How Quora sent me 40x traffic in a day and why you should try it too

By Nistha Tripathi on February 18, 2014 30 Comments / 4306 views

That’s the site stats monitor on my blog. The 40x spike that you see in the end (and the smaller one previous to it) is coming from one source – Quora. Infact, there was so much traffic that my hosting provider had taken down my blog account today and unfortunately it was down for more than 7 hrs else that last bar would be still higher. The blog is now back up.

1300+ upvotes, 95,554 views and 71+ comments within 3 days on one simple harmless post that I wrote in 10 minutes.

Also – Doubling of my Quora followers, many new subscriptions for my yet-to-be-released book, many new followers on blog, twitter and Facebook. I had to pinch myself and stop my head from dizzying up.

I was just telling my story in response to this question – “I am in my late 20s, and feel I have wasted a lot of time. Is it too late?”

This is the answer that is for some reason touching people’s sensitive nerves – https://www.quora.com/Life-Advice/fghj/answer/Nistha-Tripathi?__snids__=326109109&__nsrc__=1

This answer in turn helped me in promoting my upcoming book!

You might have seen my previous discussions on How I wrote a novel and seeked publishing help.

Good news – I landed a publishing deal this week. Its been nearly a year but I’m ecstatic that my painstaking work is finally going to be in stores and in hands of people 🙂

But this post is about the marketing potential of Quora and some of my lessons-

People love authentic stories – this short simple post has just one thing going for it – it is 100% genuine and people can relate to it. Plus, it is a relevant answer to the question asked. Therefore, not only did the readers read it, many of them promoted my post to new people without me even asking for it.

Should not feel salesy – the links embedded here fit in naturally with the content and therefore people did click on it and a LOT. Comparing it to some forced marketing techniques where we leave comments at random places just to insert our URLs that never leads to good clicks, it feels so clean and organic.

Have faith and patience – Marketing doesn’t come naturally to me and could never have imagined getting such unexpected response on something I didn’t plan. It just tells me to give it time. Keep making your efforts, learn from the successes and failures and improve upon it. Eventually, things will go right.

Content matters – I won’t discount the countless hours I had put in on the book website in the first place so that the content resonated with the audience when they reached it. And those who liked what they saw signed up for updates – https://nisthaonweb.com/blog/seven-conversations/ I had put in the work and with this post, it serendipitously came together. I would call it a touch of divine intervention in line with the theme of my book 🙂

My lesson is that I should focus on finding the right channels for marketing the book (or anything for that matter) instead of following every random internet marketing/seo strategy and Quora seems a great place to find people who might be interested in the kind of book I created. If you haven’t explored this fantastic social network yet, please do so now esp if your target customers might be hanging out there.

I can’t claim that I had planned this and had the foresight to know how this will turn up but I am going to leverage it wisely in the future.

How to get started on Quora-

Follow the topics relevant to your product and interests.

Contribute meaningful content – ask intelligent questions and provide insightful answers. If your product is too niche, see which other topics can you provide good answers on. The more number of followers a question has, more exposure you will get.

Focus on quality over quantity. In my case, I have written only 30 answers or so and have only 2 top answers (350+ upvotes). Only this epic post had links to my site and I could see the excellent traffic it generated. It wouldn’t be easy to write right answers that you can connect your product with and which can reach to a huge audience. So, do some research but when you find such an opportunity, make the best out of it.

Build a following by answers as well as posting blog posts. It can be a nice extra traffic generation tool in the long run. This is the reason I think people like James Altucher repost all their blog posts separately on Quora.

P.S. I will write another post detailing my publishing journey for anyone who might be looking for a publisher. I know how painful and slow this process is but keep hanging in there!

P.P.S By the time I have submitted this, it has crossed 820+ votes.

(I could have done much better job at organizing this post, apologies for my hurried write up but I hope its still helpful. Feel free to ping me/comment if I can elucidate anything further)

Comments

Nistha Tripathi

30 Comments

asha chaudhry February 20, 2014, 7:42 am

thank you for sharing all your learnings here nistha!

yes – quora indeed is a large but useful jungle of insights!!! this serves as a huge reminder how much we underestimate the power of digital media and viral marketing. i mean, everytime someone upvotes a comment/reply on quora that person’s entire fb network comes to know about it!

ps: CONGRATS ON THE BOOK DEAL. we will surely look forward to the post about this exhausting journey – i can imagine how painful it must’ve been. best wishes!
Gaurav Dharmwani February 20, 2014, 8:43 am

INSIGHTFUL post on the power of Quora.. It will help lot of us to figure out the ways to use it in better way. For anything to succeed, the ‘core’ has to be the strongest, be it a post, a product , or an human being.
Rishi February 20, 2014, 1:45 pm

Small world of www. Your response was one of the trending topics on Quora couple of days ago, and I was one of those who had commented. Didn’t know you were on #trhs then.

Quora is a great tool for marketing, but also a big whirlpool…I get sucked into it whenever I login, and by the time I’m out of it I realize I spent an entire day on Quora. 🙂 Congrats and best wishes for your book!
Nistha Tripathi February 20, 2014, 2:28 pm

Thanks so much Asha 🙂 Will be posting book post soon!
Nistha Tripathi February 20, 2014, 2:29 pm

Oh, thanks Rishi…I was replying until it got too many. Good to know you are active there already 🙂
Nistha Tripathi February 20, 2014, 2:30 pm

Thanks, meaningful content wins!
Mandar Marathe February 21, 2014, 9:26 am

Rishikesh, my classmate at TAMU. Nistha, whom I know from NYC. Small world.

Remarkable content always wins 😉
Nistha Tripathi February 21, 2014, 9:43 am

True and you were the one who introduced Rodinhood to me when I moved back to India. Life comes back a full circle 🙂
Rishi February 21, 2014, 10:00 am

tu bhi yaha? 🙂
Uddipta Ghosh February 21, 2014, 10:11 am

I have already Upvoted,Shared,Commented and thanked for your answer.Please let me know if I can do anything else 🙂
Nistha Tripathi February 21, 2014, 10:17 am

No, let me thank you for the appreciation! 🙂
Tejas Jasani February 21, 2014, 10:25 am

I have been visitor of Quora since quite long time now, never posted any answers / comments though 🙂

But now your post gives me a reason to invest more time there !

Thanks for sharing !
Sanchita Dutta February 21, 2014, 10:53 am

being short n crispy worked for u. but did see quite a few nasty remarks for using the platform for publicity. personally i feel nothing wrong with that, infact a smart thing to do. why not take back something( in the form of a few clicks) when you are giving something to the site. whenever i contribute to this site as well be in comments or a new article, i never fail to add the site i own and promote, http://www.indiacod.com, an e-com site. ab dikhega nahi toh bikega kaise!!!

Oh No!!! Did i do it again? i mean promoted my site “inadvertently”? 😉

Well it is NEVER UNINTENTIONAL…

best of luck for ur book. will look fwd to ur new insights on marketing

Sanchita (http://www.indiacod.com)
yuvraj wadhwani February 21, 2014, 1:03 pm

Congratulations to a fellow Indori 🙂 Great going indeed!
jawwad mobin sajid February 21, 2014, 4:23 pm

hear go my vote + fallow
Nistha Tripathi February 22, 2014, 6:50 am

Thanks Sanchita! There is no winning with haters, why bother? 🙂
Nistha Tripathi February 22, 2014, 6:51 am

Thanks 🙂
Nistha Tripathi February 22, 2014, 6:51 am

Yeah, its worth exploring!
Perzen Darukhanawalla February 24, 2014, 7:35 am

Congrats Nishta – we have been evaluating quora for a while and your post just brought it all back for me on why we need to get onto this platform. On another note – I wanted to understand the publishing process in India. Is it possible for us to connect offline over an email or call perhaps?
Nistha Tripathi February 24, 2014, 8:33 am

Thanks and sure, please email me on nistha.tripathi@gmail.com…happy to help
Rajaram Pittala February 28, 2014, 6:30 am

Quora is a great place to market your company.

All you need to do is finding the good questions related to your company niche, and answer to the point. If you think, your answer can really help them, then just put it in right words and at the end you can leave your signature as @Sanchita Dutta has just done.

But, when you are trying market on Quora, however your ultimate goal is to get traffic for your site, but, your answers should be like you are genuinely providing information. When your focus is on marketing your company you may end up with some bull shit answers also, thats why you should focus on helping/providing the info.

Its like a Win -Win situation, If they like your answer then only they gonna click on your links, so focus on good content. Content Marketing is one of the best marketing techniques.
Aparna March 3, 2014, 9:42 am

you just took blogging to another level! Thanks for posting it here.. else I wouldn’t have known your story 😀
Ankit Shukla March 5, 2014, 4:53 pm

Awesome read, I believe that quora is a fantastic place to be if you want to gain knowledge, till now i was just a content consumer over there but you motivated me to engage in two way conversation.
Congratulation for the deal with the publisher, I hope the book would be as awesome as this post.
Would love to connect with you to learn more about content marketing and generating pre and early launch strategy for my startup 🙂

Thanks again.
Nistha Tripathi March 6, 2014, 7:21 pm

Yes, it gives you a new avenue to leverage your knowledge and of course, promote your content
Nistha Tripathi March 6, 2014, 7:21 pm

Thanks Aparna! 🙂
Nistha Tripathi March 6, 2014, 7:22 pm

Thanks Ankit, I am no expert, but would love to connect! Hoping to see you on Quora then 🙂
Alex J V March 14, 2014, 11:44 am

Hey Nistha,

Great article. Thanks for sharing. I was thinking of starting to use Quora. Now I think the value proposition is clear.

Between I noticed that there is a lot of negative comments on your answer on Quora. What do you think about it? Can it be generally assumed that there will always be a set of people who will try to put you down? I guess there is nothing known as negative publicity. 🙂 There will always be someone who is vocal about hating Harry Potter 🙂

Alex
Tanutejas Saraswat July 24, 2014, 1:02 pm

2.2k Upvotes… WOW. Amazing..
Nistha Tripathi July 26, 2014, 5:02 pm

Sorry for such a late reply. I have observed than once anything crosses a significant number of eyeballs, hate comments start pouring in. Perhaps it is people trying to get some attention on a popular thing…I dont know exactly. I even stopped reading comments at some point of time because those people were missing the whole point. I think you really cant avoid negative comments on Internet – there are people who can hate Tendulkar (to your Harry Potter comparison)!

Anyways, I hope you have been able to use Quora more! Whats your experience?
Nistha Tripathi July 26, 2014, 5:03 pm

Thanks Tanutejas, we need another Indore Rodinhood meetup 🙂