If you’re familiar with all the ways to make money online you’ll know that writing is one of them.
Squidoo has worked very well for some of our members having wonderfully ranked lenses on a variety of topics.
Services like Squidoo, Wikipedia, and Mahalo are all great for those looking for answers to life’s many questions or a summary on a particular topic.

Google’s Latest Product Will Pay You to Write

If you follow the blogosphere, you’ve probabaly heard that Google will be releasing a project called Knol which will compete with all of the services outlined above. Take a look at this screenshot provided by Google:

This particular Knol (which Google defines as “a unit of knowledge”) is on the topic of Insomnia. As usual, I only care about how money can be made so take a look at the full version of the Insomia page.

Right near the top right of the page there is Google Adwords/Adsense box of advertisements. Google has suggested that “If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.” – This is great news for anyone who is currently making money writing online.

Will Google Manually Alter Their Rankings for Knol’s?

At this point I’m not really sure how Google will eventually approach this. It is safe to say that at first rankings won’t change much, and a popular Knol page might see rankings similar to a page in Wikipedia. But What if the Knol project is a wild success and their are thousands of expertly written pages? For every new page competing on a term an old page must drop. Google has claimed “Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge.”

If I were a website and my name was Wikipedia or Squidoo I would be shaking in my little digital boots. Knol has the potential to be a huge disruptor to the existing players in this space and a great source of income for all you writers out there.

It’s in private beta now, but will be coming to the masses shortly. I’ll keep you posted.

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