Make Money with a Wiki
Are you looking for a way to make money with the internet? Consider starting your own wiki. This article will show you how to create and operate a wiki for profit.
Contents
Steps
- Register a domain name.
- Obtain wiki software.
- Find a company willing to host your site for reasonable fees. Reliable web hosting is very important because your wiki needs to be up and running at all times.
- Choose a theme for your wiki. Some common themes are encyclopedia wikis, educational or instructional wikis, and wikis that provide a niche service such as music lyrics.
- Find people willing to provide content for your wiki without compensation. Think of other ways to reward them, such as giving out a virtual star when they start a new article. Create a sense of community and belonging, and make your contributors feel they are a valued part of an important cause. In this way you satisfy their emotional needs while they help you satisfy your financial needs.
- Choose administrators for your wiki. Make sure administrators know their future at your wiki will not be bright if they don’t toe the company line, which is to generate as many articles as possible (to maximize page views, which in turn generates advertising revenue).
- Hire at least one person to work as an administrator. Through this person you can set the tone for how all the administrators are to act, and exert a certain amount of control. Don’t hire more than one or two people for this, as other administrators will be working for you for free.
- Find companies willing to pay you to display their ads on your wiki pages.
- Revenue permitting, advertise your wiki on high traffic web sites. Particularly search engine sites like Google.
- Spend the remaining ad revenue on nice things for yourself. When the right offer comes along, sell your wiki for a profit and move on.
Tips
- Don’t forget about viral promotion to attract advertisers and editors. Be enthusiastic. Go to other sites and tell everyone about how much you love wikis.
- High school and college students are a good source for article contributors. They don’t know much, so the quality won’t be stellar. But the important thing is to crank out as many articles as possible in order to generate maximum web traffic to impress advertisers.
Warnings
- Creating a profitable wiki requires a substantial investment of initial capital, and success is not guaranteed. You may want to find one or more partners to share the risk. Angel investors can be a good source of funding; unfortunately they tend to demand a large share of the business in return.
