Quora is like a human-powered Google. You or someone asks a question, and other people, including yourself, can chime in and answer these questions.

So you're probably thinking this is just another Yahoo! Answers, right?…wrong.

Quora does an amazing job at moderating questions/answers, and the community has an almost inexplicable, natural way of encouraging others to out-do the other people who have already provided an answer for a specific question.

The answers with the most up-votes, the people with the most followers and the posts that end up going viral all provide one thing; value.

One sentence answers, self-promoting links and just overall, downright stupid answers get pushed to the bottom, provide no benefit to the asker nor the answerer and are sometimes even deleted. You cannot game Quora.

So, how can you leverage Quora's massive, rapidly growing user base to indirectly benefit you?

Well, first you should focus on topics relevant to your product/service audience, and follow them. This will keep you updated when new questions relating to those topics are added.

When a question appears on your feed, this suggests it is has been recently submitted and promoted, therefore it will have more activity right away. These are good questions to provide valuable insight to.

Each question shows how many views and followers it has, so take this into consideration so you don't spend 20 minutes or so crafting a great answer to only have it viewed by 2 people.

In a nutshell, go after relevant questions with activity. Provide a well thought out, valuable answer. Fill this answer in with some aesthetics such as bullet pointing key things to focus on, adding in a few pictures or infographics that drive the point home, and if it's a long answer, throw in a conclusion paragraph to summarize and recap. It will take awhile to get used to Quora, but it's worth the investment.

You can also share your answers to your Facebook/Twitter which can help with generating some up-votes from your network.