170 views. This is just a minuscule sample of what blogging on the Quora platform can do for a blogger. Just one up-vote indicates my subsequent posts must far exceed the present one in quality and resourcefulness. And this also indicates that even if you write trash, you will still get the audience, though this might destroy your reputation fast.
More so, Blogs on Quora gives the prolific writer the chance to target different markets on one blog. A freelance writer in the writing/blogging niche like me can post about travelling and have it read by travelling fans, or use my Quora blog as a collection of writing samples on various unrelated topics to show that I can perform well in any niche I get hired.
Another advantage is that unlike in traditional blogs or other social media platforms where an old post might be gone forever, old Quora Blog posts that get up-votes (just as in Q&As) can suddenly appear back in the feed making them “evergreen and re-discoverable” – TechCrunch.
Quora Blogs Optimization
Even when Quora claims that you need not do anything other than the writing to enjoy the benefits of the blog, it’s still important to look for ways to enhance the effectiveness of the features of Blogs on Quora.
Best optimizing your Quora blog is mostly within the ambit of the features available to users of this platform; very few things can be done from outside the blog.
Within the Blog;
- When opening your Blogs on Quora account, make sure you are conscious of the details you enter, having your keywords in mind. Your brand name should be your URL followed by your target keyword or brand tag (65 characters max) – mistakenly engaged my original brand name, LucrativePen, in another way. Can’t even say how.
- Your ‘About’ message should be very compelling and keyword-rich.
- When selecting your topics of interest, do not forget your market targets. These are the people that ordinarily get to see your posts. Don’t worry; the interests of your individual posts can differ from that of the blog. One other good thing is that you can edit your posts and edit your interests long after publishing.
- Always write quality posts with on-page optimization in mind. Your keyword should be used as title (can be changed after publishing, but your permalink will remain the same), and your first 160 characters should contain your target keyword. Maintain a decent Keyword density throughout your post though.
Your description on search engines will be pulled from your latest post as Quora doesn’t use Meta description tag.
- Change your image name to your keyword before uploading it.
- Always share your posts to your social networks.
- Improve the authority of your blog by linking out to authority sites.
- You can invite people to follow your blog and you can also promote your blog to people with your Quora credits. When you promote your blog, it gets more attention, and possibly more followership or up-votes. *In a bid to understand how Quora credits work, I wasted my default 500 credits which I would have loved to keep for better purposes. Don’t waste yours!
Outside the Blog;
- Backlink to your Quora blog from an active blog, either through posts or commenting on do-follow blogs with your Quora blog URL;
- Get your Quora blog indexed on Google. Ping it with Ping-O-Matic or any other tools.
As earlier said, much optimization can only be done within the blog. The most important factor is writing great content; that’s what gets you the views and the follows – and upvotes.
Blogs on Quora is a relatively new concept, but a lot of people are already reaping the benefits, in form of audience and traffic. It’s the next big thing in the blogosphere. You should get on board now and improve your online presence via Quora blogs; you don’t wanna lose that URL you love.
Author Bio:
Yomi-Alliyu Oludami is a professional freelance writer and the founder of www.lucrativepen.com, a blog that teaches how to write for money and traffic. You can visit his website to learn more or hire him for your writing projects.
You can also follow him on twitter @oludami_LP.
