Since I have not done much with Squidoo as a marketing tool myself, I asked my friend Jackie to step in and share some Squidoo tips with us... Enjoy! ~Lynn
Jackie Lee is a work at home mom who breaks internet marketing strategies into simple steps so people can overcome overwhelm and take action to move their business to a new level.
3 Simple Ways to Use Squidoo in Your Internet Marketing Strategy
While it can be easy to dismiss Squidoo as an integral part of your promotion strategies, I would caution you to give it a second thought. It is a very flexible and powerful site, and well worth the minimal time it will take to add it to your list of promotion possibilities. There are many ways you can use Squidoo in your promotion strategies, but let's take a look at three...
1. Affiliate marketing
If you are new to the game of affiliate marketing, a little short on money but long on time, Squidoo is a fantastic place to start. Find a product you'd like to promote, do a little keyword research and get started. You can put a new lens up in less than an hour with the easy to use wizard.
Use your basic on page SEO techniques to optimize your page and then build some links to it. You may be surprised how quickly it will rank in the search engines, and how quickly and easily you can drive traffic and make sales. Once ranked these lenses can continue to bring you traffic and make sales for months, even years to come.
2. Link Building
If you already have a website or blog, Squidoo is a fantastic way to build backlinks from an authority site. Find a keyword that is more informational than promotional and create some content. Within your content create a link back to your blog or website using your targeted keyword. This is a great way to do deep linking and create links to your internal pages.
You can also use the RSS module from within Squidoo. This will show people the last 5 posts from your blog and allow them to click through. While they will not count as links they will help drive traffic back to your site.
3. Creating Authority
It's always nice to take up the whole first page of Google with your stuff! Squidoo is a fantastic way to do this. Create lenses on topics that will help you build authority in your niche. Here's a few ideas to help build authority using Squidoo:
- Use it for an FAQ area for your site, answer questions that people ask you frequently.
- Use it to give great content for a specific topic in your niche. The more valuable content you can provide the more you will be seen as an authority in your niche.
- Use it for a services page or an about page
- Use it to tell your story and connect with your readers
Squidoo is great for getting ranked, but it is also a very active community. Not only can you get traffic and build authority using Squidoo in combination with Google, but also from the Squidoo community itself.
If you've never built a Squidoo lens I encourage you to give it a try. You can follow my step by step how to squidoo tutorials to get started.
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Thank you, Jackie!
Have comments or questions about marketing on Squidoo?
Leave a comment below 😉
About Lynn Terry
At one time Squidoo was a great place to build backlinks. Now they are so hard to deal with. They eliminated half of my lenses with no explanation. They were not spam pages. Just my opinion.
I'm so sorry to hear that you lost a lot of your lens, but I don't know how you couldn't have known about the clean-up process with the new rulings. They sent emails, SquidU talked about it, it was all over Twitter and Facebook. Everyone was warned months in advance to clean it up or loose it. I had to have almost every single lens in my 5 different accounts looked at manually, and happily I only lost a few.(1 was sadly removed under advisement; the other 2, I removed myself for being crap, IMHO) I personally think it is much easier to deal with now that so many sites of little value (not saying your lens were)are gone. It helps to clean out every now and then, again IMHO.
Thanks Jackie for these great tips! My experience with Squidoo is very limited as I only have one lense created yet. The links back to my website from the lense did push a specific page of my e-commerce site into a #1 position in Google for the keyword phrase I was trying to rank for, which is also the title of the lense. It does not keep position #1 consistently, but always shows up in the first 10 positions. So I agree with you 100%, Squidoo is a great promotional tool and creates backlinks that helps in ranking. Now, I have to rinse and repeat :-)Will check out your tutorials. Have a Happy, Safe & Healthy 2010.
I think Squidoo has been too cautious with the increasing number of. They actually banned some people who do extensive promotion which they use for internet marketing. So what techniques could you suggest to avoid this to happen?
Thanks for the tips Jackie. It's a strategy I've wanted to try but never focused on it. Since I already write content for my web sites is it still an effective strategy to use the same content for squidoo? I don't particularly want to spend time rewriting content.
A few months back Squidoo did make some changes to their policies. They did it because while you're lenses may not have been spammy there were a lot of spammy lenses on some topics, so they made a general rule and pulled the plug on some general topics. It was upsetting for many marketers who go for the "big" markets. However, since I mostly promote physical products with Squidoo I find it still works like a champ. You might want to pick something physical that is laterally related to your main topic, and do a lens on that. You could then link back to your site from that lens, or put the RSS feed in to drive traffic.
It may take a little imagination power to find a way to fit your lens in the rules, but it still works well when you can.
You're right, there are so many marketers that was greatly affected by these new policies. All we must remember now is that we really need to focus on providing a high quality content for our Squidoo lenses to avoid this problem. At least in this way, we could help build a better internet community.
Great post, Jackie! =) I also enjoyed your "Squidoo Christmas Cash" tutorials - and I even made a little Christmas cash! LOL Thanks!!
Great post, Jackie, with your usual good advice about marketing with Squidoo. I think your third point is way too often overlooked by online business owners and, for that matter, B&M business owners. Squidoo is a great authority-building site.
I just want to say that I am loving reading your articles! There is so much I don't know about the technical side of internet marketing. What a uber-cool community!
Squidoo worked really well for me over Christmas, using physical products as the focus of each lens, then tying it in with a 'gift list' blog. My blog got huge traffic from it.
The changes to Squidoo policy a few months back was a blessing in disguise. Yes, I "lost" a few lenses on suddenly forbidden topics (weight loss) but I am pleased to see that Squidoo is trying to avoid having low quality lenses. If the only way they can do that is by avoiding a few topics, then so be it.
By keeping Squidoo strong it benefits us all. I WANT my back links coming from a site that Google respects.
And hey, nice to see you over here, Jackie! It was through you that I discovered Lynn's excellent blog.
I never had much luck with Squidoo, but after reading this article, I am going to implement some of the strategies from here.
I have used Squidoo to build links for a couple of my blogs. I find it works really well and is actually a really good traffic source as well!
Another great article from Jackie. I have been following your step by step guides on your site on building lenses with Squidoo and they are truly a great way to rake in extra cash. Great way to make money and build backlinks for authority sites as well.
Jackie, Great to see you here! Lynn has been one of my heroes for years and it is nice to see another woman than I view highly on her blog! Good job, lady!
Hi Jackie, today I have finished my first blog ever. Although it is short one (about 250 words) I feel very excited about it. I also started building my first website ever thru lunarpages(thanks for recommending this). I have struggled doing all this, but slowly I am getting close to finish. I created a blog with google blogger which I am trying to copy to my site, I follow all the instructions, but still cannot get it done. Also how do I link my Squidoo lens to my site. Today I signed up with Jeff Herring for article writings. Please send response to my email. thanks
Great article Jackie! I didn't think about linking to my blogs from squidoo!
Me too. I don't understand the template of squidoo. THough it is one of the famous marketing or famous networking/bookmarking tool today....
I signed up for Squidoo in 2008, mostly just for kicks (I was already making a full-time income from my sites). I've made a couple hundred dollars through them (I made 10 or 15 lenses the first month and then mostly forgot about Squidoo), but I do still get traffic to my sites from lenses I made to promote that niche (which happened to link to my sites :). Most of my lenses don't have any pagerank or anything, but the amount of traffic they've sent have probably made the experiment worthwhile.
Squidoos page rank updated recently(7-8). Its very easy to build link through squidoo, but I dont think the link carry enough weight until you promote those lenses. Otherway hubpages is good if you can manage to get a dofollow link.
Here is my squidoo profile http://www.squidoo.com/lensmasters/sudeep13582
Hi Jackie
Thanks for reminding me about using Squidoo as a marketing tool. I was so busy finding and posting content to my site that I really forgot about it. I used Squidoo two years ago when I first dabbled in affiliate marketing. Sadly I lost two of my lenses but it was a good learning curve for where I am today in my online ventures.
Very insightful post. Thanks for sharing this post with us. I have already bookmarked this post and will come back for re-read
Thanks for the great post Jackie! I have a few lenses, but they're dusty and could be revisited. Thanks for the reminder 🙂
I do enjoy using Squidoo and I found it an easy way to introduce my husband into building pages and affiliate marketing. Lately though Squidoo seems a little clique-ish with certain people getting several angel blessings and boosts in lens rank. Sometimes when I'm working on my lenses I feel like I don't know the right people 😉 Maybe I'm just paranoid!
I have a little experience with Squidoo. This year it is on my TO Do List though.
Thanks for this article.
Dear Jackie, your article just force me to visit Squidoo, this may be the 2nd or 3rd time I am ready to visit Squidoo, because I love to build link to give my site more authority than other similar niche site. Thanks for your nice tip.
Is this really effective. I guess i need to try it my self to know the real effect.
Great tips Jackie. Its important to note that keeping your lenses updated can take this to a new level. This will give it a fresh look and bring in new traffic. Thanks
Love this article Jackie. I just finished creating a lens this afternoon and will definitely go back and use some of your tips to help improve it. Experimenting with Squidoo is one of the things I plan to do more of this year.
I've never used Squidoo before but this article has definitely give me food for thought.
Many thanks Jackie.
I have two lenses on Squidoo, which I just tried out to see how they would do. Although Squidoo gets a lot of love from Google, I think the same internet marketing principles still apply to really get your page noticed long-term.
Yes, I heard about Squidoo before 6 months and I created lens in Squidoo for my website but yet i have not got any benefits or traffic from this lens.
Thanks for the good tips Jackie! I started using Squidoo several weeks ago and I am building a series of lenses on different aspects of my topic (book marketing) and then cross-linking the lenses together. I've got three lenses so far and some pretty good placement on Google for the lenses. I like your suggestion of promoting affiliate products.
Dana
Squidoo is one of the best way to earn money online. Many webmasters already prove it. But, the big Squid did something to make their platform at high quality. They actually banned some areas to avoid any spam posting there.
usefull post! i haven't use squidoo yet, but i plan to do so to build backlinks to my website. i have bookmarked this page and i will come back after using squidoo.
I just want to say that I am loving reading your articles! All we must remember now is that we really need to focus on providing a high quality content for our Squidoo lenses to avoid this problem. At least in this way, we could help build a better internet community.
Thanks Jackie great tips. Still working on my keyword research but I will definitely be taking advantage of squidoo!