When I first heard about Google’s proposed Knol project, I of course thought of the benefit of having a followed link from Google.com.  If you read that post about the Knol, you would see that you could make money in a few different ways.

The most obvious is the shared Adsense revenue from ads that are placed on the Knol itself.  Probably not a huge amount of income here, unless your Knol happens to rank well for a very competitive search term.

Secondly, the big bucks could come from the followed links to your site in the Knol.  But what should be the topic of your Knol in order to a) avoid duplicating content that is already on your web site or blog, and b) be able to include relevant links back to your site?

Here are my thoughts so far:

1. Write Knols that are on very general topics.  Write an overview of your field that you wouldn’t normally post on your site.  For example, an internet marketing consultant could write a Knol on the history of SEO or online marketing.  This way you can use the Knol to link to your site (and others of interest) as you describe some of the many aspects of SEO.
2. Write Knols that are tangentially related to the general topic of your blog or site.  For example, I am starting a web design company that focuses on providing services to small businesses and non-profit organizations.  I could write Knols on fundraising, managing boards, or event planning.
3. Write Knols that are very specific, targeting many “long tail” searches that probably aren’t of interest to the regular readers of your blog or visitors to your site.  This is the best of the three, in my opinion.  There are many searches that you could take advantage of.  For example, Piper Tax could write dozens of articles on specific tax forms or very specific tax questions.  Suddenly, he would have dozens of links from Google pointing to his site for a variety of tax-related topics.  It seems to me that this would be much more useful than writing the same articles and simply posting them on your blog.

All of these ideas have certain characteristics in common, of course.  In general, the idea is to do some keyword research, find some topics that you wouldn’t want to use for your blog, turn them into Knols, and drive even more traffic to your site.

Those are the ideas that I’ve come up with so far.  I’m sure this is a far from comprehensive list, so I’d love to hear your ideas and feedback!

- Aaron from Enemy News

P.S. Tip of the hat to Piper Tax for suggesting this topic.