Besides creating off line promotional materials or online (like Squidoo lenses), wikis are great but not very talked about means to extend your online presence. With this article, I hope to bring to the forefront a superb, and often free tool, you can take advantage of and promote your company, products or services you might have.

So what’s a wiki anyway?

The wiki inventor, Ward Cunningham said:

The Wiki concept has become a study in what’s now called ‘Social Software’. With a Wiki I write the seed of an idea and I come back in a week to see how the idea has grown.” www.wikiwikiweb.com

Wikis are web pages that allow people to collect and edit their knowledge about a particular subject – all in one place. All this material put together resulted in an online encyclopedia database founded on its contributor’s additions.

Resources:

• www.wikipedia.org
• www.mygads.com
• www.commoncraft.com
• www.pbwiki.com
• www.wetpaint.com
• www.wikispaces.com
• www.wikihow.com

Easy Steps to Establish Your Wiki Presence
1. Visit and open accounts on wiki sites listed above
Go to Wikipedia.org and search for things you are passionate about. Write new wikis if you don’t find any in your area of interest; edit the ones you find if you believe they are not accurate.

2. Create a company wiki
Develop an internal company wiki. Go to one of the providers, open an account and start creating a wiki about your company. Who else would know your own company better than yourself?
Encourage your employees to participate and edit existing pages or create new ones. You will be surprised how fast your content and loyalty will grow within your network. Not to mention your search engine page rank.

Conclusion:
 Wikis are great venues to engage the crowd and have them contribute their knowledge to this ever expanding reservoir of information. Besides from being fun and easy to use, wikis can help tyou with research and even self promotion so don’t be a stranger to wikis.

 Claudiu Geanta is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Design by Satori Inc. & Satori CG Inc.. He helps businesses promote their presence on and off line. He is also an accomplished web designer, book writer and photographer. You can follow him on Twitter.
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