761 – Up your marketing by answering questions: Tom talks Quora

Episode 761 - Quora
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 761 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about a place where you can answer questions and they've got 300 million users. And you can really get your name out there. It'd be a good social media thing to add to your mix of marketing tools, and it's called Quora, so we'll talk about that in a minute. Hope you didn't miss Episode 760. That was pitiful. Podcast pitches say that really fast. I get pitches all the time on this top rated show and most of them suck is like 90% of them are just terrible and don't know another 9% just basically suck, right? So the 1% are any good. So this shows you what to do to really make yourself a good podcast guest to get on more shows. All right. Make sure grab a copy of our automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. You will thank me for it. And hey, if you like our training episodes, we do a lot of them then just go directly to screwthecommute.com/training and those are all listed by topic man. There's just I think there's about 400 of them to listen to back episodes you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, and then the episode number the pitiful podcast pitches was 760 so it'd be screwthecommute.com/760.

[00:01:48] All right let's get to the main event. So so what is Quora? Well, Quora is a highly respected place where anybody can ask a question and anyone can answer it. That sounds pretty simple, right? Well, it is. But knowing the ins and outs of using it to promote yourself is what I'm talking about today. Now, when I say core is highly respected, all right. That doesn't mean there aren't trolls there who ask totally stupid or contra super controversial questions just to get rises out of people. I mean, these people have nothing better to do. For instance, someone might ask, I stole a car last week. Do you think the old owner would give me his spare key? I mean, yeah, I just made that up. But as I've read Quora over the years, that fake question that I just made up doesn't hold a candle to some of the stupid, real and trolling questions you'll see on there. But that doesn't mean Quora isn't an effective tool to add to your marketing mix. At last count, they have 300 million active users, and you can be sure out of that many people there are some business for you to grab from this site and also see. Quora answers are searchable on Google, so you can get traffic from people that never even heard of Quora. And Quora is highly respected, so it gets high rankings in Google. First thing you want to do is to join and then create a great profile and an. Here's another cool thing. You can have multiple credentials in your profile and and multiple accounts, and Quora allows you to pick which credential to display when you are answering different questions.

[00:03:41] For instance, if I get a public or professional speaking question, my cred reads 3000 paid speeches in 12 countries. That's my tagline. And I just started answering and I've been doing that since 2017, I think. I just started answering self defense questions in my head for that is survived over 100 violent encounters. And you can add your education and experience credentials, too. So you want to do that right off the bat. And here's a great hack. Your account also has a knows about section that's K-n-o-w knows about. In other words, other things that you know about. You can edit that section and tie in your other expertises. Now, I wouldn't go crazy with this because you don't want to appear to be a jack of all trades. But it's just another way people can see what you're all about. Now, all this stuff is tied to questions you answer. Now, it's pretty easy to get started if you're just signing up. You can search out stuff in your topic area and jump in to start answering questions. Once you do that, you'll start getting emails like this. Tom As a person who's answered questions on public speaking before, can you answer this one? And then they ask another one. In other words, you started getting fed questions to answer. Lots of people who are heavily into Quora as a marketing tool say that it's best to jump on the question immediately and be one of the first people to answer.

[00:05:28] The first answers are seen way more than answers to questions that are days, weeks or months old. Now, I do suggest you either have a throwaway email address or go to your settings page and click on email and notifications, and that's where you can customize what emails come to you and how often you get them and all that. Now you can follow topics that either interest you or would be good for your business. For instance, I might follow a topic on recumbent bicycles, the ones where you kind of sit back on. But I have no interest in answering questions about. For public and pro speaking, though, it makes sense for me to answer them because I've been selling public speaking and professional speaking info for many years and I still do. Do I answer every question that is sent to me? No. Not even. Not even close. Not even a small percentage. See, for me, I just answer the ones that I can easily answer and that I can sneak in promotion for my stuff that I sell. Now, you can't be blatant about it because I'll tell you why in a minute. But for instance, someone ask a question about pepper spray in the self defense section, the first thing they saw was my credential was self defense related. Then I started my answer like this. Quote. What I teach my students in my brutal self-defense class is. And then I gave a very detailed answer that proved that I know what I'm talking about.

[00:07:04] I still got in my promotion though. My brutal self defense brand. And people could go over and buy my brutal self defense videos and you can put links and images in your answer too, but don't be spammy about it and don't put the same link in every answer. See, readers can upvote and downvote your answers. If you get downvoted enough, your answer could be removed and you totally wasted your time and hurt your reputation. Quora also has blog space you can take advantage of. Let's say you might have a blog that doesn't get that much traffic. You could take content. This is really cool, hack. You could take content off of your blog. Now you don't have to take it off. I mean, take it from your blog copies of it, put it on a Quora blog that you control, that you can name and so forth, and link back to your blog. You have nothing to lose by doing this and everything to gain. See, Cora has so much credibility, it's likely that your blog post may show up in Google from Quora. Even though technically it could be considered duplicate content because it's on your blog and quora's. But see, Quora is so big, they pass the test there. They're not worried about duplicate content penalties from Google. They're in a different league, like, you know, like super, super big sites are. They don't worry about that kind of stuff. And you don't have to worry because the content showed up on your blog first, right? So it's a win win.

[00:08:48] Maybe I would adjust the blog on Quora or do a synopsis and have them click over for the full story on your blog. That's something I would probably do. But anyway, it's I just want you to know that this exists for you and it's free. Quora has good analytics, so you can see which of your answers and topics are doing the best and you know, so you'll know what to talk about and say in the future. And you can also advertise on Quora to make sure your answers are seen. Now, is Quora my main marketing tool? Not even close. But that doesn't mean it can't be a super effective tool for you, especially if you're just starting out. And I'm not saying it's not for experienced people. Yeah, it's great. It's just that in my position where I'm at now, it's not my main thing, but it's certainly powerful and worthy of your attention and it gets some of my attention, so I wouldn't be messing with it if it wasn't worth it. Gave you a link in the show notes of a more in depth article of what I'm talking about from a site called Zoho. And hey, if you want help with this, then the other gazillion things you need to do to be successful online, check out my mentor program. It's the longest running, most successful, most unique ever in the field of digital and internet marketing.

[00:10:09] And also I have a school. I have the only licensed, dedicated Internet and digital marketing school in the country, probably the world. And I'll tell you what, the way things are going with these, it's all over the news all the time about runaway tuition costs. And this thing with the free tuition is never going to fly. It's unconstitutional. And and these poor kids are getting dumped on with enormous amounts of debt and then they're getting a lousy education if they get any education at all. I mean, one of the things I uncovered that the average student is spending eight hours total total per week. In studying and preparing and going to class. The total add combine those studying and going to class eight hours a week. The rest of the time is shopping, eating and partying. And then they they get out of school with $200,000 in debt and they're competing for jobs at Starbucks. Well, that doesn't happen in my school. It's IMTCVA.org. Check it out. Give me a call. We'll get your get you something that's worthwhile, a highly in demand training and like 5% of the cost or even less than going to a regular four year university and you'll be making we have many of our students are making money before they even graduate. You know so so very powerful. Check it out at IMTCVA.org. All right. We'll catch you all in the next episode. Let's see some of those answers on Quora.