🔥 I'm launching a Quora Marketing Tool soon, if you'd like to be notified let me know here (No Spam, pinky-promise) 🔥
USE AT YOUR OWN DISCRETION. THIS PROJECT IS INTENDED FOR.. EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. COUGH. SCRAPE RESPONSIBLY
I'm glad you asked, behind-a-rock-living-species. Quora is a question-and-answer platform where questions are asked, answered, edited, and organized by its community of users in the form of opinions.
- You build your email list fast.
- You establish thought leadership.
- Your posts get many organic views.
- Your traffic compounds as you gain followers.
- You can drive thousands of more members to your online community.
- Excellent posts get syndicated to major publications, including Time and Inc. Magazine.
- Quora is gaining traction in Google’s SEO landscape
This script focuses on the top funnel for this Quora Strategy: identifying the right questions 100x faster
Knowing how to write quality answers is important, but if you spend thirty minutes looking for a quality question, then you’ll never get traction. You need to understand what questions you should answer and how to find them.. faster.
Before you begin jumping into these topics and bookmarking every question that pulls your attention, know the attributes that make a question ripe for traction:
- (5-7):1 ratio of followers to the number of answers provided.
- A lot of followers, but many bad answers.
- A question that you can provide a personal image to complement.
- An emotional pull. This pull makes it easier to write more genuine answers with thought-provoking stories.
- Relevant to your bio offer.
- A question with poor-written answers making yours more likely to stand out.
The fastest way to identify a poorly-written answer is to look at whether the writer focuses on self-promotion rather than providing value.
For example, in the question below, the top answer has a promotional link in the first sentence and provides little value to the reader. Moreover, there’s a 7:1 ratio of followers to answers.
Jackpot!
Bare with me, young padawan. If you're not at least a bit technical this may seem daunting, but it isn't. Pinky-promise..
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Install Ruby
- You are on Windows -> https://rubyinstaller.org/
- You are on MacOS -> http://railsapps.github.io/installrubyonrails-mac.html
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Install the required Libraries
gem install ruby-progressbargem install nokogiri
Thats it. Clone this repo:
- Open your terminal of choice
- My choice for mac -> https://www.iterm2.com/
- Navigate to where you want to download this repository (
cd /some-folder/)
enter
git clone git@github.com:Theminijohn/quora-scraper.git
Voilà. The hardest part is done.
Open your browser and navigate to a topic you want to scrape. Make sure you select All Questions from the options dropdown
Either scroll by hand until you have a satisfactory amount of questions loaded on the page or use an auto-scroll plugin like Auto Scroll Chrome Plugin
Hit cmd + s / ctrl + s to save the html output of the page. This will save a .htm file and a folder in your Downloads directory
You can delete the folder, we're only concerned about the .htm file. Move this file into the folder where the scrape.rb file lives (you downloaded it previously into a directory).
Open your terminal, navigate to the folder where the script and the .htm file is and type
ruby scrape.rb
This will output a quora-data.csv file into the same directory.
You can repeat these steps for multiple topics, the script will keep appending data.
The quora-data.csv file contains this data:
- Topic
The Topic slug, as its used in the url on quora (https://www.quora.com/topic/{topic_slug})
- Title
The title of the question
- Followers
#of people that follow this question
- Answers
#of answers given
- Ratio
Follower to Answers ratio
- Engagement potential
Ratio is above a specified threshold. This is defined via
ENGAGEMENT_THRESHOLDon line 7. I Believe that 5 is a good starting point, if you feel like changing this, thats where you would need to do it. - Last action
Quora provides timestamps for Last Requested & Last Followed
- Parsed time
When the last action was performed (YYY-MM-DD)
- Question link
The canonical url for the question
Head of Example Scrape
+-------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+---------+--------+----------------------+-------------+-------------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Topic | Title | Followers | Answers | Ratio | Engagement potential | Last action | Parsed time | Question link |
+-------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+---------+--------+----------------------+-------------+-------------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Visiting-and-Travel-in-the-United-Kingdom | Would the government know if you went into the UK with a child then came back in with the same child without officially leaving? | 1 | 1 | 1/1 | No | Requested | 2018-09-08 | https://www.quora.com/Would-the-government-know-if-you-went-into-the-UK-with-a-child-then-came-back-in-with-the-same-child-without-officially-leaving |
| Visiting-and-Travel-in-the-United-Kingdom | What are the alleged no-go areas in England? | 36 | 87 | 36/87 | No | Followed | 2018-09-06 | https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-alleged-no-go-areas-in-England |
| Visiting-and-Travel-in-the-United-Kingdom | Why have you decided to never visit the United Kingdom ever again? | 10 | 0 | 10/0 | Yes | Followed | 2018-09-05 | https://www.quora.com/unanswered/Why-have-you-decided-to-never-visit-the-United-Kingdom-ever-again |
| Visiting-and-Travel-in-the-United-Kingdom | What is your biggest cultural shock from visiting the UK? | 2 | 5 | 2/5 | No | Followed | 2018-09-04 | https://www.quora.com/What-is-your-biggest-cultural-shock-from-visiting-the-UK |
| Visiting-and-Travel-in-the-United-Kingdom | What should I never do or say in Britain? | 74 | 112 | 74/112 | No | Followed | 2018-09-01 | https://www.quora.com/What-should-I-never-do-or-say-in-Britain |
| Visiting-and-Travel-in-the-United-Kingdom | What should I keep in mind when I am traveling to the UK on a student visa from India? Is there any restriction on the medications that I can carry? I will have a prescription along with me to justify my medical conditions and necessary medications. | 1 | 3 | 1/3 | No | Followed | 2018-08-31 | https://www.quora.com/What-should-I-keep-in-mind-when-I-am-traveling-to-the-UK-on-a-student-visa-from-India-Is-there-any-restriction-on-the-medications-that-I-can-carry-I-will-have-a-prescription-along-with-me-to-justify-my-medical |
+-------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+---------+--------+----------------------+-------------+-------------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+