A Series Of Unexpected Quora Successes: My Love Hate Relationship

I’m now a 2018 Top Writer for Quora. I didn’t see that coming, but I suspect this award came as the result of a series of recent and unexpected successes on Quora after writing five Star Wars answers.

Here's the message I received from Jonathan Brill from Quora Writer Relations about my new award.

"Congratulations! You've been named as a Quora Top Writer for 2018 in recognition of your highly valued contributions to Quora over the last year. 
 
As a Top Writer, you will now have a badge on your Quora profile that says “Top Writer 2018”. Other people will see this badge when they're reading your answers, this will also be listed in your Credentials & Highlights section of your profile page."

How Did This Quora Success Happen?

Before responding to these recent questions, I answered 79 questions across a variety of topics primarily in the category of freelancing as a way to promote my book on the topic. While I’ve received thousands of views on these 79 Questions, the most upvotes I received was 15.

When I was writing answers to freelance questions in 2017 to promote my book on freelancing, a friend suggested I write answers to questions in the photography category. His insight was based on the fact there was a larger audience to connect with, and that audience could provide enough leverage to generate the momentum I was seeking. 

Well, it turns out I tapped into this type of leverage with an unexpected Quora success. This past January, I wrote five questions and all five easily and exponentially surpassed my previous views and upvote counts. Two of my answers are now in the hundreds (559 & 164) and the others are between 52-89 upvotes. In other words, all of my answers surpassed any previous answer I had written to date.

This all started with me sporadically answering a simple question about The Force Awakens when I thought the question was ridiculous, and I had a quick and effective answer. Over a hundred upvotes later, I considered answering Quora questions a great strategy for promoting my extensive blog post about The Last Jedi, divided Star Wars fandom, and humanity.

After my first answer, I went and found four other The Last Jedi questions that would allow my answers to hit the main points of my blog and make it easy to invite intrigued people to read the entire article. After I answered these questions and the upvotes started clicking away, I experienced how good it felt good to watch the growth and engage with the comments flowing in. This also resulted in additional website traffic (although only a small fraction of total Quora views). 

Movie making is a powerful conduit to connect with other people. It's a platform to communicate messages for better leadership and personal development. Outside of stories, it's challenging to reach a large number of people in a memorable way. This Quora channel is definitely a conduit for me to reach people and grow my digital footprint which is part of my reason for working on another Star Wars The Last Jedi blog post.