For a online marketer, it’s gratifying to test out something new and then discover that the test ended up attracting many more site visitors than originally expected. The tricky part is turning a test, which produced unexpectedly strong results, into a broader, ongoing strategy.
If you’re continually experimenting with new approaches within social media and online marketing, you’ll eventually stumble across something that works significantly better than expected.
Answering a Quora Question with a Blog Post
As most people know, Quora is a great site for obtaining crowd-sourced answers to a wide variety of questions.
In late March 2011, as Facebook was about to deprecate FBML, I wrote an informational post called The New Options for Creating Custom Facebook Tabs — driven by personal interest around the topic. The post describes various options for setting up iFrame Page tabs in Facebook, including how to display a custom icon.
Several days later, while browsing Quora questions, I happened to see this one: How to add a custom icon on a Facebook FBML tab?
As a Quora newcomer, I thought that while it may or may not be generally accepted Quora protocol, I’ll provide a short answer to Quora question along with a link to the recently published blog post, since the post provides a detailed answer to the question. After all, I’m not pumping my company’s solution — and who knows, we may get a site visitor or two.
The brief answer soon became, and continues to be, one of top incoming links to our site.
While the answer to the Quora question has been successful on the traffic generation front, it has not been proportionately successful on the visitor conversion front. Only a small percentage of site visitors that enter the site from this link end up signing up for our service.
Why? It’s mainly because, while the question pertains to our general technology area, it is not necessarily one that’s being asked by someone who’s currently investigating solutions to the business issues that our application solves. There’s a similarly low conversion rate for visitors who discover this blog post via search.
Repeating Quora Question Success
In order to repeat the visitor rate success of this test and to also get higher conversion rates, the following steps would need to be executed:
1. Search for a Quora question that is somehow relevant to the problem that your product or service solves.
2. In your answer, provide a link to an objective, non-promotional blog post that answers the question in detail. You may, of course, have to author a new post.
3. Include an appropriate call to action in the sidebar and/or at the bottom of the post.
If you’re providing valuable information to the person asking the Quora question and you’re gaining a site visitor who’s a potential lead or customer, you’ve created a win-win.
