How to Use Q&A Websites to Promote Your Business

Content is crucial for digital marketing.

Businesses try to generate more leads and conversions using content marketing as their basic means of promotion, particularly through social media platforms, websites, and blog posts.

Q&A websites, such as Quora and Reddit, are a recent trend in content marketing. Q&A websites provide the opportunity to present yourself and your company as industry leaders, which helps to promote your business and increase traffic to your site.

In this article, I explain the features of Q&A websites and how to use them for brand promotion, particularly Quora and Reddit, the two Q&A networks with the largest marketing potential.

Digital Marketing Benefits of Q&A Websites 

Q&A websites curate user-generated questions and answers on all sorts of topics. More than 400,000 subjects are discussed on Quora alone.

Q&A sites allow you to gain exposure to a wide audience. Given the variety of topics, it is likely that your company can find its target audience in one of the Q&A website niches.

Users express opinions about answers and threads through using upvotes and downvotes, pluses and minuses, or stating that the answer is useful or not useful. That way, the most popular answers stand out from the crowd.

The benefits of using Q&A websites as promotion tools include:

• Increasing website traffic: Through answering questions, you get the opportunity to advertise your own website, products, and services. It’s a genuine traffic booster and lead generator.
• Attracting new customers: The first advantage of Q&A websites leads to the second one. You can gain new buyers for your products because more people will learn about your company and your brands.
• Strengthening SEO: Popular Q&A providers can improve your website SEO if you are able to provide users with relevant answers in your topics of interest. This logic is simple: Users notice high-quality answers and follow outbound links to your webpage, where they hopefully discover more useful content. If you can provide them with good answers, you get a big chance to lift the overall search engine ranking of your webpage.
• Learning about your target audience: Since users post full-length questions, you can analyze their way of thinking and learn what your potential customers have in mind. This enables you to customize your own offer according to the customers’ needs and stay up to date with the latest industry developments.

Bearing all this in mind, which Q&A websites you should target? Our answer is Quora and Reddit.

Why Quora and Reddit?

There are dozens of extremely popular Q&A networks, such as Yahoo! Answers, Google Questions, and Ask.fm.

However, there are many reasons to consider Quora and Reddit the best options for your marketing campaign.

First, Quora now has 190 million monthly users, while the number of unique visitors to Reddit in March 2018 was almost 1.7 billion. It’s a huge targeting potential that you should use to reach potential customers.

Even if your niche is very narrow, you will probably find at least a few thousand potential consumers on Quora or Reddit.

How to Start Your Q&A Website Campaign

Launching your Q&A website campaign is a time-intensive process. Consider the following steps when designing your campaign. 

1. Create an Individual Profile

The first thing you need to do is to create a profile. You can do it as an individual or as a company, but we suggest you create a profile as an individual.

Word-of-mouth marketing is very important these days, and users are more likely to trust a real person than a brand or company profile.

Add a brief title to reveal your position and boost professional credibility. Keep in mind that Quora displays only 50 characters of your title when you answer a question.

Additionally, you need to upload a profile photo that reveals your true character. If you want to leave the impression of a serious businessman, you should post a picture that matches such requirements.

Use the ‘About Me’ section to describe your professional expertise and experience. Always add a link to your website and social networks that you use.

2. Target the Right Niche

After you create a profile, search your desired keyword or phrase to find topics related to your business. After that, simply click ‘Answer’ in the toolbar, and the website will show you a list of all questions in the category.

Carefully analyze all questions to determine the time they were posted, the number of views they have, and the number of available answers.

Your best chance of grabbing users’ attention is to correctly answer a question with a large number of followers but a low number of answers. Generally speaking, these are often difficult and time-consuming questions.

3. Demonstrate Your Expertise in Your Answers

Answering questions on these forums provides you the opportunity to make an impression on your target audience.

Use your expertise to explain the solution to a problem with concise but comprehensive explanations to earn upvotes and improve your Q&A reputation.

When you answer a question, add a link to your website somewhere in the text. When doing this, make sure to follow Quora and Reddit rules. If you want to answer using only a link to one of your website posts, make sure to choose the article that directly addresses the question.

4. Measure Results

You don’t know if your Q&A marketing is effective if you don’t measure the results.

For example, measure the time it takes you to answer each one of the questions. If it takes you 2 hours to answer a single question, perhaps you could use this time more effectively doing something else.

Analyze the number of leads and conversions generated through Q&A websites using Google Analytics. Go to Acquisition and then choose "Overview" - "All Traffic" – "Referrals." When you do this, you will see the list of all websites that brought users directly to your page.

Additionally, you can enter the Quora or Reddit reference in this list and see the exact posts that earned you new webpage visitors. This way, you can filter topics even more precisely and learn what you should focus on in the future.

On average, it takes around 20 answers to measure results and find out if it’s worth your time to dedicate to Q&A websites for business promotion.

What to Avoid When Using Q&A Websites

You’ve seen what to do while trying to make an impact on Q&A websites. But, there are also some things that you need to avoid. These include: 

• Supplying short answers: It’s great to know that you can answer a question precisely in one or two sentences. However, our experience shows that users think longer answers are more credible, so try to extend brief responses with some interesting facts or statistics.
• Asking for upvotes: Stay away from this, or you will be banned from Quora or Reddit.
• Forgetting photos or GIFs: Users love to see a good image or even a GIF in your response, so don’t forget to indulge them from time to time.
• Failing to answer comments: Just like any other network, a Q&A website is the place of user interaction and you need to engage accordingly. If users comment on your posts, make sure you respond to them.
• Using the same bio for all categories: Q&A websites allow you to write a different bio for each category. Seize this opportunity and don’t create generic profile descriptions.

Use Q&A Website Marketing Campaigns to Grow Your Business

Q&A websites are a content marketing trend. If you prepare a good strategy for how to use them for promotion,  you can increase your webpage traffic, generate new leads, and grow your business.

Use this article to guide how you create your Q&A website campaign. 

About the Author

Olivia Ryan Writer

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