Lens Promotion and Traffic Generating Strategies

By far the quickest, easiest, and most pain free way to promote your lens is through a service that Squidoo offers you. As soon as you publish your lens, you will have a prompt on your screen that will read, "Publish Successful! Nice update. Want to tell anyone about it?" From there you are provided with three options which are, Share the update on Facebook, Twitter your lens, and Send a Squidcast to your fans within Squidoo.

All of these are great options and if you are pressed for time we all can do these simple steps at a minimum. However, to optimize the effectiveness and clickthrough rates of your tweets and Facebook messages, I recommend personalizing the promotion and not using the generic automated message. I will explain in greater detail in the Twitter and Facebook modules.

Twitter is another great Web 2.0 site that is used for social networking and micro-blogging with short messages that allows users to send tweets(updates) which are displayed both on the user's profile page as well as other users who have signed up to receive them.

I have really become hooked on Twitter. In the past, I didn't like it and thought it was for people with too much time on their hands. Then one day all that changed when I found how fun it was to see what your friends are doing and more importantly, I realized how you can leverage it to your advantage.

The key to effectively using Twitter to promote your lens is to have friends. Here in Squidoo alone you can find hundreds of friends to add on Twitter.

The second thing to keep in mind is that you should not bug people with spam messages. Use Twitter to give updates on what you are doing in your day. Through in the occasional message about a particular lens that you are working on or that you just updated.

Here is my guide on using Twitter For Social Marketing.

I'm not crazy about the name Free Traffic System, but I am thrilled with the way it works. It is a system that you can join for free, or choose the paid Pro version that can drastically improve the amount of quality anchor text backlinks to your lenses or websites.

Using this system, you can pick up tons of backlinks from thousands of real blogs in their system. It is easy to use and it quickly builds you tons of backlinks.
After signing up (I use the free version), you create an article and paste in into their article rewriter. From there, you use a [spin] [/spin] command to give your article dozens or even hundreds of unique versions so that you will not be using duplicate content. You also get to choose your keywords that you can rotate as anchor text in links which will appear in the article, not in a resource box at the bottom like so many other article directories.

Then you get to choose which blogs you want your posts to appear in and the system takes care of the rest. The posts are made over the next few days and with this system you can build up to 60 links from each article/post that you use.
Using this system you can improve your SEO which can help to improve the organic traffic you receive from the search engines. On top of that, you can also pick up traffic directly from the blogs where your posts are being made.
I highly recommend this free system that really does work well. Since the system is free to use, why not give it a try today

I recently discovered Bukisa in the Squidu forums. It looks to be a promising way to promote your lenses and to build some extra links.

Bukisa allows you to post articles that you can put keyword text links in the body. This is great for both bringing in traffic, but also SEO help. The text links are unique as most article directories only allow links in the resource box.

They also allow you to get in on profit sharing for the amount of content that you add. Stop by today and get started on building links and gaining some traffic.

SheToldMe is a new website where you can Add a link/Publish a story to share with the world. You can use this to add links to your lenses with some keyword rich content.

Users can vote on the quality of added links and if you are lucky you can end up on the front page where you will be earning a lot of extra traffic.

A nice thing that SheToldMe does is adsense sharing. Every time someone clicks on an adsense ad on a page you submitted, SheToldMe will share the revenue with you.

Writing articles is a terrific way to promote your lens. The most powerful article submission site is Ezinearticles. Ezinearticles gets tons of traffic and has a high Google page rank. Some of my articles have been viewed 10's of thousands of times and have lead to hundreds of clickthroughs to my lenses.

To use this great site all that you have to do is write an article that is a minimum of 300 words, 500 is preferred. Be sure to do your keyword research for year lens and to add those to the text of the article to help search engines find it. At the bottom of the article is a resource box where you can put a link to your lens. I recommend using your main keywords as part of the link using basic html.
To learn more about how Ezinearticles work, visit their TOS.

If you are serious about building links, boosting your page rank, and gaining traffic to your lens, I highly recommend you join Content Crooner. It automatically sends your article to hundreds to thousands of editors for their blogs or websites.

With The Red Carpet Broadcast you can publish articles around the niche of your lenses to help to draw in traffic and backlinks.

To make this site even better, they will share 50% off all adsense revenue that your articles earn with you.

I love Zimbio. They describe themselves as "Thousands of online magazines at your fingertips". Zimbio is easy to use, has good PR, and helps to bring traffic to my lenses.

If you have a blog or are a lensmaster, you will love how Zimbio works for you.

To use Zimbio on autopilot, simply visit SquidUtils and log in. Click on your lensmaster RSS feeds and copy down your squidutils lensmaster RSS feed.
Then go to Zimbio and you can paste your feed after following the Submit Your Blog button.

I know that Zimbio can use your RSS feed, but I still like to submit every new lens that I make to the "Submit Your Blog" button. This way I can often pick which wikizine I want it to be featured in.

Captain Squid is the person who turned me on to Zimbio and you can learn more about how to use the site at his Captain Squid Blog.

Internal linking plays a big role in SEO and in increasing the traffic of your lenses. The best way to do this is to link your lenses to each other. This works especially well if you have groups of lenses that fit into a specific niche.

You can do this in several ways. The first is to lensroll. I only like to lensroll similar lenses together. Lensrolls will show up on the right side of the lens just above the favorite by. You can see it where it says jeffwend Recommends...

It's also a good idea to lensroll similar quality lenses. With any luck, other lensmasters will return the favor and you will soon be sharing traffic.

I also highly recommend adding text links within your lenses if that topic comes up. This is very common when you have lenses on a specific niche. Say you had a Twilight movie lens, but you also made lenses about the stars of the movie. When their names come up on the Twilight lens, make their names links.

The final way that I recommend to link to your lenses is with the Featured Lenses Module. This makes it easy to show the image, title, and first few lines from your intro module.

Using these practices will help to keep the traffic flowing in your lenses and they also will help with SEO.

Tumblr is a free blog service that can come in real handy for Squidoo lensmasters. If you are unfamiliar with Tumblr, it is similar to Blogger or Wordpress, although many users prefer the term Tumblogs.

As a lensmaster, Tumblr is a great way to build backlinks to your lenses. You can do this in several ways.

The first way is to make blog posts on your topics and to use links to your lenses. Be sure to add images and do your best to make a compelling post to keep readers coming back.

The second way, and in my opinion, my favorite way, is to add an RSS feed to your Tumblog. Tumblr allows you to add up to 5 RSS feeds to your Tumblog.

If you are not sure how to get your RSS feed for your lenses, go to squidutils and enter your lensmaster ID. From there you are taken to a page where you can select Lensmaster RSS Feeds. Then you can select which feed you want, and plug it right into your Tumblr blog. Tumblr gives you several options on how you want your RSS feed to appear, I always choose "links with descriptions." This allows your links to appear with a brief description so that there is some content added.

Once you have submited your RSS feed, whenever you make a change to a lens, or create a new lens, a new post will appear on your Tumblog. You can check out my Tumblog at jeff-on-squidoo.tumblr.com.

There are forums on nearly every topic imaginable from very broad to narrow scopes. If you can find an active forum on the theme of your lens than you may have found a gateway to more traffic.

A good place to get started is by visiting Big-Boards.com. This is a site that list thousands of forums categorized by topic and popularity. Search a forum or two that relate to the niche of your lens and register with them.

Under your profile, you get the option of adding an avatar and a signature. I highly recommend adding an avatar to put a name with the face. In your sig, put in a keyword or phrase of your lens and add the link using the html or BBCode.

Once you have finished these two steps, you are ready to start posting. The trick to posting is to actually participate in the forum. No spammy posts of any kind will be allowed by the forum's admins. Just watch what happens with spam in the Squidu forum if you don't believe me. Set a goal of making or participating in a post or two every day or every other day. With some time, you will find that other users of the forums are going to start following the link in your sig to your lens.

I have recently stumbled across an excellent article that is a must read if you are looking to pursue promoting your lens on forums. You can find it here at How to Use Forums To Drive Hundreds of Thousand of Readers to Your Blog.

Facebook is perhaps the most popular Web 2.0 website for social interactions. I originally joined to promote my websites and before I knew it I had friends from high school and college tracking me down. It has been great reconnecting with so many old friends.

I still do use it for my lens promotion. I do it through groups. The first way that I do it is by searching for groups on my lenses topic. For example, under another account I made a lens for the American Idol contestant, Jason Castro. I joined groups that are Jason Castro fan groups or AI groups and posted a link to my lens with a quality comment about how a new video was just added or something that added to the group. This brought in hundreds of viewers to my lens. Remember though, DO NOT SPAM FACEBOOK! I have seen other Squidoo users do this and they were chastised. Doing this will both make you, and the rest of us here at Squidoo look bad. The goal is to add to the group, not take away.

The second way I pick up traffic to my lenses is by creating my own group. For example I created a group on PH Balance with links to my lens on Alkaline Diet. This is another way to help to bring in targeted traffic to your lens.

I have created a group on Facebook called Squidoo Love where you can join and post links to promote your lenses. Stop by today to join and get started today.

If you use Squidoo for affiliate marketing or to generate traffic to your own online store, you might want to give Craigslist a try.

Dan Gluckman gives some good advice on how to properly use Craigslist for affiliate marketing. I have experimented with his advice and have actually had some success with conversions through Craigslist traffic.

To summarize his points:

1. Don't Spam. The users of Craigslist can recognize it and avoid it like the plague.

2. Be honest with your pitch. Place it in the right category and don't mislead your potential customers.