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

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.

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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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-

1. Sign up on Quora
2. Follow the topics relevant to your product and interests.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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!