How Quora sent me 40x traffic and crashed my blog

I have been on Quora for a couple of years now. I answered to questions once in a while, mostly academic. But as I started using it more frequently, I found it to be the most insightful social network – if I had to find out how a person is, I would prefer to look at what he has voted for, asked and answered on Quora than his Facebook updates. I have been using Quora a lot lately and it has already paid off! I happened to reply with some personal story one time and things got a little out of hand.

Someone had posted a question – “I am in my late 20s, and feel I have wasted a lot of time. Is it too late?” And I couldn’t help replying because it disturbed me to think that someone can imagine its too late if they haven’t achieved wonders in 20s. I began – ‘I am 31’ and then wrote a little more. In ten minutes and 265 words, I had briefly sketched my journey through 20s and the better time afterwards when it was not really supposed to be better (after all, how can someone be happy after 30). Something I wrote must have touched a cord with people because the up votes and comments started pouring out. I guess it was this bit – ‘One can say that 20s is for making mistakes and learning and then unleash the real YOU when you are ready, sober and wiser in 30s.’

This reply has generated 129,500 views, 102+ comments and 1800 upvotes till date. That is not trivial to put it modestly.

This is the traffic monitor on my blog and the 40x spike mountain was a result of this post. The post contained and the and over 5 days, I received nearly 10K hits. The hits had gone so crazy that my webhost thought it was some phishing act going on and he blocked my blog for full 7 hrs on one of these days. So, if that hadn’t happened, there would have been crazier traffic. Also, it led to tripling of my Quora followers, many new subscriptions for my yet-to-be-released book, many new followers on the blog, twitter and Facebook.

At the end of the day, I feel people love authentic and inspirational stories. My post was genuine and relevant to the question. People could relate to it. Not only did the Quora readers read the post, many of them promoted it to new people without me even asking for it. 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 book updates. 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

Quora is known for discovering great content. But, I feel it can be a great channel to promote your thoughts and content as well (be a supplier). I had never thought that I’ll find people who would connect to Seven Conversations on Quora. But my post helped finding those people and it was a perfect match.

Unintentionally, I was able to use Quora for getting more visibility for my blog and book but you can do it intentionally as well. Here’s how you can get started-

Sign up on Follow the topics relevant to your product and interests. 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. Focus on quality over quantity. In my case, I have written only 30 answers or so and have only 3 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. 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.

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 Quora wisely in the future. .