First, keep on competing with the internal traffic. After reading through question insights and seeing questions in your feeds, compose questions around that stuff. Don’t feel bad about crafting questions that are similar or slight variations of popular questions. It use to annoy me when people were doing this to me because I had people following me and copying and pasting my questions then changing one word. I quit caring if people copy me because I changed my strategy. There are a lot of people in the top ten doing this, so don’t feel bad about doing it to retain internal traffic. Personally, I don’t see much value in copying other people because you run the risk of overlapping traffic with the original viral question…i.e. copying other people can end up making the original question even bigger.
Second, I read a lot. I read current events, tech articles, wikipedia, Quora feed, etc. These are where my most valuable questions come from. After you get a feel for words and phrases that are popular, you can craft original questions from things you read. Original questions have the biggest payouts.
Finally, external traffic comes from what people will be searching for in Google. Most people don’t see the value in external traffic because they are short-term thinkers. I have many questions that are yielding me a few dollars a month because they are yielding external traffic. The best advice I can offer for external traffic is to craft questions that you feel people will search for throughout the entire year. I.e. think of making questions with the intention of helping people. Even more, think of niche groups.
Final tip….The more you read, the easier it is to ask questions. I never run out of questions because I read a lot. I see a lot of people in the top ten that consistently post the same questions over and over with slight variations…which explains for a lot of stalled earnings.
Also, Quora started off as a tech site with a large tech following. Learn what is buzzing in the tech world and read enough that you have a firm grasp of concepts to generate discussions.
Oh yea another tip. I have decreased my question volume a while back because of diminishing marginal returns. I found the highest returns comes from posting about 20–50 questions a day. Anything over ends up in diminishing returns/lower quality.