How to get your first 1,000 readers online (hint: Quora)

Image: Adam D’Angelo, founder of Quora, with Steven Levy, technology journalist. Source: Wikipedia

How to get your first 1,000 readers from Quora

In the back of an Uber on the way home from a dinner party – where I met the incredible story teller – I wondered how if I were to write a short story online, I would get my first 1,000 readers.

You could ask the question another way, and perhaps it’s more relevant if you write a blog or create content regularly:

How can you get your first 1,000 visitors / readers / viewers?

I achieved it instantly on Quora.

Quora is a questions and answers platform a bit like Yahoo! Answers. You post a question about anything and people reply. Those answers are then up voted and you’re usually left with some fantastic and qualified responses at the top.

The quality tends to be better than Yahoo! Answers or on other forums for one main reason:

Google does not index Quora links
- This is great because it means spammers avoid it. People don’t just post answers to get links to their products for Google SEO purposes, as those links will be valueless (unfollow). That’s not to say you can’t post links: you can, and you can link to products that people might buy.

Loads of incredible people have been or are on Quora: Stephen Fry, Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia – also an investor in Quora) and Barack Obama, for example.

How I wrote a story on Quora and got 1,000 readers within a day

Here is the story. It’s a true story about how I used martial arts in a real world fight.

This is the story I published on Quora. It answered someone’s question which was:

What is it like to be a trained martial artist and have an untrained person on the street want to fight you?

I was pushed into a bus when cycling home from work one day.

A group of men were drunk on a busy London street and as I cycled past, one pushed me into a red double-decker.

By luck – and it was just luck – I bounced off the bus onto the pavement. The men laughed while onlookers gasped.

I confronted the group. I asked them what on Earth did they think they were doing? They were on one of the busiest streets of London, hundreds of witnesses around, CCTV cameras everywhere. To be so brazen and wreckless was absurd. But they were drunk, so there was no conversation to be had.

The man who pushed me jeered. He pulled his arm back in a great arc, as if it were a slow-motion film, and as he brought it forward for the brawling swing I stepped in and used the basic shomenate technique from Aikido.

He fell to the ground like a cartoon hippo turned upside down. His friends laughed at him historically and pulled him away. I did not find it funny and felt anger build up.

Someone came over and gave me my bike. I cycled home and got on with my day.

### End of Story ###

How to find questions on Quora where you can write a story / answer and get 1,000 views

There are two techniques to find questions on Quora where your answer has a higher chance of getting more readers / views.

1. Followers

On Quora, people can follow a question. For example, if someone has asked a question that you too are interested in, you can follow it so that when someone replies with an answer, you’ll get a notification.

Therefore, look for questions with more followers. If it’s a new question, most only have between 1 – 10. You could filter those that you answer by choosing only those with 5+ followers.

If it’s an old question, they may have 50 – 1,000 followers. Again, you can choose those with more.

I chose a question with 55 followers.

2. Views

Click on the question (on the desktop version of the website) and on the left hand side it shows you question stats:

Quora question stats

These are super useful indicators as to how popular the questions are i.e. how many people are clicking them to read answers. The screenshot above shows the data for the question ‘Who is the greatest martial arts actor of all time?‘

In the three years that it’s been up, it’s only got 4,904 views so probably not getting much traction. Whereas the question I answered had 200,000+ views. It also had more followers, more comments and more previous answers, many of which were recent showing it was a popular and current thread of conversation.

Use these techniques to find a popular question on Quora and to answer it. I do not think it necessarily matters whether your answer makes it to the #1 spot or not, but obviously that’d be good.

Extra Tip: Use a picture

People scroll the web. Read Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows if you want to learn more about what that means neurologically, but from a little Nudge perspective, it gets people to stop and look at it… and then your answer.

Even More Quora Tips: Write first in WordPress, then paste into Quora

It’s frustratingly difficult to add a link into a Quora answer. The founder, Adam D’Angelo made it so on purpose.

One simple way around that (and therefore to put links to your own blog / site / product) is to write the answer first in WordPress with the links and then copy and paste it into Quora.

If you’re using the Quora app, write your answer first in an email with the links and copy and paste it there.

How You Can Hack Quora (OR, how you can buy Quora upvotes)

Like everything online, things can be hacked. Rarely, very rarely is online success truly organic. Usually there’s some fertiliser.

I’m not endorsing this and it’s not how I got 1,000 readers in one day from my story. Hopefully it shows that although Quora means well, it’s all too easy for people to manipulate.