Quora – Be Your Industry’s Expert Online

Quora’s goal is to be able to answer questions that Google and Wikipedia can’t. They are accomplishing this goal by posting user generated questions answered by the rest of the Quora community. A rating system that pushes answers up or down depending on community agreement moves the “best” answer to the top. Currently Quora is generating a large amount of buzz online. The main reason for this buzz isn’t the concept – questions and answer sites like Yahoo! Answers have been around for years – but instead the user group is Quora’s greatest strength. It seems that very influential business owners, celebrities, and other major industry leaders are actually active Quora users. Case in point, the question “What is an ideal use case for Amazon PayPhrase?” was personally answered by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels.

Why Should I Use Quora?

1. Increase & Build Brand Equity
   So reading and answering questions on your industry is fun, but what is the benefit? Basically if you have a small to large business, Quora has already built a revered and trusted platform for you to utilize. By answering questions pertinent to your industry honestly and without blatant selling you have the opportunity to emerge as an industry leader on this still young platform. Theoretically Quora can also be used to build brand awareness, trust and evangelism as long as your answers are useful and continually voted “the best”.
2. Perform Free Market Research
   Want to know what your users think of a certain aspect of your business? There is nothing stopping you from posting a question like “What would be the best feature you could add to product x?”  You have the ability to receive free, unbiased answers from a diverse user base.
3. Increase Your Page Rank
   Quora also allows link backs to both your company and social sites via your profile which can help SEO. Quora is openly searched and indexed by Google – thus the more active your profile, the more Google will index your name and company name in relation to industry keywords. Inbound links from Quora should carry a fair amount of page rank, which can only help your rankings.

Ready to Get Started?

Currently Quora is open and free for anyone to create a personal account. Just visit www.Quora.com and sign-up. For further reading concerning the SEO potential for Quora and small business owners, I highly recommend this article from the ReachCast Blog: A Quick Guide to Quora for the Small Business Owners.