The Knol Revolution Is Upon Us

On July 23rd Google released their newest project Knol to the public. Although still in beta it is promising to be a hot source of traffic for your website. Google created Knol to compete with Wikipedia and Squidoo; in fact it is kind of a hybrid of the two. With Knol an author can write an article based on a specific topic and have complete ownership to that article. He can then choose to have other authors edit and add information to that article if he so chooses. Articles are rated by readers on a 1 to 5 star system. Also to keep out spam, readers can flag an article as inappropriate.

As Internet marketers there are several benefits to participating in Knol. Since Google owns Knol they will be marketing this site quite heavily in the future. Also they will more than likely give more importance to Knol pages than to other content sites. Also participating in it will give you authority in your particular market which will help brand your product or website.

One person has already shown how to use Knol to gain exposure as a niche marketer. His name is David Petherick and if you type “read Russian” into Google, his Knol page entitled “How to read the Russian Alphabet in 75 Minutes” will show up on the first page of results. This is quite impressive since there are over 13 million pages he has to compete with for that term. So you too can be ranked high in Google for keywords in your market but there are some things to keep in mind.

Here are some tips for writing a Knol. For one make sure your article is comprehensive and full of quality content. Make sure that what you write is 100 percent original and not copied from anywhere else. This applies also to any of your own articles you have written. If you have previously submitted articles to any directories or posted it on your blog then you’re better off not using it as a Knol. Also make sure to include a picture of yourself as the author.

Now keep in mind that all the links in the articles, your profile, or in the comments have the no follow tag, so you can not use Knol for back links. But you can still use it to drive traffic to your website by writing quality articles or posting informative comments.