Category: Affiliate Marketing

Quora is a well-known Q&A site that many digital marketers have included it as part of their marketing strategy. However, the platform bans outright promotion—when you include affiliate links in answers, Quora tags these as spam and shuts down your account after repeated warnings.

Nonetheless, some remain undeterred in promoting their affiliate offers through Quora. After all, it's the best platforms for affiliate marketing because it allows you to demonstrate your expertise and authority on specific topics. Your target market is more likely to click on your affiliate link if they trust your opinion.

So, if Quora strongly prohibits affiliate links on its site, how do you do it without getting banned? Below are a few tips to promote covertly.

1. Build a strong profile.

If you think putting the affiliate link on your Quora profile will pass, it won’t. Even when you try to mask or cloak it, the platform will still identify it as a no-go and tag it as an offense. 

What you can do instead is to set up a bio highlighting your expertise and proof validating your authority, such as published works and collaborations. List credentials relevant to your affiliate business; it shows your knowledge and interest in the product. 

In the Quora profile, you can include your website URL. If you want to promote the affiliate link, use interesting content from your site to weave it through rather than blatantly placing it on your bio, which can be off-putting.

2. Focus on niche-related questions and topics.

You can find millions of questions covering a range of topics on Quora. Even if you put in a lot of effort going through each one and answering them, it won’t amount to much without the right strategy. Instead, follow the advice of top writers—work smart, not hard.

Start by looking for questions related to your niche, as it can be an area of expertise or interest. Choose topics relevant to your affiliate links. It’s challenging to promote something you have no interest in or knowledge of, so focus your keyword search on these first. While it’s helpful to follow popular topics and thought leaders, you don’t have to limit yourself to them and expand your scope.

Once you found the right questions, compile them in a spreadsheet for better tracking. Input the question, link, topic, number of followers, and answers. Determine the ratio of followers to responses. Most top Quora writers mind the 7:1 rule in vetting questions, but not always. If it’s higher, it means that many people remain interested in the question, allowing for potential traction. 

Sometimes, it isn’t easy to discover questions with the 7:1 follower-to-answer ratio. You can still post your reply, especially if you find most of the responses lacking in content or substance. Moreover, you don’t have to shy away from new or fresh questions. Answering them can give you a slight advantage over others in terms of views and upvotes. 

Whenever you scour Quora for possible questions, remember to limit your choices to ones where you can backlink your site content with the affiliate link.

3. Write great answers.

When you’re on Quora, remember that its currency is an excellent answer—ask any leading marketer, and they’ll tell you this. Most people forget this fact, missing out on the numerous upsides the platform has to offer.

So, what makes an answer worthy of view and upvotes? A lot goes into crafting a great Quora response, but the most important is that it should be useful. Many users post complex, difficult, or thought-provoking questions to trigger lots of quick responses. If you want yours to stand out and avoid getting buried into invisibility, contribute something valuable to the discussion. It can be additional information, different insight, or personal experience relatable to the readers.    

Whenever you answer, write with style. Use bold and italicized fonts to emphasize key points and takeaways. If possible, make your post more mobile-friendly by limiting paragraphs up to two sentences. Bullet points and numbering keep your reply concise but informative. 

Another effective strategy to grab attention is adding imagery in your post. Granted that Quora is not a visual platform, breaking up your answer with relevant images and photos makes it easier to read and understand. It also lessens the monotony of your content.  

Sometimes, appealing to the readers emotions works, but only on specific topics and up to a certain point. If humor doesn’t fit the situation, take on a more personal approach to answering, such as giving advice or sharing your real-life experience.

4. Create the right content.

Affiliate marketing isn’t allowed on Quora, but there’s a creative workaround—putting the affiliate links indirectly in your answers.

The platform considers it an offense to insert affiliate links in your answer, no matter how well you disguise them. Instead, tie them into the site posts that you can use as a reference or source material when answering related questions.

Build relevant quality content on your website first. The more articles you have, the higher your chances of directing traffic because of increased visibility. By extension, more site visitors will click on your affiliate links.

If you find it challenging to produce content, look at your bookmarked questions, and use these as topic ideas. Here’s another thing to remember—refrain from copying your blog contents and pasting these as answers on Quora. Instead, craft an entirely new post to avoid getting banned.   

5. Monitor your metrics.

Every affiliate marketer’s dream is to earn enough passive income; however, it only becomes possible if you put in the work and keep track of your progress.

Every Quora user has a dashboard containing their stats—which answers had the most views, upvotes, and shares. Try to answer similar questions in the future and create site content around such topics.

Take on the same approach when assessing your affiliate marketing business relative to your site—what contents drove most of your passive income.

Bear in mind that affiliate marketing through Quora will not yield significant results overnight, so if you want to make a quick buck, then you’re at the wrong place. Quora frowns upon overt promotion, but it doesn’t discourage marketers from using the platform for such purposes. When done right by following site policies and regulations, it provides long-term benefits through high-quality site traffic and passive income from affiliate links.