Quora Partner Program - Case Study - Part 2

It's been about a month since the last Quora Partner Program case study post. In that time I've been using the program, learning about how it works and earning some money along the way. So, let me give you my first real impressions of using this program...

• Quora Partner Program Case Study - Part 1
• Quora Partner Program Case Study - Part 2

So for the last month or so I have been coming up with questions to ask on Quora Partner Program. The only reasonable way to measure the succcess of this program is to work out how many hours you're putting in and how much you're earning. Time is money, and if you're wasting hours and hours to only get paid $2 an hour, you're better off doing something else. There are plenty of ways to make money on the internet that can get you close to minimum wage, and this case study is all about looking at whether Quora is a good option.

Of course, I'd love for it to make some serious cash too, especially when Quora publishes how much they are paying their top members. Here's a quick snapshot of this week's top earners:

1 £1,236.99 this week (£4,710.14 this last month)

2 £947.62 this week (£2,563.99 this last month)

3 £531.14 this week (£1,182.78 this last month)

4 £337.15 this week (£453.99 this last month)

5 £335.61 this week (£1,637.20 this last month)

Sadly, I didn't come anywhere close to these types of numbers, but it's hard to quantify these earnings without other data. How many questions did they users ask for that week? 50? 1000? 10,000?

Questions, Questions and more Questions

Coming up with Questions for Quora in the beginning is easy. You probably have a hundred or thousand different ideas you could think of to ask, and you feel like you could this forever. But after just a couple of hours doing this, I slowly started running out of questions to ask. I've been trying to come up with questions as quick as possible in the hopes of generating more money. The problem is that, when you run out of ideas, you really have to scrape your brain for questions to ask. This adds additional time to coming up with questions- they're not just rolling off the tip of your tongue when you first started, now you've actually got to really think.

And that's when the mental fatigue hits. Coming up with question after question slowly wears you down, especially when a) those questions don't earn you any money and b) those questions were already asked in the first place.

That is one of the negatives I found when working on this program. My pattern of work was to get a notepad and write down all the questions I could think of. I tried not to ask too many obvious ones as I knew Quora would already have those in their database. Duplicate questions get merged, and you don't get any of the money from them (unless you were the first to come up with the question).

However, I found even my most obscure questions had already been asked. Whilst I am almost at 1,000+ questions asked, a good chunk of the questions I came up with had to be discarded due to duplicates.

But, there may be an untapped market. If you know another language, you can apply for the Quora's Partner Program for that language. The feedback I've gotten from other users is that these languages have much more potential because there aren't as many questions that have been asked in them. Unfortunately, I only know English and so I can only participate in the most crowded part of the program.

Question Types and Quora Policy Changes

Right after I had made my first post, Quora decided to change their policy on the type of questions they let you ask. The policy basically restricts you from making "first person" type questions such as: I came home one night and felt really dizzy, do I have a brain tumor?

These leading questions actually do pretty well. Based on Quora Insights, a lot of these types of questions were included in the rankings, earning $10+ each. Which is probably why Quora has decided to ban people asking them. So now you have to be careful about the wording of questions- otherwise you can get your account suspended.

My first piece of research was going to be about these first-person type questions. I based a lot of my questions on these, and I wanted to explore whether they could make you good money. I think I had one really good day where I made over $8 and these types of questions were my highest earners. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to change tactic.

Speeding up the process

Being able to submit your questions to Quora fast is important. I spend about the same amount of time coming up with questions as I do to actually submitting them and making sure they're in the right categories. I'm thinking of writing a script to help with this process because cutting down the amount of time to submit would be helpful. Perhaps even a background process I could run so that I don't have to manually input each question. There might be something out there already that does this, so I'll have to do some research.

Quora Partner Program Earnings

A couple of early observations:

• So my earnings per hour has increased. If I could cut out the 4 hours of processing time, my earnings per hour would be £7.81. This is the number I would rather be earning, so I'm going to put a lot of focus into getting the processing time down.
• The amount I earned per day varies a lot. One day I earned over £5, then the next day it dropped drastically to £0.45. I think this is a sign that some/most of my questions of short-lived. They get a big burst of traffic from being new, and then once they've been buried in the endless amount of questions, they earn nothing.
• My top earning questions from the last 7 days are some of my oldest (almost a month old). So it goes to show that your questions earn you money over time, rather than instantaneously.
• The amount of money per week some partners have been making seems to have decreased drastically. I'm not sure if this is Quora changing the way they display earnings or what. But before you could see accounts earning £1000+ per week, now it shows around £300+. Someone said they have split this data up more into earnings per language, rather than bundled all the groups together, to give you a better idea. It makes sense at least.

Making £31 isn't too bad for doing very little work. It's boring work for sure, and there's no joy in it. But if you've got nothing better to do and want to start earning money now, it's not a bad way to get started. You can take that £31 and invest it into a website or something and start making more. Or, if you're young and don't have a job, that's some sweet sweet V-Bucks for Fortnite.

Hopefully the next entry I can increase my hourly rate to £5!

If you've had any experience with Quora's Partner program, post in the comments as I'd love to get some feedback on how to best improve my chances of making it a success.

Thanks!

Patchesoft | Entrepreneur

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