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5 Quick Ways To Discover Hidden Content Ideas with Quora

I’d bet that a lot of you use Quora for personal reasons, or maybe even for a little content promotion, but how many ofyou use it to generate content ideas?

While writing a post about the keyword research process and using Quora to find hidden keywords, I realized what agold mine the site is for finding out what your market cares about, how you can solve their problem, who theinfluencers are and loads of other data — at a glance, and totally free.

This is why Quora is your secret weapon for content ideas

For those of you that don’t use Quora, I’ll give you a quick explanation.

Quora is a question and answer site visited by around 80,000,000 people a month who are experts on every subjectyou can imagine.

The site is divided up into topics. To give you an idea of how niche the knowledge can get, there are entire topicsdedicated to questions on Henry Ford, Birdwatching, Medieval Manuscripts and Elves (Tolkien’s Universe).

Not to mention topics for marketing, podcasting, content writing and other things you’re likely to have an actualinterest in! It’s useful as a way for communities to start discussions and help each other out, but Quora is also a well-indexed database of the questions people really want to know.

Here are the 5 quick ways you can use Quora to generate content ideas, get a database of influencers and becomean expert in your niche.

Instantly find what people are saying about topics related to your product or service

Selling baseball bats? Here’s how I’d find content ideas that people care about:

Input your niche into the search bar, but instead of hitting Enter, click on the ‘Topic’ option. This brings upquestions related to baseball bats, not only questions with ‘baseball bats’ in the title.

If I were to be a content writer for a baseball bat shop, then I’d have some quality content ideas already.

Read sourced research from experts that you can quote in your content

When I was writing a post about SaaS pricing pages, I stumbled across an answer from Jason Lemkin whilst lookingfor the pricing info for GoodData. The answer he gave about why most SaaS companies hide their pricing was sothorough, relevant and interesting it made up the research I needed to write a great hook for the post! (I turned thatanswer into an infographic, too.)

While Quora questions can give you good content ideas (and even titles), answers from credible people can make upthe real substance of your post.

Use Quora to gain more knowledge about your niche and become an expert

To find any topic, you can edit this URL to include your niche at the end: quora.com/topic/YOURKEYWORD

Like I pointed out before, whatever you’re interested in, Quora has a topic for it. You don’t have to think too hard aboutit, just look under the Related Topics section of something you like to branch off and follow other relevant feeds.

By tailoring your Read tab, (or what you see when you go to the Quora homepage) you will get a fresh load of contentideas each time you’re stuck.

Find every influencer in your niche in an afternoon, then use them for outreach andcontent inspiration

Here’s a quick way to find the most influential people for any topic on Quora.

1. Go to your chosen topic by going to quora.com/topic/YOURKEYWORD. For example, if I wanted to go toproductivity, I’d go to quora.com/topic/productivity

2. Click the Most Viewed Writers link

Once inside, you’ll find the writers who have written the most popular answers in that topic within the last 30 days,giving you a current profile of influencial people. And if their answers are popular, perhaps they have somethingworth sharing with your audience.

A quick look at Catherine Chen’s productivity writing and there are already some great ideas coming to mind. If youfind writers who routinely post quality research on interesting topics, you can follow them personally to get live

updates.

Find the right keywords phrased in a way people actually speak

Keywords are, at their core, a human way to accurately query a massive database. When people want something,they’ll type it into a search engine and phrase it in the way they think will get the best results.

We want to match our keywords to the ones people are actually searching for, which means being in tune with theway they speak. A quick glance at the Network Security topic shows me some interesting keywords that I’d look attargeting if I was in that niche:

With a bit of manual scraping, you could come up with a huge spreadsheet of future potential keywords for your blogin a few hours. Here’s an example I put together in under 20 minutes for the ‘productivity software’ topic:

By using Quora, you can:

Get amazing content ideas without much effort

Write more informed, better sourced content

Improve your knowledge in your niche

Find a ton of influencers

Quickly grab plenty of keywords you’d otherwise miss

Did this post help you out? Do you have anything to add? Let me know what you think in the comments.