My Quora Traffic Experiment
You might be wondering about what traffic from Quora has to do with financial freedom or making money. That's a good question and I'm not sure if I can answer it. Okay, since you pressed me I'll try. To make money you need to sell something. To sell something you need to have an audience. To have an audience you need to have traffic. And you have to get traffic from somewhere other than your dreams. I came across Quora (a question and answer site) a few years ago. I signed up and did nothing with it. I read somewhere that all sorts of famous people have used Quora to get traffic. So, I decided I would experiment with it.
The first question I answered was this one about what the best investment option for a man in his 30s looking to retire early:
It is actually the perfect question for me as this is where I am an expert in investing for early retirement (if I do say so myself). At the time of writing it has had 382 views and 3 upvotes. I posted it on the 19th of August. So, the result is not great. I didn't post again until September the 20th and I was determined to actually start the experiment. The 2 questions I answered got just under 900 views total. On the 21st, I posted eight answers and have around 2,200 views. This is where I made a bit of a mistake. I posted an answer to something I was interested in, but not directly related to the area I wanted to be focused on. Quora then filtered answers into that topic, which is personal development rather than giving me questions about personal finance. I answered both topics until about the 28th where I focused on personal finance exclusively. On that day I answered a couple of questions that received 2.5k and 4.7k views respectively.
The next week, the results to answers were in the low to middling hundreds of views on each one. That is until I answered this question: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-quickest-ways-to-accumulate-wealth-1/answer/David-Coss. It was a similar question to ones that I had been answering. The first day it had around 25,000 views. In total it has been around 91,000 views and 115 upvotes. I had a surge in signups to my website. I offered a free ebook about financial freedom at the end of the answer and obviously it worked. I would say it was around 150 sign ups for that one post. I haven't been able to replicate that success, but most of my answers now get low to middling thousands of views as opposed to low to middling hundreds of views before that post.
I discovered that I should either be first on a question that was receiving a good amount of views (I would say around 1000 per hour). Or I should look for questions that have a high amount of views, but either don't have many questions or have a lot of followers. If people follow a post, they will get notified if someone posts an answer. I think so far the best strategy has been to go for posts that have a lot of views, but not a lot of answers. To date I have had around 231,000 views to my answers. It's not a lot compared to many on the site. This is free traffic apart from your time to answer the questions. The views do seem to drop off quite significantly after the first or second day of answering it. So, there is not as much residual traffic. I still get around 2.5K views per month on my answers and, on average I would have a few people sign up to my website. It is not very much, but I don't have to do anything for that. I stopped posting a few months ago. If I was to post more regularly, I could hope to gain more than that.