Growth Hacking is one domain which I always loved to explore, but haven’t really got a chance to.

So, I decided to dive in and learn about it. I took the Hubspot Inbound Certification course, kept myself updated with the growth community through various articles in the growth hackers community, and now even my Wunderlist is full of management and startup related to-reads.

Having been a founder of a couple of unsuccessful and a mildly successful companies and also a self-taught data scientist, I loved the articles and resources especially because I can connect them to the success of a company and the value those concepts would add to a data science problem.

So, after a month of training myself, I tried to use the tricks in a real world scenario. So, I tried my luck at Fiverr, where you can freelance for micro projects. So, I decided to spend an hour after office for a week for putting my growth knowledge to test.

So, the first client was a group of youngsters from India, who have built an app for bulk file transfer through Whatsapp, and are struggling with their marketing on social networks. So, they explained everything about the app, and how they failed with their paid advertising strategies on Facebook, and by bulk tweeting on Twitter. They want me to get atleast 500 downloads after this gig.

500 downloads? I haven’t done marketing before, and now I have a monumental target before me, and especially when the app was struggling to get downloads. But it sounded like an exciting project to undertake, and well, I accepted the gig.

So, what is the best market for this app; and how do I market it to those customers?

The app is a productivity app (Android) and is compatible with Whatsapp. The answer is right there in the product description. Youth in the age group 21–28 are the best customers, and in fact are awesome early adopters. Yayy! So, I have the audience to which the app needs to be marketed to.

Now, I have to choose the medium through which I can reach them. Well, what can be a better medium than Quora for reaching audience of that age group. Some might argue in favour of Facebook and Twitter. But, Facebook and Twitter have just 1% adoption ratio, which means out of every 100 users your ad reached, only 1 user installs it; and that’s a pathetic marketing model to use when you are out of time. So, enter Quora.

On Quora, you can guarantee 10% adoption rate as users read answers completely if written correctly. So, I wrote two answers on Quora about the app, which got an aggregate views of 12k+. So, according to my assumption of 10% adoption rate on Quora, the number of downloads should be atleast 1.2k. But, the app managed to rack up an impressive number of 8k+ downloads. So, such is the power of having inbound links on Quora. So, now I’d explain how to write an answer which can get a lot of views and upvotes (damn they removed those credits, but still upvotes are always a pleasure).

So, this is how you write a nice Quora answer, especially when you want to market your product to the awesome audience out there:

All of these have been learnt during my gig and dabbling all these years on Quora.

Write a very relevant answer. By relevance, I mean to say that the answer should be very relevant to the question. And most importantly, you don’t want to spam on Quora. The downside of writing a spam answer on Quora is very high. You’d lose on followers and in turn, substantially less views on your posts. Include pictures in your answers. Yes, answers with pictures in them tend to score high on Quora. Split test, if you don’t trust me. And the reason is obvious. PEOPLE GET BORED halfway, and pictures act as nice focus boosters.

3. Write short answers if you can. Short answers, if written right are like fast food. They look good and can be read faster without losing focus. Nice way to rack up some nice upvotes for less time wasted.

4. Include your inbound link before the answer ends. Make sure you add the link to your product in the product introduction, and then build up, on the introduction down in the answer. It never hurts, if you include a link at the end too.

5. Make sure the question gets a lot of A2A’s. Make sure the question you are answering having a nice number of views and followers. And A2A’s (Ask-To-Answer) are a nice way to get them. So, ask a lot of “relevant” people to answer the question. This’d help in getting more answers, views and followers for the question. And now, your goal is to write an answer better than the existing answers, and you can follow the 4 steps above for that.