Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

Let's talk a little about Wikis today, niche publishing and going local.

We've talked a lot about local marketing and promotion at The Alpha Marketer, today let's get into the locality as a market.

John Gartner at Marketingshift.com says:

"Wikis -- those democratically created encyclopedias -- are a perfect match for niche publishers to aggregate expertise in a given universe while generating advertising revenue. And local wikis will be the next big thing.

"Now that many of the top players are in the Wiki biz (per Marketwatch), the collaborative tool will grow in popularity both as a corporate research tool, and as a specialty search engine."

The next foray into wikis will probably be by locality and region. Most people could only dream of having a site with local people contributing to all aspects of the area and cities. People that really love their cities would love to rave and write about their favorite local spots and entertainment, along with numerous practical and insider information plugs.

There aren't very many of these out there yet. Most of this has been done by the blogging world as they take a city and blog various aspects of its life. Wikis would take this a huge step further and incorporate hundreds of people into the mix.

This should have a built in monetization model as the ads can be targeted to those like-minded people who contribute, interact and read specific aspects of the wiki. It should result in increased click through rates. Of course the down side is that the wiki community could turn on the hand that feeds them if the advertisers do it wrong, as they will want to defend the integrity of their content. 

Those that offer easy to use wiki building tools should do well in this area also.