Be A Guide For About.com

I don’t know how many of you have heard about About.com. They were, in their own right, pioneers in customised web-content. I have followed their path since 1999 when I first started using the Internet and have seen them grow by leaps and bounds. It was hence not surprising to me when they became one of the few Internet companies who got acquired by a prominent media house The New York Times in 2005.

Around 29 million people log on to About.com every month. That is around a million a day. Quite impressive. In their own words: “According to Nielsen NetRatings, About.com is a top 10 Web property used by one out of every five people on the Internet.”

The strength of About.com is their experts in different fields who guide people by writing articles everyday or week on their specific topics. They have about 500 such guides working on an equal number of domains or sites or subjects that are a part of About.com. They are always on the lookout of more experts and they have listed details of their requirements on the link http://beaguide.about.com/. The link http://beaguide.about.com/topics.htm gives descriptions of each topic they need guides for. Move your mouse over the subject on the left, and on the right you will see a detailed description of requirement from that guide.

There are quite a few topics that are open for new guides. From the India perspective, topics like “Sikhism” and “India For Visitors” are available. There are other topics one could take, like Manga, Menopause, Journalism, Astrology, Bicycle etc. Among the few requirements they have, the most important is for one to be very passionate about the subject they want to be a guide of and to have a bit more than basic Internet and computer skills.

The earning potential for a good guide is substantial. Those who understand advertising on the Internet would realise this (whenever you search something in Google, chances are ripe that you will find an About.com page in the first 10 search results.) The best part is that this job can be done along with what you are currently doing (after a week or two of online training. To satiate the ego of a guide is also a photo of the guide that is posted and the global following one will register if one is really good. This can also be a door to something big for anyone who’s passionate about a subject.

Rajesh Jain, a visionary and one of the first successful Internet Entrepreneur with Indiaworld.com (and a poster boy of the dotcom boom back then along with the likes of Rakesh Mathur and Sabeer Bhatia) and who now runs one of the most popular blogs in India, Emergic, wrote the following about the site:

About.com is made up of 500 "Guides", people who are experts on a certain topic. In a way About.com was the precursor to topic-focused blogs. Only the guides are more renowned for writing how-to articles, rather than the analysis and commentary of the best blogs. About.com these days also has a lot of reviews and product comparisons, similar to a site like CNET.

In terms of stats, Scott told me that About's total revenue is growing slightly faster than their page views - so revenue grew 40% last year, compared to 30% increase in page views for the same period. On the 80% of total traffic from search engines, when you consider that About specializes in writing how-to guides for hundreds of topics - then 80% sounds reasonable. I myself often bump into About.com webpages when I need to find out how to do something. But 80% is still a huge amount and illustrates plainly the difference between About.com guides and bloggers (most of whom rely on incoming links and subscribers for their traffic). It also shows how well About has mastered the art of SEO!

I highly recommend this job, if you can spare the time and passion to do it.

QuoteOfThePost: Time goes, you say? Ah no! Alas, time stays, we go. - Henry Austin Dobson.