So, you’re looking to make some money by writing on Quora. And you’ve heard of the Quora Partner Program. But what is it? And, is it going to be worth your time?
Well, let me give you the low down on everything you need to know about the Quora Partner Program.
#1. What is Quora Partner Program?
The Quora Partner Program is a way for writers on Quora to earn money from asking questions on Quora and attracting followers as well as other Quora users to write answers to those questions. If you get into the program, you’ll be paid based on how many views and followers your answers get.
How to join the Quora Partner Program?
The Quora Partner program is invite-only. The exact requirements to join the Quora Partner Program are not known. In fact, a lot of people on the web give out a lot of conflicting answers.
Here’s what I think, you need to become eligible to receive Quora Partner Program invites.
You’ll need to have published at least 20 high-quality, original answers in order to qualify for the program. The company will also be looking for:
- Complete profile info (including bio and profile picture)
- Authenticated social media accounts (such as Facebook or Twitter)
- A history of high-quality upvotes and downvotes (including a high ratio of upvotes to downvotes)
- It’s also been suggested that you may need 50 answer views per Q&A session (or session views if you’re writing a blog) and a total of more than 100,000 answer views.
- And most importantly, your answers need to be super high-quality. You know when people get all picky about grammar and spelling? Well, it turns out they’re right—those details really do matter!
To join the Quora Partner Program, you might also need to be an established expert on Quora with at least 50,000 followers and at least 100,000 views per month, but contrary claims providing for lesser follower count also exist.
Also, you have to be 18 years old or older and live in a country where the Partner Program is available. The Partner Program is currently only available in the U.S., India, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
How does the Quora Partner Program work
Well, it’s pretty simple. You just have to ask questions on Quora. Then you need to invite people to answer your question.
The Quora Partner program compensates users for the questions they ask on the site. The amount you are paid is determined by the amount of traffic you bring to Quora, not by the total number of questions you ask. You’ll be given a link to the partner dashboard once you’ve been accepted into the Quora Partner program.
Questions that have high ad value, will gets ads pasted before the answers by the Quora team and you get a commission from the ad views / PPC clicks.
#2. Can You Make Money from It? a.k.a. Does Quora Pay?
Well, here’s the thing. Quora’s pretty tight lipped regarding the commission one makes from the Quora Partner Program.
So, the only way you get to learn about the earnings are from the experiences shared by the partners themselves. So, I went through a lot of the accounts by these partners. And, unfortunately I saw that most don’t earn much at all.
In fact, the earnings are quite sadly low!
In a medium post, Chris shares that even with half a million views on Quora, he hasn’t been able to make any money via the Quora Partner Program. In fact, he shares that the Partner Program doesn’t even make coffee money. With 5 months of consistent efforts, he has made a total of $7.84! Also, Quora doesn’t pay out until you hit the $10 mark, so go figure!
Sean Kernan, a Quora Partner, with one of the most viewed content claimed that he averages around 50 cents a day!
Asking the Right Quora Questions
A BluSteak media post however confirmed my thoughts. Posts that have keywords that attract more ads bring you more money.
In fact, in a test, wherein a question was asked seeking suggestions for webinar software tools and in another case a question was asked seeking 100 year predictions that came true, it was found that the question on the tools raked in $0.08 from just 414 views whereas the other question got $0.05 from 48,342 views.
This showed the higher the ad value of the question. Although that’s a 100x improvement in getting paid from Quora, is it really worth it?
In my opinion, no effort is worth $0.08! So, if you ask me – you can’t get paid on Quora and you can NEVER profit from Quora Partners Program!
#3. Is the Quora Partners Program Legit?
Well, after all, Quora is a billion dollar company. Surely the program must be legit.
However, it doesn’t look ethical. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of transparency in how much Quora partners can expect to get paid and what they should do to increase their pay.
Quora’s revenue sharing also looks to be too far tilted, in favour of Quora. Plus, the ask-questions scheme seems to be contrary to Quora’s business model, which facilitates questionnaires connecting with experts in the field.
Rather, it seems a motivated scheme to ensure Quora gets content on keywords that bring it more and more ad revenue at the expense of its partners. Since most of these questions are intended at capturing positions at Google Search results, legitimate knowledge sharing gets thrown out of the window!
#4. I Don’t Care! I Want to Make Money Off of Quora. What Should I Do?
Well, okay! First of all, you should know that Quora pays via Stripe, if you’re from the US and Paypal if you’re from anywhere else in the world.
$10 is the minimum payout limit.
So, first thing’s first – to make the best use of Quora Partners Program, you need to know what works and what doesn’t. The best way to learn that would be to check out the Insights page of Quora Partners’.
Note that you can not access the page if you are not already a Quora Partner. Anyhow, the insights page shows you the highest earning questions as well as lets you on the details of the average question payout value in a year.
You’ll find that the highest earning questions are ones that rake in around $300 per year, whereas the average question earns just half a dollar in a year.
So, How do You Maximize Your Revenue from Quora?
It’s pretty simple. You just have to reverse engineer the Quora Partners Program revenue model. Quora already has a ton of traffic. But they want to capitalize more on the traffic that they miss out. The only website that brings Quora traffic is Google.
As such, you need to ask questions that have keywords with high PPC value in Google.
This ensures Quora can get more ads to those content and it enables them to earn more money, of which you get a peanut sized commission, but still commission none-the-less!
Also, get on trends. As soon as any trends approach, ask a lot of questions on the topic. For example, a week before the World Environment Day, start asking questions on global warming etc.
It helps bring ads to the table and gets you more commissions.
Wrapping it Up
As you can see, you can’t earn much money via Quora. The ad revenue sharing is just bonkers! And, most partners don’t even get paid anything inspite of asking several questions as the minimum payout is $10.
Anyhow, ad revenue is dying out. I had a post on Adsense a couple of years back. I argued similarly that Adsense doesn’t make you money. And the Adsense revenue has been decreasing ever since.
I’d suggest you try your hand at providing a product / service, affiliate marketing or sponsorships and forget about getting an income via these means.
Hope you liked this article. If you’re a blogger and looking to make more income, I’ll be getting several posts out soon showing you how you can diversify your income fast!
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