Quora is a Q&A based website. With around 100 million monthly visitors, it is a place worth noting when it comes to affiliate marketing.
But let’s start from the beginning.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate Marketing is a money making strategy that involves promoting other people’s products for a commission. It’s great for beginners since you do not have to create your own product, handle shipping, payments, customer support etc. All you have to do is drive traffic to somebody’s product.
How do you do that?
Well, This is where Quora comes in. You need your affiliate link to reach a large audience in order for it to convert. If you were to build a blog or a YouTube channel, it would surely take a long time before you start making money. You need something like Quora.
It is a place where people ask questions. And they ask a lot of them. The audience is already there, all you need to do is to make sure they notice you.
How to start making money?
Firstly, start by creating a quora account. It’s free and simple. Next, set up a profile. Make sure that your profile is legit. You don’t want a nickname like ‘Affiliateguy123’. The thing is, nobody likes people who help just to make money. Make a personal profile, give it an actual face. Upload a picture of yours, use your name, or at least a proper nickname.
Add a small profile info. Tell everyone who you are, what are your hobbies, skills etc. Just seem friendly.
Quora will require you to enter your fields of interest. It will allow the algorithm to show you related questions and threads. Mind what you want to promote. If you’re into money making and entrepreneurship you will want to let Quora know that. This will make it easier to promote money making products (like courses, for instance).
Once you have your account set up, it’s time for action.
Find a product you want to promote.
As an affiliate marketer you will need to join such communities. Sign up for affiliate marketing platforms. Depending on whether you want to promote digital or physical products I recommend those networks:
Is one of the largest Affiliate programs out there. Although you can find some digital products (like games or movies) on Amazon, this one’s mostly focused on physical goods.
This is a platform for affiliate marketers that offers mostly physical products and services for you to promote, however you can find merchants that offer digital products. ShareASale features more than 3,900+ affiliate programs in 40 different categories.
Because it contains affiliate programs not products themselves, the commision rate varies between merchants. Some pay per sale, some pay per lead or click.
A great platform for online marketers. Most products on clickbank are digital and offer high commissions. You can find a Variety of products there. Dating, health & fitness, money making, lifestyle and many, many more.
Are other great affiliate networks, mostly for digital products. Just like Clickbank, they offer high commissions and a wide array of niches to choose from.
Give value to people
You want to be as helpful as possible. Find questions you feel like answering. You don’t know the answer? Research it. Write them a mini article as an answer.
Quora works like this:
The questions on Quora are public. This means everybody has a chance to submit an answer. Imagine a question with 10.000 answers. Nobody’s going to read through all of them. Fortunately, there is a solution.
It’s called Upvoting (just like on reddit). If someone likes or finds your submission helpful they upvote it. The more votes it gets, the higher it is.
People are going to close the page after they have found a satisfying answer to their burning question, which is why you want to be on the top.
You want people to see your post before they exit Quora. That is why you must be helpful.
You see, there are loads of spammers on Quora. They are people who don’t even read the question, just spam ‘Hey it is a great product take a look: <link>’.
Such people are most of the time ignored, even reported sometimes. You don’t want to be those people. It just isn’t going to work.
So, How do you write a good reply?
Well,
- Take your time. Maybe don’t spend a week on a post, but certainly take your time to understand the question.
- Research the topic as thoroughly as you possibly can. You need to be sure of everything you write. Everyone can give an opinion, not everyone can give the expert’s advice. You get the point.
- Answer the Question. Be precise and include everything you know on the topic. Make sure it’s readable and grammatically correct. This needs to be the top of your post. This is what gets the most attention. This is a face of your post. Make it perfect.
- Your job doesn’t just end there. You want to think of a few related questions.
Become a blogger for a second. Give them more than they want to know. You see, the person who asked the question isn’t the only one you’re helping. Quora gets an insane amount of traffic, so most likely your post will be read by quite a few people.
They don’t want to ask questions in the comments, they’ll just google it. UNLESS YOU GIVE THEM THE ANSWER BEFORE THEY ASK.
Genius, right? Not only are you helping the person who posted a question, but also serve the entire community by covering related topics and FAQ.
Thus everyone who feels satisfied with your answer will most likely upvote it. Then, it snowballs. The higher it is, the more people see it and upvote to help it stay on the top.
One ‘killer’ answer to a question in a thread that gets a lot of attention and you’re getting loads of traffic. For days!
It’s just like ranking a blog post on google, only quicker. (Well, maybe except for domain authority, but that’s not the case here)
(Please note, that this is thought to address a specific questions, like: ‘what is the best way to do facebook ads?’ and not listings like ‘best pictures of cats’. You’re more than welcome to reply to such listings, but you don’t necessarily need to expand by answering more questions.)
Of course, it’s not that marvelous – You see, If you were to post a reply to a question a week after the question is asked, you’d probably be left unnoticed. Someone is probably already be on the top with lots of upvotes, and most people would just quit after they read that answer.
That’s why you want to be quick. You have to make sure that the question you’re writing a reply to isn’t old. A day or 2 I’d say is still worth it, unless there is much competition. You have to figure out for yourself what kind of delay is still suitable for your niche.
You see, it’s all dependant. If a question gets barely any traffic it’s easy to get noticed, as it probably won’t have many answers. Those are ‘What is the best toothbrush for turtles?’ kind of questions.
Such questions might not be receiving enough search volume to be worthwhile. You want to be targeting questions in your niche that are supposingly highly searched.
How do you find questions that are worth your time?
Keyword research tools. If not for Quora, then for google. Google the question and use keyword tools. Such tools show you search volume. If a question is googled many times, the chance is it is also searched for on Quora.
If you don’t trust such tools or just don’t feel like using them, Well, then it’s common sense I guess.
Ask yourself the question and think. Is it something people would ask? Would there be much interest in the topic? How many people could possibly be searching for it? If something sounds like people could be interested, then it probably is.
Also, you can go on Quora and search for it. Dig through and find similar questions and see how many answers they have. Anything over a 100 replies is good.
Keep in mind, that the less answers there are, the less search volume it gets. Usually.
Principle is simple. The less competition the easier it is to be at the top, but the less attention and traffic it gets.
You have to figure out the optimum. Too much competition and you won’t get through, to little competition and you’ll barely get any traffic, not to mention conversions.
Remember when I mentioned that you have to be quick? That’s because even if the question is highly competitive but you manage to get to it quite early, you can still win a top position. And if you do it’s more profitable.
Imagine you were the first. Somebody reads the question and first few answers. Reads your, likes it and upvotes. You answer gets ranked higher in the feed, and since it’s a competitive question many people see it. It’s great for you.
How do you get there before everyone else?
Well, unfortunately, consistency. You have to become an active Quora user. Browse the feed daily, even a couple times a day.
Download the Quora app onto your phone. Thus you can browse Quora daily, on the go, on the bus, at lunch etc. You see, you want to be the first to see a posted question. Then you can think of a reply and if you find a few minutes to write it you can do it through the app.
Although you can get notified of a new question Quora thinks you might be interested in, there is no option to automatically get notified for every new question added by someone you follow.
I suggest you have a properly set fields of interest on your profile, so Quora can notify you of related questions.
This is why you have to find it manually, while browsing the feed or searching for questions.
How to find proper questions?
Go to your niche by clicking it’s name on the left of the feed. It’s automatically selected to ‘read’. There, of course, you read the feed. There you’ll find questions posted by people. Questions that have plenty of answers. Of course you can go and submit one of yours if you so desire, but as I said, it might be hard for people to find it in the sea of replies.
However if you do get noticed, it will most likely attract much attention.
You might want to click on the ‘answer’ section. There you’ll find Questions that have been asked and mostly not answered yet.
Now, here’s the thing.
Most of these won’t go viral. They will just serve as an information to the person who asked the question.
However,
There is a chance that a posted question receives so many answers that you’ll find it in the feed while reading.
The purpose of the feed is to spread the information to a wider group. Imagine you go into the feed of some niche and first question to show up has your answer on the top with 15k upvotes. Imagine how much traffic would that get.
Of course, it won’t happen overnight. You have to answer a lot of questions on Quora and only a percentage of those will ‘go viral’ (which means they’ll be shown in the ‘read’ feed).
Don’t get discouraged. Most people will just think it’s not worth their time, but remember. This method is completely free. All you need is your knowledge and time. You can’t expect it to produce you results overnight. You have to put in a lot of work before it starts to be profitable.
Once you get the hang of it, it becomes easy.
Just remember to be devoted to it. Read the question and provide the kind of value they asked for.
If you feel like the question isn’t going to go viral any time soon, then answer briefly.
‘But you’ve just told me to write a mini article, give all this value! C’mon..’
Yes, I did indeed. But here’s the thing. Do give value. Just don’t oversaturate your post with information as if it were to go viral. Look, if you don’t think many people will see this post, what’s the point of answering questions that weren’t asked. This is the value you can skip on this part. In such case you just want to answer the asked question by providing the asked portion of value.
However, you can never be sure if a post is going to go viral or not. All you can do is just estimate.
You see, you don’t want to spend much time on a post that only the creator will see, because they asked the question. Give a decent answer. Involve only the crucial information. Don’t make it a 700 word article, just give them what they want.
After we’ve discussed how to answer properly, It’s time to actually make use of it, isn’t it?
How to place affiliate links in your reply?
Once people got satisfied with your generous answer, it’s time for profit.
At the end of your post you’ll need to encourage the reader to learn more about the said topic. Noone’s going to fall for it if you write: ‘Hey, buy this product, it’s cool’ even if you have just provided a lot of value to them. It will just ruin the experience.
Instead, you want to make them curious. You want them to believe they could also do the thing you were talking about. If it was a post about weight loss – they obviously want to lose weight since they’re reading it! Making money online? They want to make money, they’re interested!
By persuading them that it is possible and within their reach, you attract their interest.
A perfect example would be like this:
(…) Now, that you have learned everything there is to it, it’s time for you to take action. When I first started I was struggling for […] . I know how it feels to lose all hope and to feel like you’re not going to succeed. That’s why I highly encourage you to read more about this. If I were to recommend anything, it would be this (affiliate link). This is the one and only (let’s say course) that has allowed me to succeed. (…)
Let’s analyze.
It emphasizes that you have learned what is necessary to start. It calls to action. You tell a bit of your story, which forms a sort of bond with the reader, that you’re an actual human being not a machine-like copywriter. You encourage them to read, educate, take their first steps. Then you recommend what it is that helped you achieve your success. And the thing is the product you want to promote.
Another example could be:
(…) I think I have covered most of the topic. I’m sure you’d like to read more about this, that’s why I encourage you to check this article out (link). I helped me understand the issue well, and inspired me to take action, to become who I am now. (…)
This one is more straight-forward.
That’s all I have to say, check out this article, I learned a lot from it.
However, it links to an article containing affiliate links, not the product itself, which is in some ways better, but requires more work.
My point here was not to give you exact scripts (however you’re welcome to copy and use those) but rather to help you understand the concept.
Conclusion
Quora is a great place to do Affiliate Marketing, especially if you have a tight budget. All it takes is your time and effort.
Please, remember that you are there to help, not to sell. Sales are a reward for the heart and passion you put into helping others.
My final advice would be:
Always put yourself in the shoes of your reader. What would you think after reading this article? Would you trust its writer? Did he create a bond with a reader? Was it helpful? Do I feel encouraged to take action and check what they’re recommending?
Write in a way it’s comprehensible and easy to read, while containing as much value as possible.
Don’t be one of those people who read this article and skip to the next because they are looking for easy money. There is no such thing as easy money. Go play a lottery if you want, or start working for your income yourself.
My challenge is this:
Become a Quora affiliate marketer.
Take 2 weeks of your life and devote all your free time to it. Browse Quora many times a day, write killer posts, answer as many questions as you possibly can.
Do this for 2 weeks straight, no delays, no ‘I’m gonna skip a day today’ kind of stuff. Dedicate yourself.
After 2 weeks you’re allowed to leave it. Watch your posts whether they’re getting attention or not. You’ll see that sooner or later there will be profit.
You can’t say it’s not for you if you haven’t tried it.
You’re starting tomorrow.
That would wrap this up for today. Thank you for sticking with me till the end.
If you’d like to learn more about Affiliate marketing on Quora and how to take it even further than just answering the questions, be sure to check out this article on how to take Quora Affiliate Marketing to a next level.