If you want to build credibility online, quality beats quantity.

It's hard to promote what you've written in communities without coming across as purely self-promotional. Yet I've often found forums and communities some of the best places to find ideas for stuff to write about.

And if you play it right, by answering real people's questions, you can find great stuff to write about and get a backlink from the community while being helpful. Win/win.

I start with keyword research, and try to find topics that I would already want to write about from a search perspective—topics that are reasonably popular, fairly easy to rank for, and would be of interest to people who would also be interested in my product/whatever I’m writing to broadly promote.

Then, I'd find unanswered questions on Quora, Twitter, Reddit, forums, and more that felt like they'd be reasonably popular based on that research (that, or questions that only had SEO-driven answers that didn't really solve the issue). I'd then research, find a solid solution, and write it up in a blog post (either a dedicated post, or as part of a larger piece with an anchor link to that specific section).

Finally, I'd share the full answer (that's the key part) on the original question, along with a link for more details.

The trick is then in actually providing the real answer. You need to answer the question 100% on Quora/Reddit/forum, where anyone could read the answer and walk away without clicking your link and still be happy. Then your link can include “extra info”. For example, I’ve used this promote software roundups in the past—and say someone asked on Quora what the best CRM for real estate agents is, I could give a clear answer around that, and say that it was based on my experience reviewing 50+ CRMs and link to the full roundup article as a reference.

You're basically "giving away" the full answer, but that's what makes it work. You're helping the person who asked the question, making that page actually valuable to search results on its own—and that makes your included link more ok. You're far less likely to get your post downvoted or removed, and over time will likely see your standalone post reap traffic and ranking from it.

And then, it’s hit and miss. Don’t do it too much, answer some stuff that’s purely helpful/not self-serving at all, and make sure every answer you add has a really high quality bar, and you’ll likely be ok (Reddit and many private forums are harder, Quora’s in the middle and increasingly filled with lower quality stuff, Twitter’s the easiest but you only get a handful of people and each interaction has lower long-term value).

Oh one more thing: Don’t directly promote your product. This works best when your content is one step removed from your product. When I was at Zapier, say, we could write about CRMs that people would then automate with Zapier—and you could promote that content on say Quora by essentially promoting other people’s products, on this longtail hope that in the end it’ll still help your own product.

It does take time and luck ... but it's worked enough that it seemed worth sharing (and, if enough people take the same approach, maybe places like Quora would start being worth checking for answers again!).

idea originally sparked from the Marketing Hacks discussion