Quora is a website where people ask questions, answer each other's questions, and explore a broad range of daily life topics. The goal is to help find remote answers that are sometimes difficult to find in your narrow network. Quora is both a social media platform as well as an source of information. The site is aimed at individual users who want a better understanding of topics of current affairs, culture, economics, and technology.
The site was founded by Adam D'Angelo and Chad Hurley in November 2010. On April 17, 2012, Quora was acquired by Facebook for a reported $30 million. During its early years, Quora has been considered both a social media site and an educational platform that could potentially alter the way people learn new things.
Why is Quora so popular?
Quora is so popular because the site has a wide range of features that attracts many people. Quora can be used in four ways: for information, for pleasure, for intellectual stimulation and to make friends or acquaintances with people from all over the world who share common interests. Using Quora has never been so easy, by just using a computer or any electronic device you can quickly find answers to your questions.
The site has a very active community and users are always sharing interesting information that helps them to get a better understanding of various topics. Also, Quora allows them to ask questions, which have the power to make many people share their thoughts and knowledge.
How to Build a Question and Answer website
In building any Q&A site, the most important thing is to understand what people want and how they want it. You are building a tool that relies on the community, not just the Q&A portion of it. That's why it's important to do a lot of research and have a detailed strategy as to how you're going to approach this.
Who is your market?
When you build any product, especially for the internet, thinking about your customer first is critical. The same goes for building a Q&A site like Quora. You want to understand who your customers are, what they want and how they want it. That will help you build your website.
You can look at it from different angles. For instance in Quora, people ask questions to get answers and on the other side, people answer questions to learn new things that may be useful in their lives. They're willing to give their opinions and take on challenges they don't know how to do or they do not have the capacity to do them (for example, Starcraft players). This is an example of how to attract people who have a lot of knowledge. This is best done by keeping the questions and answers in moderation.
Knowing who your customers are also means knowing what they share socially, what they crowd source and how they like to consume information. This is where we can look at Quora as an example of how to attract a crowd of people who are willing to share their knowledge, expertise, experience and utility by answering Quora questions.A good way to think about building a question and answer site from a business perspective is:
- Who are your users?
- What are they looking for?
- How do they want to consume the information they're seeking?
- What do they value in information?
- How do your users communicate with each other (social media)?
Freelance
As a option you can hire a freelancer to help you build site like Quora. The minimum budget is 500$ and maximum is up to you what features you want to add on your site.
Using Completely Free cloud service
You can use a completely free cloud service: mywebforum.com which can help you create your own site like Quora. You can take a look a couple of examples sites which is using this platform:
- Software Developer Questions and Answers: devhubby.com
- Interview Questions & Answers: theinternettoday.net
- SEO Questions & Answers: sidsprojectimpact.com
- Generic Questions & Answers emediaworld.com
- Bad coding Practices crapcodes.com
There are much more examples to be honest but from the sites above you can see how it looks like and you can play with features as well. If you need build a simple community application and you are not ready to pay for the freelancers, hosting etc... this option works great.
How to monetize question and answer websites like Quora?
This is a very important step in building any website. You have to find the best ways to monetize the content on your site. Usually, this process involves creating a couple of revenue streams from different areas on the site and you don't want to short-change any one of them.
Showing ads on the page with the answer to the questions may interrupt that experience and make your users leave the website. In other words, don't put ads where they will get in the way of what you're trying to do.
So if you have a question and answer site, usually you will have three areas where you can put monetization for your Q&A site: some sort of paid subscription, display ads and native ads (sponsored content).
In conclusion, in order to build such a site, you have to understand what your market is about and implement any monetization strategy for the site depending on that data.
