To Knol or Knot To Knol... Who Knows?

Ken's Blog

What's Knol's future? Will non-marketers share what's in their heads or will Knol merely become competition for Wikipedia and article-submission sites (ex., squidoo.com and ezinearticles.com)? Another question...

Since you can earn income by placing AdSense ads on your knols, will authors choose more high-CPC-paying topics? There will certainly be an over-saturation on high-payout topics. Also, the entire "feeling" changes -- people contribute to Wikipedia out of a sense of mission, not commercialization. In short...

It's hard to predict whether Knol will succeed. Google has had failures and underperformers (ex., Google Answers, Base and Orkut). If they do not market this to "regular non-marketers," it's possible that Knol may become simply another article submission site for Web marketers, with a Web 2.0 twist. And those individuals may be quite happy with what they currently use.

On the other hand, this is Google. Creating a quality knol in your area of expertise (i.e., your Site Concept or a sub-theme of that) may turn out to be a strong way to improve your credibility in your niche, while also gaining one or more valuable inbound links.

The road to best results, assuming Google has the technology to truly figure out quality (a reasonable assumption) is the following...

1) Take your time.Try to make your knol the best article you've ever written on your theme. A great overall summary, in your voice, with your positioning.

2) Keep it real. No tricks. There's no need to worry about keywords, as long as you have one keyword in each key spot of their page-creation tool.

3) Pay attention to the comments you get from folks. Google will surely notice activity like this.

4) Think of who you are and how you compare with your primary competitors. Carry your voice and your positioning into your knol.

5) Consider not putting AdSense Ads on your knol. For the few dollars you forego, you show Google and visitors who find your knol a "commercial-free," high-quality piece of content.

In other words, think of your knol(s) as your calling card. Visitors should finish your article with a big "Wow, I should go visit that person's Web site." If you achieve that, Google's algorithm should rank your knol highly, attributing more credibility to the link to your SBI! site. On the other hand...

If you are just going to bang out some short, poor piece, with commercial links all over it, it's probably not worth your time. You may even hurt your primary site. Remember, others can review, comment on and rate your article -- they can even report a spammy page. No doubt about it... a poorly written one, or one with little original content, could come back to haunt you.

So if "doing it right" sounds like too much work, it's not the end of the world if you don't write one...

Who knows? Knol may not even succeed. The best move you might make is to stop reading now and focus on building your own site's content!

All the best,