What Should I Write About on Yepic?

Ask yourself three questions before you start:

1. What are people searching for on the Internet? List your answers.
   
2. With your answers in hand, ask yourself "What info about these subjects would people actually pay for?"
3. Why should they trust me as an author?
   

What Are People Searching For?

Here are several tools that will help you take the pulse of the web, find out what people are searching for, about, etc.

Google's Zeitgeist will show you the most popular searches on Google.








Google Trends will show you who in the world is interested in a particular search term.

















Yahoo Answers is a terrific site where users ask questions and other users answer them for free. Generally speaking the information exchange is at a very conversational level and doesn't provide a very deep treatment of any given question, but you and get a very quick read on which subjects people are interested in at a given moment.











Google Answers is a site where users actually pay to have certain questions answered. Sometimes as much as $200! This is a great site to mine if you're looking for subjects people are interested in paying for.











I also recommend checking out Technorati's list of the web's most popular blogs. This can also give you a cross section of the information the most people are interested in.

What Info About These Subjects Would People Actually Pay For?

I've come up with 3 types that I think will actually fly on Yepic:

1. Assisted Search. The fact is that lots of people don't have time to dig around on the Internet for hours and hours looking for a piece of information, and this means that lots of the great content that's already out there never gets found by its intended audience. I recently read a quote, can't remember who wrote it, but it nailed the image of Yepic serving this particular need: Imagine Yepic acting as a giant horseshoe magnet waving over the entire web, pulling the proverbial needle out of a billion haystacks. Have you put the time and energy into finding all the best and most useful info on a particular subject? Pull your research together and sell it on Yepic!
2. Useful Information. How to, where to go, insider knowledge, etc. Many people head to the web to find this type of information and they're often overwhelmed by a deluge of information that's been put together by marketers and/or company's with something to sell. Why is the Zagat survey so successful? Because it's informed by the opinions of work-a-day folks who speak with authentic voices about their experiences at restaurants. I wrote an article about where to go to eat in Utah, for example. In putting together this type of information, use your own needs as a guide. What kind of questions do you have that you haven't been able to find good answers for yet? It's likely that many other people are having the same problem. Do the work, put together a good piece of information, and list it for sale on Yepic. Here's a tip: price your articles as free until you get a decent sized audience that's consuming your information.
3. Content generated by more than one person. This content could fit topically into either of the categories above. The defining characteristic is that the content is developed by more than one person, and therefore benefits from more than one perspective. Sites like Wikipedia have shown that this "network effect" tends to produce information that's much more interesting and has higher degrees of quality and value. The Yepic platform has a collaboration harness built right in so you can benefit from the contributions of other users.

Why Should They Trust Me As An Author?

If you don't already have one, you'll need to work to build your audience at Yepic. Don't be surprised if you write something and no one buys it at first. People don't know who you are and aren't certain whether or not what you've written is worth reading, much less buying. You need to develop trust with readers before they'll start to read your stuff consistently.

Here are several tips on how to develop your audience:

1. Write good stuff and write it well. This single factor is probably more important than any other.
   
2. Publish often. Several bloggers have found that their traffic goes up when they publish more often and it drops substantially when they publish less frequently. Think of it like watering a plant . . . do it daily and the plant will grow.
   
3. Use your Author Profile. Take the time to write a great piece about yourself and include some photos. Your author profile also lists all of your articles and lets users buy them right then and there.
   
4. Use your network. We're going to be building several features around the user network.
   
5. Make articles you like your "favorites" using the "favorite articles" feature. What goes around comes around, and other authors will promote you if you help promote them.
6. Continually keep your audience in mind. As time passes, you'll become known for certain types of information and people will start to view you as something of a credible expert. Remember this group and make sure your information is fulfilling their needs.
7. USE YOUR SYNOPSIS. Every article has a synopsis, and this is the place where you can articulate all the reasons why a user should read your article. This information is also crawled by search engines. The more descriptive you are with your synopsis, the better. A very descriptive synopsis will drive your article summary up in the search engine ratings.
8. Pick a great article name, one that's highly descriptive. This also get's searched by Google. And here's a tip if you're writing a "How To" article: come up with several alternative titles and see how they come up in Google with quotes around them. If you can find a reasonable one that doesn't turn up any Google results, use it! My hope is that Yepic will fill up with how-to content that users can search on with Google and find nearly everytime without a bunch of other clutter. Click here for an example of what I mean.
9. Write shorter articles. Don't put together the 10 page diatribe. Cut the 10 page diatribe up into 5 individual articles that reference each other. People appreciate brevity, especially on the web.
   
10. List your Yepic Author profile page in your email signature. www.yepic.com/[username]. People will click on it.
    
11. Advertise your articles. You can use Google Adsense and Adwords (remember, you don't pay unless someone clicks on your ad) to drive traffic to the URLs of your article summaries. You can also use free advertising services like BlogSnob.
    
12. Link other Yepic articles to your own. As soon as another author sees you linking, she's very likely to link you right back.
    
13. Actively comment on and participate in the development of other Yepic author's articles.
    
14. Pitch your articles via email to family, friends, co-workers, etc. Also post links to your article in discussion forums, blogs, etc.
    

Hope this post was helpful.

Interested in learning more? Here's another article I sell for $1 that dives deeper.