catmanu
Junior Member
- Dec 27, 2010
- 108
- 27
Hello fellow BHWers. I've got a nice white hat method to share with you. I've used it for three years now to create and get in some really killer white hat niches, both for getting outgoing links, and for making killer conversions right on page. This method is a long term method and it takes a bit of work and dedication to start rolling, but after a certain time it yields really powerful results. I'm not promising to make you a millionaire overnight, but I am sharing my method that has brought me really reliable earning and
What's A Wiki and Why?
A wiki is a kind of web site where anyone can edit the pages and update them. The idea is to 'crowd-source' the content writing and creating part and have random people write content on it for free, it gets a ridiculous amount of traffic. According to Alexa, it's the 6th most popular website. According to Business Insider, Wikipedia, a nonprofit organization, is worth $7 Billion dollars. Of course, I am by no means saying you will become as big as wikipedia, but even a tiny fraction of the traffic, editors etc can give you very reliable earning potential.
Pros and Cons of Wikis for making money
Pros
- "Wiki" as a brand has amazingly positive reputation, unlike some random blog where you allow others to post
- People love wikis and trust them and the information in them
- Other people will eventually write content for you
- Unlike blogs or other websites, advertising wikis is really easy. No one looks down on it, you can post it in forum threads, blogs, anywhere and because it's got such a positive rep
- You can excuse ads by saying you need to support the wiki
- You, as an Admin, can make it look like there's a consensus to outsiders
- Product placement, as long as you do it right, has very high conversions
- Very SEO friendly for engines
- Lots of targeted direct traffic if you do things right
- It's 99.9% Whitehat!
- Making wikis in a non computer savvy field is a ridiculously easy and has sick conversions
- PEOPLE TRUST WIKIS
- Wikis take work to seed the initial content
- You can't monetize right away
- You need to have a long term plan to attract users and people to make content
- You need to research the market well
- It's a long term project
- You've got to be really white hat and good in your copy writing to make it 'innocent', because the people you host the wiki with have to never question you or receive too many complaints
- Others can mess up your work if they're really malicious
- Technically you don't own the content with the default terms
Market and Keyword research
I can't stress how important it is to have really good niches and markets. You can't go in a niche where other successful wikis exist. You can't go somewhere where there is no traffic! (Duh!). You can't go in somewhere where you won't have a long term strategy for making money out of it. You must take careful time and research setting up a wiki niche for yourself, because you're going to have to do work in the long term to get the site going. Remember, traffic is key, but so is the kind of traffic you're getting.
I also must point out that you've got to concentrate on niches that are not related to internet marketing or to tech savvy people or anything like that. First, imagine you had a wiki niche about IM. Other IMs would quickly figure out to put their links in it, they'd figure out you were monetizing stuff, etc. The less tech savvy the audience, the better. They're way more trustworthy and they don't question some potential ads or your ownership of the wiki. The niche for things not related to computers is way less likely to have a good wiki in it too! Remember these tips! Remember to research your competition ahead of time, you can't just sit down in five minutes and dive in a niche! It also helps to have some knowledge about the topic yourself.
Powerful thing to do while researching!
Let's say you're pretty figured out on what you want your niche to be. You've done some research, and you've got a good idea of the market, of the monetization long term strategies, of how in demand the content is, if there's a lot of good will people in the community that will help you out in the long term, etc. Okay, you must do this one IMPORTANT STEP. This has helped me so much in the long term I can't overhype it. Even before you set up your wiki but after you're pretty sure on the niche, start making GOOD and CONSTRUCTIVE posts using the same identity on popular forums, discussion sites, blogs, facebook pages, and other awesome community hubs for your niche and very related niches. You want to build up a bit of time for your identity to 'exist' out there and for people to accept you. This will come to be useful a bit later, you will see. Trust me on this!
Setting up the Wiki
Research what kind of wiki hosting you want to go with. Do you want to use one of the many available free hosting wiki services? Do you want to redirect it to your own site or do you want to host it on theirs? Do you want to download a wiki package and host it on your own site without involving the wiki hosting places? I personally mostly use Wikia, because it looks exactly like wikipedia and people feel really familiar with it and how to use it., and most importantly they're a lot more likely to trust it!
I'm not going to explain the process of making an account and all that, because it's fairly simple to set up, no matter what hosting you've chosen. Make sure you do your keyword research and organize the subdomain or domain to be an effective on for on site SEO for searches. This will matter in the long term! Now comes the hard part!
Content in the Wiki
In the long term, your users are going to be generating content and you're going to be thinking about ways of monetizing it. Hopefully you've thought very well about the niche and it's a fairly big one without too much competition as far as wikis and other stuff goes. Hopefully your niche caters towards people that aren't tech experts and likely have a number of free time to write about their expertise and experiences with whatever niche you're thinking about.
To start, wikipedia and other wiki's content is copyrighted in such a way that other wiki pages can use it freely as long as as you include a link to them. But let's use our SEO hats for a minute and think! We can't just copy wiki content, because we're going to get hit with a duplicate content penalty, but we can easily use it as a base to work out on making content yourself. So for example if you decided you wanted a wiki on strength training. Sure, there is a competing wiki in that 550k search volume keyword, but what we'd do is go to wikipedia for strength training (here) and look at the content people wrote. Then we'd take it and rewrite it ourselves to expand on it on our own wiki. This takes time and patience and hard work, like any kind of SEO and website building. But after a couple of hours or days or weeks of work, you will have some pretty good content in wiki form. Remember how I told you to start participating in the communities? Because you were posting and talking to people on the niche subject, you will have a lot of ideas about what content to write, but this is not even the big part. It's time to market it!
Marketing and Advertising the wiki
Okay, so you remember to take time to set up a trustworthy identity for yourself. Awesome. People have made connections with you, the blog authors kind of know and trust you, your forum account is not one day long, etc. Now you can LEGITIMATELY go and advertise your wiki and ask people to help you and to link to you. This is the beauty of this, because wikis as a brand have such a powerful 'brand' image and people feel so altruistic about them, as long as you don't start stuffing ads right away you will get people to help you. You will get people to write content for you for free. This takes some time, but as long as you did your market research well and you found a good niche and you've built up a decent chunk of starting content and you've got a pretty legit online identity for people to trust you, they will FLOCK to you to give their expertise and advice on your wiki. They will link to you because wikis are so positive and altruistic and good. You will have a ton of organic traffic in the long term, too.
Grow time
Like any good project, wikis will take some time to grow and go up in rankings and get the content going. Keep at it, remember, your goal is not to have it bringing money right away, because this is not what this method does. Your goal is long term. Keep at it! Keep making improvements and getting the community interested.
Monetizing
Okay, it's a year in and you've got a good community of people occasionally writing content. Now it's time to make some money. If you chose your niche well, you can either go for an ads displayed way or you can go for stuffing occasional affiliate product links in the content. It's up to you how you do it, but be both subtle and positive about this. You don't want to advertise shitty products that the people that write for your wiki don't approve of. You don't want a backlash. Keep your ads on topic, they will have better conversions. You can also make wiki pages on the product you're advertising and write up a really positive wiki page on it detailing all the features and benefits and savings it does. In case you get flak you can always make up a story about how we need ads for server hosting, or w.e. in private to the people that complain.
Also, after a year or so your wiki pages might have pretty good pagerank. Use them to push your other project's SEO up and to get people to related places that you own that can be used to monetize the traffic.
Ending tips:
I wanted to share a few tips I learned in my working with this method for you guys.
First, if you took time to find the right niche, chances are its oriented toward less computer savvy people and maybe even old people. To make it easy for them, increase the default font size on your wiki. Older people and most people in general have a lot of trouble reading small sized text, so they will really appreciate your bigger text!
Don't start monetizing too early. It can hurt the initial amount of content and make people less likely to help you contribute. You want to give it time to build up in size.
Slow and steady wins the race, but don't be too slow!
If your content is really good you get an incredible amount of organic links. So work really hard on making sure you're providing real content. You can't spin random crap articles this way, you've got to go legit.
