How To: Evolve Your Blog with a Wiki

In the past few weeks, I have listed ways that you can enhance your blog and build a more solid community around it. Adding a job board, forum, and a Twitter shoutbox can always help you provide more value to your readers and get them more engaged. Of course, you don’t want to do any of these things without having a plan. But if you have a strategy, those moves can help you take your blog to the next level. Adding a Wiki to your blog is yet another way you can enhance your blog, get more traffic to it, and bring more visitors on board.

Anyone who has been online for the past few years has used or heard of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an open community that has become a major source of information for a lot of people. Why do people love Wikipedia? Because it’s by the community for the community. And let’s not forget that it’s the most comprehensive encyclopedia around. While Wikipedia is great, niche wikis are very popular as well. People don’t like searching for information more than they have to. So having a wiki about your niche can not only help your visitors get all the information they need faster, it could help you get more traffic from the search engines as well (needless to say, search engines love search engines).

When creating your Wiki, you want yours to be broad enough to cover your niche. At the same time, you don’t want to create a copycat of Wikipedia. It’s already there, so duplicating that effort is not only impossible but doesn’t add too much value. While Wikipedia is pretty comprehensive, it doesn’t cover everything. In fact, in almost any niche, you can find areas to improve upon what Wikipedia has to offer. That’s the best way to go, especially if you plan to retain your visitors for a longer period of time.

Creating a wiki is not that difficult these days. There are plenty of open source wiki solutions that you can install on your server, like you would Wordpress and Drupal. If you have no idea where to start, here are 3 wiki solutions you can use to create your own wiki site:

• MediaWiki: the wiki script I am currently using on many of my websites. It’s very easy to get a handle on, and it works as you would expect it to. Best of all, you can use it no matter how comprehensive you plan your wiki to be. It’s the best solution if you are creating a website for a broad niche.
• WikkaWiki: it’s a lightweight wiki solution designed for those who put more emphasis on performance, speed, and security of their website.
• DokuWiki: it’s a cool script that lets you create online documentation for your product or service. So if you have a product that is out there, DocuWiki lets you create a help site for your users to help them get the most out of your product. You can also use this wiki solution to share documents and information across your business.

Wikis are not perfect. Security is always going to be an issue when you are running a website that has multiple authors.  You can always try to block users and keep spammers out, but if Wordpress is susceptible to hack attacks, so are wikis. So make sure you backup your database and keep an eye out on malicious updates to your wiki. Wikis do take time to develop and are harder to maintain, but if you can handle that, adding a wiki to your blog is a great way to take it to the next level.