How Do Writers Make Quora Work For Them?

I’ve recently written a book about flourishing as a freelancer. As part of my strategy to build awareness for the upcoming release, I decided to more seriously dive into the Quora community.

If you’re not familiar with Quora, it’s a place to “gain and share knowledge”. People ask questions and other people answer those questions. The best answers rise to the top of the pack.

I’ve had a profile for quite some time (since 2012)before starting this initiative. There were a handful of questions and answers I submitted but mostly participated in Quora as a reader and learner.

My strategy was simple. Answer one freelancing question per day and let the momentum of my activity build my authority, platform, and the book’s awareness. After starting this, I had a quick win with one of my answers being distributed through their email digest (These emails are well done in knowing what I want to read!). 1000+received the email as you’ll note in the screenshot below.

As I continued writing, each answer provided an initial boost of views with a small boost to the ongoing daily views. Eventually, I exceeded the 10,000 view mark (with the help of previous non-freelancing answers). I’m now at 20.8k views.

The more questions I answered, the more that was requested I answer. At this point, I was simply answering the question that was next without any real strategy as to which questions I answered. So, I jumped to the freelancing topic to see what I could learn.

Quora has a feed of recently submitted answers, a tab for new questions, top 10 questions, and most viewed writers. I jumped to the tab for the top 10 questions to explore which of these I could provide a valuable answer. I moved several of these questions to my top priority list for answering.

Overall I was making steady progress and realized I was getting more views for some answers than others. Finally, I connected the dots that people follow specific questions. I began answering questions based on the follow count. Unfortunately, most freelancing questions had a follow count of less than 20.

So, I jumped to the Most Viewed Writers in Freelancing to see if I could find questions with higher follow counts. What I found was a leader board that could give me a goal to shoot for. The page is segmented into most viewed writers overall and the up and coming writers. Without realizing it, I had broken into the up and coming writers for this topic. Now my goal was to get to the top of the up and coming and eventually the top of the most viewed writers.

I went through the freelancing questions the most viewed writers had answered and begun answering them for myself. As I answered these, I accidentally struck gold answering this question. Thousands of views almost instantly and 6.7k views as of writing this. I quickly jumped to the top of up and coming writers for the freelancing topic.

My next goal is to get on the top writer's list and then to get to the top of it. So far, I’ve answered 35 freelancing questions and each answer builds on the previous in terms of growing the view counts. The top writers have answered a different number of questions each so there are other factors that determine the view counts. I intend to keep answering as I discover how best to rank up.

The question that soon follows is, how much does my Quora activity actually create awareness, drive traffic and ultimately lead to the purchases of my freelancing book (Path Of The Freelancer)?

What do you think? What effective Quora strategies have you used?