Personally, I am a great fan of Squidoo. With Squidoo, you can create pages (they called it lens) and write about any topic that you are an expert in. There are many modules that you can attach on your lens: you can embed youTube video, top links, text module, twitter and many more. On your lens, there will be Google Adsense ads and you can choose whether to keep the royalties or donate them to charities.

The best thing I like about Squidoo is that Google loves it. If you create a solid lens with lots of unique content, you will actually get some nice long tail traffic to your lens.  Squidoo itself has a very high PageRank (PR) which already helps in Google rankings, and with solid unique content, you can capitalise on the long-tail effect of SEO. So, Squidoo is definitely a great tool for affiliate marketers to promote products on the Internet.

In this post, let me share with you how I use Squidoo to make money online… (I am not talking about the Google Adsense royalties here)

My strategy of using Squidoo to make money online is to drive lots of traffic to my lens and promote affiliate products from there. Squidoo allows you to place direct affiliate links on your lens, which makes life much easier for most affiliates… Although sometimes, I may choose to drive my Squidoo traffic to my squeeze pages, so that I can capture their name and email addresses first before promoting products to them.

So how do you drive traffic to Squidoo? Simple - Articles and SEO. The first strategy that I usually use is to write articles with content that is related to my lens and submit them to EzineArticles.com. However, do take note that EzineArticles.com is getting more competitive nowadays… so make sure that you have done your research for the market/industry that you wish to enter.

When your articles are ranked high on EzineArticles, you will get a lot of eyeballs for your articles. If your articles are well written, you will get a nice Click-Through-Rate (CTR) to your Squidoo lens. By driving the traffic from your articles to your Squidoo lens, you are giving your lens link juice (which helps in SEO), as well as pushing your lens to obtain a higher Lens Rank. The higher your Lens Rank in a category, the more traffic you will get from the Squidoo readers. In summary, by getting your articles to rank high in EzineArticle category, you are getting lots of traffic from EzineArticle readers. In return, these Ezinearticle readers will visit your Squidoo lens and help your lens to achieve higher Lens Ranks (where you will get another surge of traffic from Squidoo readers again…)

The second strategy to increase traffic to your lens is to write solid, keyword-targeted and unique content. Content is king when it comes to SEO. With Squidoo link popularity, you already have a first-hand advantage. What you need to do is to spend some time to do a thorough research on the topic that you intend to write, and create solid content for your lens. Include important keywords as the title for each module (e.g. Text module, Feedback module, etc). Once you have created your lens, publish it. However, things do not stop here. The next thing you should do is to get some back links for your lens. You can write articles and use ArticleMarketer’s submission service to get some decent back links. Also, do sumbit your lens to various social book marking sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc. Oh ya… remember to ping your lens too.

Once you have done an initial link building for your lens, observe the traffic for a while. Through Squidoo admin panel, you can actually get a bird-eye view of the traffic for every lens that you have created thus far. You may also want to update your lens regularly with new content, links, videos, etc.

Now, it comes to the most important matter of all… how do you monetize your Squidoo lens?  Other than Google Adsense, you can promote affiliate products on your lens. If your overall content is relevant to the products that you promote, YOU WILL GET SALES. Period. One very common strategy that a lot of affiliate marketers use is to create lens that talk about product reviews. The keywords that they target when they write product review lens are usually very targeted. This means 2 things: you will have lesser competition on Google (your lens will stand a higher chance to obtain high rankings for various keywords) and people who found your lens through these keywords are usually buyers. Why? Because these people who are searching for reviews of a particular product already have the intention of buying. They just need to get some unbiased reviews before they make the final purchase decision. So it is either they buy through your affiliate links or from other affiliate marketers.

I do encourage you to build your own squeeze page to collect names and email addresses before sending your lens readers to the merchant’s sales page. This is because if you are driving them directly to the sales page and they do not buy immediately, you lose them forever. With a squeeze page, at least you have their email addresses which you can use Follow-Up and regular Broadcast messages to get your direct and back-end sales.

Last but not least, to be successful at Squidoo marketing, keyword research is very important. You need to know what are the keywords you should target so that you can come up with keyword-optimized content.

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