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MKN General Information

Site Name: My Knowledge Network (MKN)
Domain / URL : http://MyKnowNet.com or http:// MyKnowNet.net
Site Description Phrase: A World of Knowledge at Your Fingertips

What?
There are hundreds of knowledge sites out there. Some are quite specific, others more general. Some are "how to" sites, others are more general information. Nearly all of them lack any kind of cohesiveness. You probably happen upon them through a Google or Yahoo! search, which takes you to a specific page that may or may not have the information you were looking for.

Some of these sites are large or even huge. eHow, Associated Content, Helium and many others. Finding information on these sites is not always easy, straightforward or even practical. Titles seem to be written according to the whim of the writer in many cases. Or, especially on Helium, a lot of blogs and other sites, you find a personal experience that attempts to address the issue presented with the title.

Another issue that just makes life miserable is after a search, you see a promising result and click on it, only to find out you've been led to another search engine or a parked domain loaded with advertising and no useful content. Uhg!

The purpose and idea of MKN is a site where users go to get information, and find the information they were looking for, all in one place. If you want travel information on Dubai in the Middle East, its all there. Hotels, sights, airport, food, people, local information, places to go, places to not go. Everything.


Cohesive and Complete Knowledge

On other sites, you might be able to find articles that pertain to what you were looking for. Or not. That is the big problem today for users looking for information, sometimes you have to visit far too many sites to get everything you are looking for.

Look at the advertisements on TV for bing.com with the babbling bubbleheads who found everything but what they were looking for on a search engine. They went looking for one thing and got distracted and found out everything but what they started out looking for.

Consider the web searcher who is looking for information on remodeling his bathroom. Does he really want to go to one site to figure out how to install his new bathtub. And yet another to figure out how to do it if his house sits on a slab rather than over a crawlspace or a basement. Or what if it is an upstairs bathroom? All the issues, all the answers, all the solutions, trouble you'll run into and what to do about it, all in one place - My Knowledge Network.

My Knowledge Network - Not Me, as in Mike Williams personally because I came up with this idea, but your mother and your kids and your friends and the rest of the world. This is their network of knowledge. I want people to say, "I'll just go to my knowledge network and get the information." And say so knowing they can probably get it there, and if they can't, let us know and we'll see if we can't get the information because, if they need it, so does someone else.


When people say, "my knowledge network", they are saying it because it is indeed their personal knowledge network.


Targeting Knowledge
Many writers have personal areas of expertise. Some are professionals, others are not. I owned a remodeling and handyman business that started as an offshoot of investing in property. So I know a lot about real estate, small business from a trades perspective, and remodeling or home improvement. Since growing heirloom tomatoes is a passionate hobby of mine, I also know a lot about that. Computer and Electrical Engineering are also subjects I am an expert on, since that is what I went to college for and the fields I worked in for almost 20 years.

I can write and write well on those subjects. But don't ask me to write about manufacturing widgets, getting the best travel deals or where to go in Nova Scotia, Scottland or Germany. I haven't a clue and franky, I don't much care about those things. You sure wouldn't want me writing on those subjects. But my step by step instructions on laying ceramic tile in a bathroom will take you, step by step, to a perfect floor. Not only that, but no matter how much or how little you want to do in that bathroom, you'll know where to start and how to proceed from my articles on it.

My Knowledge Network will be all about that. Good writers, writing about subjects they love and care about, and know a lot about, and are willing to learn more about.


Community Approach
We're all going to be in this together and to do that, we all need to be on the same page. I want to make some money, and I want you to make some money. Frankly, the amount I get paid for my articles on some sites is ridiculous. And there are reasons why that is.

 - The site owners take the grand share of the revenue and pay only pennies on every dollar that an article earns.
 - Articles compete with each other for advertising revenue.
 - Writers compete with each other for advertising revenue.
 - There is so much overhead, not much is left to distribute.

These are just a few reasons. Generally speaking, for most topics, writers should make about $25.00 for a well written article. Put on a site with good traffic and good keywords, that same article might earn $120 or more in the first year. A well written evergreen article might make that for several years. Some articles will be seasonal, others not.

Lets look at this from a community perspective. If Joe writes fifty articles and collectively they earn $50.00 a month, then Joe should take home a significant portion of that $50.00. There are costs involved with running a site like this and the bigger it gets, the more it is going to cost. Space and bandwidth cost money.

Assume that MKN has 50 writers, each with 50 articles and each writers articles earn $50.00 a month. The site has a gross income of $2500.00 a month. The cost of site hosting and so forth might be $50.00 a month. Say we spend another 150.00 on advertising. Put another $300 in the kitty to pay for anything else, like distributing the money among writers, site improvements and the like, and you have $2000 left over to split evenly among the 50 writers or about $40.00 each.

This is a simplistic example of how it will work. In reality, there are going to be more writers and they will not all contribute the same, nor make the same amount of money.

These are example numbers only - I'm not making promises or implying this is how much - or how little - any writers articles will earn.

To start with, those here at the beginning are going to take a share of the total. Those that take on roles like editors and content producers are going to take a share of the money articles in their areas produce. It is only fair. If "My Editor" edits 100 articles and those make $50, then
"My Editor" should get a portion of that. If "My Producer" comes up with an article series, creates the titles and sets up a writer for them, then "My Producer" should get a portion of the revenue as well.

Community
In association with MyKnowNet .com and .net. will be MyKnowNet .ORG. This nonprofit will be our community. A forum, a blog and a few other things. A place where we can talk comfortably, get a sense of community and support each other. Not just with writing but with whatever we want to make it.

Beyond Articles
Online News. Sometime in the next six months, it is hoped to start a newspaper with various topics from politics to sports. A place for the grade school basketball team to have news articles about them. High school sports. Pee Wee sports. Professional sports, college sports. Local news items. State and national news and state and national news from a local perspective. The same with world news. I see an opportunity to possibly partner with universites and get upcoming journalists to write news articles for the online paper.

eBooks. A place for writers to publish books they have written. The site will advertise the ebooks and hopefully the writers make it big.

Blogs. Targeted blogs on specific topics. The 2012 Presidential Election. The economy. Anything with a big draw. And some things with less of a draw. Currently, Wordpress will be the software package, but like everything, else we're open to suggestions right now.

Magazines. I've always wanted to run an outdoor magazine geared towards experiences people have had in the outdoors. I plan to start this once I get everything else going. I'd love to have people put their own ideas in, take the bull by the horns and get it going. Heck, if it makes money, then lets do it. Start one these, make it successful and you'll reap the rewards.

Can you think of something that belongs? Tell us and we'll consider it. More than likely, if it looks like it can work, we'll put you in charge of it or find someone who can run it and get it started.

Think Big
My father used to tell me, if you want to get to the moon, shoot for the stars.

Right now, I'm shooting for the farthest galaxy.

The goal is to have 5000 articles by the end of 2010. Ten times that many by the end of 2011. And ten times more - that's half a million articles - by the end of 2012.

Making Money
On one site I write at, I often see people asking, "Can I make a living at this?"

The answer is, it depends. How well do you write? What do you write? How much can you write? One thing for sure, most of those people won't make a living on that particular site. Could they make a living on MKN? I think there is a good chance at it, provided the answers to the questions are right: "Very well, AP and Magazine style writing." "Good topics that many people want to know about." "Lots of articles a week."

I will only make one guarantee at this time. Each writer will make at least 50 percent of the revenue from his or her articles, after paying their share of the expenses. Getting started, the expenses are low and I intend to motivate people to write here by bearing the expenses until the site has to expand beyond its current cost.