Knol offers experts in all areas the opportunity to write authored knols or "Units of Knowledge" on their specialist subjects. Knols can be about anything writers care to share their wisdom on, from accountancy to asthma relief, the history of Camembert cheese to elephant soccer. In time the mass of knols will accumulate to create a vast new, expert-led encyclopedia, an alternative version of Wikipedia, the Web's most successful - if flawed - communal knowledge base.
The project's potential for writers is clearly limitless. As the man who dreamt up the project, Google's VP of Engineering, Udi Manber, put it in launching Knol in December 2007:
"There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it. We believe that many do not share that knowledge today simply because it is not easy enough to do that."
The site at knol.google.com was opened up to writers in late July and already new knols are being posted on a daily basis, on subjects from diabetes to debt consolidation, from plastic surgery to pizza making (Elephant soccer is awaiting its first entry, if you are interested in writing that.)
This is all very worthy and interesting, but how will I make money from writing a knol?
Well that's simple. Advertising. When he introduced knol in December, Manber said:
"At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads."
Using the Google Adsense program, knols can carry a small number of "search for content" adverts - typically two - placed by companies or organisations in related areas. If you were to write a knol about, let's say, the principles of sailing, the ads would, in all likelihood, be for sailing courses, yachts, sailing holidays and other sailing related products.
Fine, but isn't that going to be loose change? Isn't it going to be a waste of my writing time?
Well, no. The long-term aim is to make knols the first organic entries Web users see when they search a term on Google. (They are the slots currently dominated by Wikipedia.) So it's possible, if your knol is on a particularly popular subject, for example, money or health and medicine, the piece you have written might be visited MILLIONS of times worldwide every day.
Adsense pays members of its program money every time someone clicks on their adverts. (The amount is a percentage of the money it has earned from the advertiser. The more popular and lucrative commercially the keyword, the higher the fee. Keywords related to insurance, credit card and medical related words are the most expensive.)
The amount of clicks varies enormously, but it's not uncommon for 1 per cent of visitors to leave a website via a Google advert. You only have to do the maths on this to see why Manber said authors writing knols could make "substantial revenue". This might be the understatement of the new century.
Aren't all sorts of people going to try to pass themselves off as "experts" to take advantage of this? Isn't there going to be some kind of knol-rush?
I think the answer to this is yes and no. Yes, there will be those who will write quick, cut and paste knols on lucrative Adsense subjects for a quick return. You can see them at the knol website already. But they won't prosper for long and may not prosper at all. Google have their reputation as the world's biggest and most reliable search engine to protect and say they will rank the best and most authoritative knols according to their quality. There is also a rating system that will quickly weed out the well-written wheat from the opportunistic chaff. There are already instances of knol authors being "flagged" for inappropriate or cynical entries.
So how do I go about writing a knol?
It's relatively easy. The knol site knol.google.com has an array of writing tools designed to make the creation of a well presented, fully-referenced and easy-to-read Knol as simple and straightforward as possible. Alternatively, if you are interested in writing a knol, but need help contact me via my website at www.write-house.net
It's very early days yet, but I can foresee a situation where knowledge-rich authors are going to enjoy a full-time living writing knols. As everyone on the Web keeps saying "content is king" and this is going to be especially true here. If you are a king (or queen) of content you will thrive in the valley of the knol.
Who knows, you may even become a knolionaire?
