Could Quora Be the Cure for Writer’s Block?

A few days ago, I was shocked and appalled…(okay, maybe that’s hyperbole)…to hear that LinkedIn was discontinuing their Questions and Answers.  I’d only dabbled it in, personally, but having worked in B2B, I know that the service is ideal for lead generation and promoting thought-leadership.

Upon hearing the announcement, me and some of my Twitter peeps had a discussion about if this was going to be Quora’s moment to shine.

What’s Quora?

For those those who don’t know, and I hope you’re few and far between, Quora is a Question and Answer site.  Similar to Yahoo Q&A, but with a lot more credibility.  Questions run the gamut from “What are the most important qualities of CEOs?” to “What online tools can I use to monitor my brand’s social media mentions?”. Quora members can ask, or answer, any question they’d like.

I used to use Quora to ask questions when I was having a problem that Google just couldn’t answer (shocking I know).  But then I abandoned the service.  Not sure why, but I think I was going through social media overload.

However, with the news of LinkedIn Q&A shutting down shop, I’ve begun to give Quora another chance.  This time though, I’m the one answering the questions.

In doing so, I’ve found that it allows me to showcase the expertise that I’ve amassed over the past few years, but the most interesting “side effect” of Quora is that some of the questions asked have challenge me to think about things in a whole new way.  In fact, I have a slew of blog topics that I’ll be writing about simply because of questions posed on Quora.

Finding Inspiration on Quora

Quora can be a blogger’s best friend.  As an example, if you’re interested in writing a blog post about Twitter, you can search Quora for “Twitter”, and you’ll see a list of the most popular questions.

In this case, one of the results is “What’s the Most Epic Tweet?”  Immediately, my wheels are turning, “What makes a Tweet epic?” would be an interesting blog post.   Is it number of retweets? Is it the amount of articles written about the tweet?  Is it a tweet from an unknown that went viral?  You could start researching the post by digging into Quora users’ answers, add your own perspective, and bam, new blog post.

It seems that the owners of Quora feel the same way, as they recently announced blogging capabilities on the site.  I’m interested to see if this actually takes off, but I can say that Quora is making me a more inspired blogger, and I’d recommend it to bloggers and business professionals alike.

How do you use Quora?  If you’re not currently using Quora, do you think you’ll start?