Projects:Common Answers
Contents
Why
To provide useful and valuable content which will encourage new users to visit more pages and potentially become an active member
Done When
There are pages for the top AboutUs searches and the top Google searches
Tasks
- Establish a framework for these pages
- Delegate topics
- Write pages
People
- Julia
- Scott
- Blake
Thoughts
Overview and Issues
After looking through the top 500 search engine keywords of the week, the results are mainly
- Popular Websites: myspace, youtube, yahoo, and ebay in all their spelling variations
- Popular Culture: names of models, actresses, and artists with the occasional song
- Service-related searches such as maps, e-cards, game cheats, etc.
It would be very difficult to compete with service-related searches because those pages are very specialized: people are not going to come to AboutUs to send an ecard or look up song-lyrics. We could provide a directory of good ecard and song-lyrics pages, but these don't seem to be at the top of Google's search-results. The portals are also hard to crack because the first 5 pages of search results for Yahoo are all Yahoo pages, same for MSN.
So where is an opportunity for AboutUs?
In the big companies and the websites, we could create amazing pages about the company. Wikipedia is a top entry for Ebay, YouTube, Mapquest, and Craigslist (4/12 top searches). Part of working our way up google's results is continually updating the page so it appears fresh and adding additional content. It would take a decent amount of work. The other possibility is less noble, but could be lucrative. We could create pop culture portals dedicated to the likes of Britney Spears (27th most popular search), Emma Watson (30th), Lindsay Lohan (9th), Paris Hilton (19th), Jessica Biel (35th). It would certainly be a departure from our more family-friendly portals like Health and Fitness, but it could steer some traffic our way. The advantage of pop-culture portals is that our competition isn't as tough as cracking the front page for Yahoo or MSN. The disadvantage is that pop culture is dynamic by nature so we can assume Paris and Lohan will not be sitting on top of web-traffic once the scandals die down. However, Paris is never far from headlines and even without a scandal these celebs generate a decent amount of traffic.
What Do You Think
I think we have three options for answering the requests posed by the top 500:
- Extremely in-depth company and website pages a la Wikipedia (we would need intense paid content or community work to achieve this, but it is on-message and reflects well on our business as a whole).
- Pop-Culture Portals: dedicated to Artists, Celebs, etc. We would have to move fast to stick with the traffic, and it could feel slimy.
- Delve further into the list: go more long-tail. I don't have the next 1000 search engine keywords so I can't say whether the list gets more diverse as we go down and the competition less fierce. Does anyone know where to find this information?
Results of Meeting With Tak and Scott
The Plan
First step is to onboard people in Pakistan and train them to build out basic wiki pages. We will populate the list of basic wiki pages to build by examining the list of common searches (dev card). Pop culture and game portals will be built after we have a larger trained staff. We also brought up the role of page-rank for Google's search-results and questioned if Google looks at how many people have edited a page. Tak points out that we could be a decent portal for service related searches (eg. e-cards, online games, etc.), by linking to valuable, popular websites.
Discussion
I'm new to AboutUs, just joined in today. I have an idea for starting a new portal. This would be exclusively for students pursuing their Undergraduate, Masters, or doctoral degrees. The basic crux of the portal will be to provide help and answers as well as examples to students looking to write their research papers, term papers or final thesis. The portal can provide reference links to popular websites which teach how to do just that such as GradeSaver.com (a Harvard student run website). It will also provide guidelines on how to write papers for various disciplines such as Anthropology, Sociology, Literature, Psychology because every discipline requires a different methodology, field research and format. Various formats such as APA and MLA may be discussed as well. Apart from this, students in their final year, writing their own thesis on various subjects may share their experiences as well as contribute valuably towards the portal. This may turn out to be extremely beneficial for students aiming to write research/term papers, thesis as well as college essays. Examples of few of the best papers can be given as well and other students may post their works in progress for evaluation by other members of the wiki community! Can somebody tell me whether this is a good idea or not?Thanx!
- That sounds like a great idea for a portal, but doesn't really fit in with common answers which is more of writing a lot of articles quickly on a weekly basis. Portal creation is going to be a very big and important part of what the content team does, but right now it's a little ways off. - Scott Keeler
