We're well under way with our five-week educational series about speeding up your business in a slowdown, which we kicked off two weeks ago. This week, you'll hear tips from Jack Herrick, the founder of wikiHow.com, about attracting new visitors to your site. As we share more tips over the next two weeks about increasing your revenue potential and attracting more advertiser budget, we hope you'll leave comments with your own suggestions for growing your business. You can also follow the series at www.google.com/ads/speedingup.Jack Herrick is the founder of wikiHow, a collaborative writing project to build the world's largest, highest quality how-to manual. wikiHow is a wiki, which means that any visitor to the site can create or edit wikiHow articles. wikiHow is currently ranked as the 100th most popular site on the web by Quantcast, and receives over 16 million unique visitors each month. Today, Jack shares three of his favorite tips to attract visitors. We hope they'll help you come up with new ways to entice visitors to your sites as well.
Tip #1: Produce great content
The first tip is obvious, but it's also the most important. The articles on wikiHow vary widely in quality. We have some of the highest quality how-tos on the net, for example How to Hard Boil an Egg, and we also have some fairly ugly, unfinished drafts we call stubs. Interestingly, the high-quality articles don't get just a little more traffic than the mediocre articles, they get hundreds of times more. When you can produce the single best page on the Internet on any given topic, people will find it and share it with their friends. Don't settle for acceptable content, always strive to produce amazing content that your readers can't resist sharing.
Tip #2: Learn to share
My second tip is more counterintuitive. To attract more readers to your website, consider putting your content under a Creative Commons license so it can be widely distributed. Everything on wikiHow is under a license that allows other websites to publish and even modify or adapt our content for re-use on their sites. In fact, we have a button at the bottom of every article that allows webmasters to copy and paste the HTML right onto their site. Many webmasters are afraid to share their content, because they worry they will only be aiding competition. By sharing, what you are really doing is encouraging your competitors to provide free advertising for you. The more people who see your content on other sites, the more likely they are to eventually come straight to you.
Tip #3: Make your community a team
Finally, I'd encourage you to allow real collaboration on your site. Lots of websites try to create online communities. To use a basketball analogy, most online communities are just groups of individuals shooting freethrows alone. On wiki websites, people play together as a real team. Humans are hard wired to want to work in groups and collaborate. By allowing this to happen, you can create a passionate community of people that will build something bigger than any one person could accomplish on their own. And that will in time attract a large audience.
Hopefully Jack's tips will help you come up with some new techniques to attract visitors to your site. In addition to Jack's tips, here are a few extra resources focused on attracting more visitors.
- Learn the basics of Search Engine Optimization with Google's SEO guide.
- Submit your content so that Google can help you distribute it across Google Web Search, Maps, Product Search, iGoogle, and more.
- Drive more traffic to your site with programs like AdWords.
15 comments:
Nice to hear that someone gets a paycheck for their content on the web, good for you.
I took a another experience through this post and I will be more helpful for the people who are all involved in website business.
We knew few thinks from this post by Jack Herrick the founder of wikihow.com. One of the best idea to the online world is the articles should be in good quality. Second one says about the sharing your contents with friends. If you have good content then it will be shared by all the people who will be all reading our posts. The third point also the best one to make your community a team in your website that will build something bigger and it will attract a large audience. Very nice post from Jack. Thanks for jack.
It is very nice post from jack.
I'd add to your tips with a suggestion that your site needs to have a focus, e.g. adsense, how tos, basketball etc. Having too wide a scope is sure to disappoint.
Good information
How much do you make per month with adsense?
Hi,
can some help me how to start doing this, i already created an account, but am not sure of things, is it like we should copy paste the AD Codes to our website, so do we need our own websites,
should i have HTML knowledge..
please reply back
or please mail me to saenju@gmail.com
london
hehehe,maybe nice too if U read my comment @Camera ....I got 50 $ from my search engine ads when I login in my AdSense account on 26 juny'09...then I login again on 1 july'09 and my AdSense account got disabled cos there are many invalid clicks and impressions....Hehe,1 question from me...How to speedingup invalid clicks and impressions ??
i've signed up did every thing i was supposed to do set up ads every thing still have not earned any income yet what do i need to do to earn an income can some one help
Hey Guys,
A question on Tip #2: Learn to share
Is it safe to share website content (including AdSense Ads on them) with other webmasters or websites?
I have a gadget with AdSense Ad and many other websites are using it with iFrame. Is that all right?
MK
Very good for all member
MK: this isn't especially how Jack was recommending that you share content. It was more that you license the content such that it's legally acceptable for other website, whomsoever they are, to just do a copy+paste on your website and use the content as they see fit.
Sharing your content? Where I come from that's called copyright infringement. Don't know about you but I don't work to produce original material that others can take for themselves for nothing and use to make money. I would never recommend that ANYONE use a creative commons license unless they are doing press releases
OK, that "Learn to share" is a load of B.S. As more people grab my content, the lower my Google PageRank gets. Google seems to hate duplicate content, but instead of punishing the copycats, Google punishes me as if I'm the one who has the duplicate content. The content came from my web site you dim-witted behemoth. Google is like a fickle, insane, simple-minded tyrant that you never know how to please because the fuzzy, unwritten rules can change on you at any moment.
I agree with previous comments regarding sharing content through commons licence. This is not only counter-intuitive but counter-productive in my opinion.
If I fulfilled #1 (create great unique content), then I would naturally be very protective over that content. The last thing you want to do is dillute the association between you and that content.
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