How to promote a site in Western markets with Quora and Reddit?

Why does your business need Quora & Reddit? 

If we need to answer a question we are interested in, we "Google" it. In the Western segment, questions are being searched for on Google queries and on Q&A services. Quora and Reddit are the biggest free Q&A services in the world.

Without studying the rules of behavior for each of the sites, carefully preparing the content, and diligently working on promoting personal and corporate brands, the effect of their use may not bring the desired results and work in the negative - even with advertising budgets.

What results to expect from Quora and Reddit platforms for SEO and more. After all, it is worth understanding why to work with these channels: 

1. Monthly traffic growth
2. Quora and Reddit work great for brand building: multiple mentions of a company and its products increase brand awareness, and high-quality responses increase trust in the company.
3. The number of users to whom the company's replies are sent is increasing. 

On these resources, we can find ridiculous questions, such as: "How can I teach my cat to paint?"

Example question on Quora

Besides drawing and cats, you can meet serious and complex questions about genetic engineering or nuclear power plants "Nuclear power station".

Hard and narrow questions on Quora

  Example question on Reddit

 Why do we show it, and what does it mean? It's very simple: these resources have a multimillion target audience.

User traffic on Quora by SimilarWeb Attendance on Reddit by SimilarWeb

That is why each user of these resources can find a suitable topic for themselves. If there is no such topic, you can ask a question, and there will be those who will answer. The level of trust in these sites is high. We would also like to point out that the services are so cool that just one cool free answer with a link to your site can get a large, and sometimes just a huge number of views. 

Let's take a look at how to turn all that traffic from Quora and Reddit into targeted traffic for your site and promote your brand to potential customers. 

Getting Started with Quora 

Registration 

Depending on the company's goals, a real employee can also become a representative on the site, whose name account promotes the site/brand. This option is better because it will allow you to create answers with hidden advertising on some topics.

Registration data requirements:

1. The name must not be fictitious or appear to be fictitious.

If you are a brand from the CIS and enter the world market, you better write like Ivan Petrov, not Eddie Murphy. Not knowing English at the native level will make you look unfavorable and cause a wave of ridicule. 

2. It is necessary to indicate your company and position held.
3. Using a real photo is mandatory. In the western market, it is strict (read - adequately) with photographs. Selfies are inappropriate. In any self-respecting Western company, employees have high-quality photos on a solid background.
4. You should not focus on your geolocation if your company (for example, an agency) is in a CIS country and promoting a Western brand. Users may not understand this. :)
5. In the field, with detailed information, briefly write about yourself, indicate the addresses of personal profiles of social networks and put links to the website and corporate pages of the company.

Whom do you subscribe to?

It is better to make the account as alive as possible. How can this be achieved?

When registering, the site offers to subscribe to some categories of questions, where you need to track discussions. Choose interesting for you: sports, travel, cars, computer games, etc. The more subscriptions, the more likely it is to get new subscribers and increase your reputation in users' eyes.

After registration, decide on a promotion strategy on the site. The strategy, for example, could be: stick to distributing answers by topic in a ratio of about 70 to 30, where most are questions about the product, and the least of them are personal interests.

What questions to answer?

The next step is to subscribe to questions by category.

We subscribe to all categories relevant to our industry to see relevant questions in the feed. We find "quality" questions that are already popular and/or have this potential:

1. With the number of subscribers from 10.
2. With wrong answers (little text, bad formatting, no pictures, not relevant), there's a chance to get the most votes and the title of best comment.
3. With high involvement. We consider the ratio of the number of replies to subscribers. The higher it is, the better. The ratio of 1 response to 5 or more subscribers is the key to good audience engagement with your product.

We also recommend keeping track of new questions on the topic. Unfortunately, there is no possibility of subscribing to new questions on the site. Therefore, it is necessary to monitor new items in the topics of interest to us 2-3 times a week and try to answer them first. A good option is to browse the topics for RF requests, as they may not be in the category to which you are subscribed.

How to write an answer and bring it to the TOP?

1. Relevant illustration. Add screenshots, infographics, even a funny picture or GIF animation on the topic - everything that will support the answer or make it stand out visually. 
2. Personal history. People trust answers referring to personal experience more, so use phrases like "remembering how ..."

"In my last project ...", "when I was so many years ...".

3. First-person story - no "we"

"Our team", "our company".

4. Formatting that makes the text readable.

Use paragraphs, bullets, numbered lists; highlight important facts in bold or italics.

5. At least 300 words. Everything is like in traditional SEO - long texts are ranked better. 

Important note: do not use template messages in your responses!

 Don't use too many links in your post! 

Don't add pictures where you don't need to.

When ordering comments, customers often ask, "Who should be posting answers on Quora?" and "How much do you need to write?"

Let's start with the first one. Any promotion requires a strategy, for example: 

1. The first month, everyone sends their answers to serious questions to SEO-specialist. He edits and approves them. 
2. Each such answer is sent to the knowledge base. After some time, it will collect quality answers to all popular questions on the topic. They can be used by any team member, simply by rewriting the segments. 

3. If it is not possible to connect a specialist in some matters, you can search for quality answers from popular authors and take them as a basis. 

How much should you write?

Quora is a platform where quantity is almost more important than quality. By focusing on the massiveness of responses, you will not gain a crowd of subscribers, but you will get traffic.

But spamming the same answer to many questions will lead to blocking.

Without losing quality, you can write from 40 to 60 narrow-topic answers a month -  about two answers a day. Among them are educational and product ones, aiming to promote the team and service, and answers to related or personal topics, which promote nothing and do not contain links. The more time a specialist can devote to a project, the more responses he will generate. Our record is 30 high-quality answers in 8 hours :) 

When we talk about successful and high-quality promotion, we mean a profile on Quora that is complete. This account is used to promote a service/product or brand successfully, and the number of followers tends to be around 1k.

A boosted profile on Quora

Brand promotion with Reddit

The main differentiator between Reddit and Quora is that Reddit is completely user-generated. 

The main goal of Reddit.com is to create subreddits, that is, categories with their targeted focus, where people from all over the world can share their content and comments.

So now, let's look closely at working with Reddit. 

On-site principles

You can start working with the site by simple registration, which requires you to enter your username and password. After registration, you need to subscribe to the topics of interest to us subreddits (both target ones, directly related to brand/site promotion, and topics for communication). 

For example, we are interested in the topic "Car rent":

 Basic site concepts

Acquaintance with the basic concepts of the site (Subreddits, Upvotes, downvotes, Karma, Shadowban, Reddiquette. (Removal by the participants of the resource themselves)) 

Subreddits are sub-communities with different topics and directions, of which there are more than a million on Reddit. 

Upvotes, downvotes – votes for or against your post or comment. The more upvotes - the material is more visible to others. Posts with thousands of upvotes end up on the first page of Reddit or thematic subreddits, but no one knows the exact algorithm for getting to the top.

Karma – the number of upvotes you received may increase or decrease depending on whether your posts or comments are upvoted, and vice versa. With high karma, the likelihood that your words will be trusted is higher, with a small one, respectively, below. 

Shadowban is such an inconspicuous ban when you can continue writing texts and commenting on publications, but no one else sees them except you.

The moderator automatically sends them to the spam list. You may not understand why no one has been reacting to you for a long time since there are no external signs of such a ban. Shadowban can be issued in a separate subreddit and can be extended to the entire Reddit.

The shameless plug is one of the first reasons to get a red Reddit card. The second common reason for a ban is "linked" accounts that set each other mutual upvotes (do not think that ask the entire team at work to raise your material, and popularity will be in your pocket). Still, you can earn it just for being an arsehole …

Reddiquette. Reddit is a very finely tuned mechanism, driven by the contributors themselves. Suppose you suddenly start shamelessly (and shyly too) advertising your product. There, you will most likely be removed by the members themselves, helped by caustic comments, downvotes, and a general position against you.

I hate marketers is practically a Reddit slogan. It is better to carefully study the etiquette of the site (Reddiquette) and the dictionary of basic terms before your first material or comment and even upvote.

Karma – how to get it? 

As we said above, Karma - this amount of upvotes you received can increase or decrease depending on whether your materials or comments are upvoted, and vice versa. So with high karma, the likelihood that your words will be trusted is higher, with a small one, respectively, below. 

Before you promote your brand on Reddit, you need to earn at least 500 karma points. To do this, by creating an account, you should not indicate your involvement in the brand - communicate, comment on publications. No need to rush to recommend your product. It is impossible to post materials and comment in some subreddits until certain karma is reached, but karma gives nothing other than trust. 

Search and participate in subreddits

Anyone can create a subreddit, as many subreddits as they want. Each subreddit has its moderators, and they can have their own rules and their design. 

You need to discover which subreddits your target audience is participating in. But before you try to work with it on an external subreddit, you need to carefully study its rules (subreddits can have their own unique rules, besides the basic rules of Reddit). 

We are looking for a subreddit on a topic of interest to us. For example, this is a car rental 

then go to the subreddit itself  

 and study its internal rules

On the site, you can easily create a community about your brand or personally about you. All that now remains is to make it interesting; thematic communities are very popular. 

Monitoring topics 

We need to track messages relevant to us - category, brand, competitors. You can use the search on Reddit itself.

 You need to communicate only on business, pay attention to a particular subreddit's rules, and use "good" language. Redditors are very attentive to grammar and punctuation. This is important everywhere, but the extremely pedantic attitude of platform users is surprising to many.

Search and participate in subreddits

Sometimes it is better to ask the moderators if it is possible to post this or that material. This will allow you to build relationships with them. Sometimes, they even help edit the text, so it is better received by the audience.

On Reddit, you can recommend your product in the comments, but only if it relates to the topic of the material, and you explain in detail, why do you advise to try the product (example).

AMA (ask me anything) as a promotion format

AMA (ask me anything) is quite an interesting promotion format on Reddit - "Ask me everything, and I will answer."

It looks like a community or subreddit, and you can also join it.

A common recommendation for marketing on Reddit is to arrange an AMA at the very beginning of the work with the site. However, activity will be noticeable only if you or your product are interesting to the community. Therefore, do not rush to use this tool. Some subreddits have their versions of AMA – if you want to, you can start with them.

Example of a Successful Reddit Profile 

Find an example of a successful case on Reddit (results)

Upgraded profile on Reddit

Find an example of a successful case on Reddit (results) 

Check list

1. In the profile, when registering, you must indicate real data, subscribe to thematic and not only discussions, do not write fake geo to give yourself away. 
2. Write a lot, competently and constantly – from 10 to 30 posts a day. 
3. Answers should be relevant and well structured, using pictures and gifs. 
4. Answer first in popular topics or choose old ones with a few answers – meaning there is a chance to get more votes.
5. Monitor selected topics of questions on Quora and Reddit daily for promotion.

If you don't want to do Quora and Reddit promotion on your own, you can outsource it to our Links-Stream team. Read more about the service here.