March 30th, 2009
by Anne Orfila
If I need to know about something immediately, and I want an unbiased source, I turn to Wikipedia. In fact, I’ve been finding myself saying to people “Oh I wiki’d that and this is what I found . . .”. Similar to the days of going straight to my parents Encyclopedia Britannica (remember those heavy books with gold lettering?) if I was interested about . . . anything such as Big Ben or World War II or the magnolia tree in our front yard.
Now, lucky kids, virtually anything we want to know about can be found on Wikipedia. A little background – the name Wikipedia is a portmanteau – a blend of two or more words and in this case it is a blend of the words wiki (a type of collaborative website) and encyclopedia. What some people may, or may not, know is that Wikipedia is truly a collaborative site. Anyone may edit or author content. You, me, the expert rocket scientist at NASA and the retired grocery clerk next door (you get the picture). Wikipedia describes it best when they say that it “is an online encyclopedia and, as a means to that end, an online community of people interested in building a high-quality encyclopedia in a spirit of mutual respect”.
It is forever growing, but in the interest of the user, it is forever being edited to maintain content that is informative, not opinionated, not self-promoting, not personal memoirs and click here to read what else Wikipedia is not! Now that you know what Wikipedia is not, are you wondering what the point of my blog post is? As the title of this post says, Wikipedia can work for you and your organization, and I am here to tell you how!
While you cannot directly advertise your product on Wikipedia, you can offer facts relating to your product that will be annotated in Wikipedia’s reference list (usually at the bottom of the article). For example, if you were an author of a website that happened to feature cabbage and cabbage recipes, you could add in something factual under the “cabbage” entry like (and this is actually in the entry) “There are many varieties of cabbage based on shape and time of maturity.” This is linked to a reference from The Cooks Thesaurus’ website page on cabbage. Simple as that!
Well, simply put, it will drive traffic to your site! I have a client who has one simple reference similar to the example above in Wikipedia and traffic from Wikipedia is constantly in the top ten of all their traffic sources. Amazing! Just a teeny tiny bit of information that was entered once, for free, is paying off time and time again. How does this work? Well, with 684 million visitors per year to Wikipedia, you’re bound to get some, if not a lot, of exposure! With more than 10,000,000 articles, there’s got to be something that you or your organization can be a reference on! Don’t just use Wikipedia, work it too!Web Marketing Therapy Related Links:
- Make Your Website Work for You — Don’t be Afraid of Change
- Want Web Marketing Happiness? Do More Work Yourself!
- I’ve Found My Calling . . . Pun Intended!
- What’s Your Web-utation?
Web Marketing Therapy » Blog Archive » Why Blog? I’ll Tell You Why!
(May 19th, 2009 at 10:43 pm)
[...] word “blogeader” (”blog” + “reader”) – cool new portmanteau (see this past post for definition of that fancy [...]