Everyone knows that Wikipedia is a goldmine for quality traffic if you can get it but one significant problem is that many niches or long-tail topics on Wikipedia get, due to their nature, very little traffic. The traffic they do get may well be very high quality and the niche may be extremely profitable when you do get traffic but if the topic on Wikipedia just doesn’t get much attention then you’re out of luck. However there is a very simple solution to this problem which I am going to call Wiki Funnels (you heard it here first! (hopefully)). It should be noted that this trick applies to any wiki, not just Wikipedia itself.
What is a Wiki Funnel?
So what is a wiki funnel and how do you go about making one for your own topics? Well most people spend their time trying to get links FROM Wikipedia to their sites because it is such a powerful link to have and because it can drive great traffic, however when the subject page on Wikipedia just doesn’t get much traffic you have to find a way to build traffic to that page on Wikipedia. You could go about creating loads of external backlinks to the page in question, hoping that it will result in more traffic but that’s rather wasteful. A much better way is to build relevant links from other pages within Wikipedia to the page on Wikipedia which you are interested in.
A great thing about this is that you can do it without breaking any rules – you are actually contributing value to Wikipedia by improving navigation there, making it easier for visitors to find the information they are looking for.
How do you build a Wiki Funnel?
All you need to do is find other relevant wiki pages which don’t already link to your wiki page and which have traffic and then add a link. The key here is to make sure the pages you link from actually have traffic, otherwise you are just wasting your time. Fortunately it is easy to see how much traffic a wiki page has – just click the View history link at the top right of every page and there you will see another link for Page view statistics which will reveal all you need to know.
When you find pages with good traffic you can add the link in a couple of ways – one way is to edit the article text to add a sentence or paragraph in which you can include your page name (by “your page” I mean the wiki page you want to boost). Of course it must be relevant, you can’t just go adding paragraphs which don’t belong there at all! Another way which is even easier is to simply add the link in the See also section which is typically found towards the bottom of the page and consists of just a list of related wiki pages, so there’s nothing you need to write besides the name of the page.
So for example say your chosen subject was URL normalization, if you check the stats you will see it has about 4k views/month which is not too bad but it could better! So you go looking for relevant pages on Wikipedia which you could link to it, Canonical form looks good and it has over 9k views! So simply edit that page and add an internal link to the URL normalization page and that’s it – now some of that juicy traffic is going to find its way over to the page you are aiming to boost. Repeat this process several times so you build up a nice collection of traffic generating links. Imagine if you created a link on a high traffic page such as Search engine optimization which has nearly half a million views each month!
Finding Link Sources
Now you may be wondering how you go about finding relevant wiki pages where you can add the internal link, the answer is that you can either just google for them or use the wiki search feature. However there is an even easier way now and that is to use Keyword Predator which is what I did for the example above. Just enter the name of your page and it will return a list of relevant pages along with a Recent Interest indication which is based on those page view statistics. So if you find one which says interest is High or Very High then you just have to get a link in there! Even Medium is still a significant amount of traffic. If you can only find pages with Low interest (or Very Low but best not to bother with those) then you will just have to create more links from more pages like that.
Tiers of Joy
Which brings me to the funnel aspect – this method doesn’t have to be limited to a single tier of wiki links – every related page you link from can also be treated the same way. This means you can find pages relevant to that one and link to it from those, effectively creating a multi-tiered funnel of wiki links which all drive traffic back to your wiki page! This is particularly helpful when all the related pages you find for your page only have very low traffic – create multiple tiers so they all end up with more traffic to send to your page.
Now like many internet marketing tactics, this one could be abused but I don’t recommend trying that. For one thing you will spoil Wikipedia (or whatever wiki you work on) and for another, Wikipedia mods are usually on the ball and will ban you very soon, undoing all that hard work you put in. Do it properly and entirely within the rules, and your ultra long tail niche could quickly end up with a secret mine of traffic which can be tapped in various ways.
Of course how you get traffic from Wikipedia to your own site is another matter, it is not easy but it is possible and there are other ways to benefit from this even without a direct link to your site – just think outside the box!
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