Use Your Writing Skills to Preserve Knowledge for Future Generations
By John Wood

This week we’re talking about additional benefits you should consider before picking a topic for your Money-Making Website.

We’ve seen examples of how a website can improve the lives of others, give you instant credibility, and help bring attention to a cause that’s close to your heart.

Today’s topic is a bit more unusual.

Let’s jump in …

“She doesn’t feel her life has meant much.”

So says AWAI member and Tennessee resident David Guthrie about his 81-year-old mother.

After discovering how his aging mother felt about her life, David decided to do something for her that will not only pass on her legacy to future generations, but show his mother “some appreciation for what she did for me and make her life have more meaning.”

David decided Nick Usborne’s How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites program would be the perfect vehicle to highlight and preserve his mother’s love and knowledge of her favorite subject: sushi.

David remembers vividly how his mother, who worked in restaurants throughout her life, would always go up to chefs in fancy Japanese restaurants and try (often successfully) to pry their secrets about how they prepared their sushi.

After seven months of preparation, David’s All About Sushi Guide website went online last December. His site features his mother’s story, picture, sushi recipes and overall sushi expertise.

In under a year, his site went from barely a trickle of visitors per day to 26,000 unique visitors a month.

Because David’s mom doesn’t own a computer and knows very little about the Internet, she doesn’t have a full understanding of what this means. David says it would “blow her mind” to know that last month people viewed her sushi rice recipe over 6,000 times.

“My mother recently said to me that ‘Nobody cares about what an 80-year-old Japanese woman who lived through the atomic bomb and loves sushi thinks.’ I always tell her she’s wrong. People do care,” he says.

Money-Making Website Benefit #4: It’s a way for you to preserve information for future generations that may otherwise have been lost forever.

While this is admittedly not one of the most popular reasons for starting a Money-Making Website, it certainly hits home with me. My late grandmother was known as the local historian of the small town both she and I grew up in. One of her goals (which she accomplished) was to write a pictorial history of her town. I was lucky enough to help her edit her book.

That was before the Internet. So, while the pictures and memories are preserved in the thousand or so copies scattered in the bookcases around town, had the book been written today, I would also have built a website for her. And her information would be available to anyone and everyone who wanted to learn about local history – and stand as a fitting legacy to my grandmother’s devotion to the town she loved.

Do you know someone – perhaps your father, mother, grandparent, aunt, uncle or family friend – who possesses knowledge or a unique point of view that deserves to be preserved? Please feel free to share your stories and ideas for websites here.

If you’re someone who wants ultimate control over what you do each day, be sure to tune in tomorrow.