Thursday, July 2, 2009

Speeding up: Attracting more visitors with content and community

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.

Video URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giNdyLY46Mo

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.


Posted by Talia Brodecki - AdSense Product Marketing

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