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.

Popularity: 24% [?]

Bookmark This Post:

When it comes to bum marketing, our number 1 objective is to get our articles, lens, or hubpages to the first page of Google. However, before our articles can get onto first page of Google, they must first get indexed. In today’s blog post, let us discuss some of the ways to get your articles and lens indexed within the next 24 hours:

1. Submit to EzineArticles.com. If you are using articles for bum marketing, you must submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. EZA now offers premium membership which you can get your articles approved within a day, provided they adhere to the editorial guideline. Google spiderbot usually visit EZA several times in a day… so your articles can get indexed pretty fast.

2. Submit to social book marking sites. Social book marking sites like Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us. are places that you must book mark your articles or lens. Similarly, spiders visit these sites several times a day which makes indexing fast.

3. Get a backlink from a high PR site. If you own a high PR site, you can place a link pointing back to your new article or lens. High PR site usually attract spider and is a great place to make googlebot stumble upon your articles.

4. Pinging. You can use free pinging service tools like iPings.com to ping your articles or lens.

5. Blog it. If you own a blog, you can include the link of your articles or lens in your blog post. Blog has RSS feeds and auto-pinging services, which will alert Google to follow the link and discover your new article and lens.

To get indexed by Google, you do not need to submit your URL to Google itself. It is best to get “stumble upon” by their spiders which will usually result in faster indexing. If you are using articles and Squidoo for bum marketing, you will already have an advantage because Squidoo.com and EzineArticles.com are both authority sites where robots will visit several times a day. You just need to get your articles approved by them and indexing shall come naturally fast.

Popularity: 37% [?]

Bookmark This Post:

Squidoo is a very useful channel to drive traffic to your website. On Squidoo, you can create lens with content of any topic that you wish to share with others. Within your lens, you can insert URL links, either pointing them to your own websites or directly to the affiliate product merchant’s sales page. Because of Squidoo’s popularity on search engines, you can use it to drive organic search engine traffic to your website by having unique content and link popularity.

Sometimes, people might think that by having unique content in your Squidoo lens, it can get rank easily for multiple long-tail keywords, driving traffic to their websites. Yes, I am not saying this is not true, but for it to happen, it may take you some time. To rank faster for multiple long-tail keywords, what you need to do is to increase the link popularity of your Squidoo lens by getting more back links to it.  Before I touch on the various ways to increase link popularity of your lens, let me explain a little further on why you need to ultimately get your Squidoo lens rank well for multiple long-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords are search phrases that people type in search engines that you can’t possibly predict. For example, if your website is selling acne products, one of your main key phrase could be “acne treatment”. However, if your Squidoo lens is optimized for long-tail keyword, your lens will appear high on search engines when people are searching key phrases like “How to get rid of acne fast”, “acne free in 3 days”, “why do I get acne and how can i get rid of it”, etc. As you can see, these phrases are extremely long-tail and the searchers may be really desperate for acne cure which will most probably result in affiliate sales for you. Hope that from this short illustration, you can see the importance of ranking multiple long tail keywords on search engines.

To get your lens optimized for long-tail keywords, there are basically 2 very important factors that you need to take note of: 1) Unique content with the right keyword theme 2) Link popularity.

What I mean by unique content with the right keyword theme is to base your content around a theme that you wish to target. Let’s take the acne industry as an example. In the acne industry, after I did a quick research, I can identify 2 keyword theme. The first is to get rid of acne or acne treatment, and the other theme is about getting rid of old acne scars. Although both of these themes are about acne, but you can see that the need of the people searching for these 2 solutions are completely different.

To get your lens rank faster for multiple long tail keywords, you may want to consider boosting its link popularity. The gerenal rule of thumb for increasing link popularity is to get back links. For your Squidoo lens, there are a few ways that you can do it. Personally, I prefer using EzineArticles.com to link back to Squidoo. This means that I will write articles and submit to EzineArticles.com and point my articles to my Squidoo lens. These will help boost the Lens Rank of my lens and thus bringing more traffic to my website. I also make use of various social networking and book marketing platforms to boost my lens popularity. You can book mark your lens at Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc or include links back to your lens on your various social networking profile like Facebook and MySpace. You can also ping your site by using pinging services from Pingomatic and Pingoat.

Once you see that you have succesfully built a long-tail squidoo lens, you can duplicate your marketing process and create more Squidoo lens for the niche that you are in. This will greatly increase your chance of generating more affiliate revenue in that market.

Popularity: 53% [?]

Bookmark This Post: