Squidoo Tips: Affiliate Marketing Strategy

To quote Stephen King, if your lens is just a bunch of affiliate links and boring text, you're gonna be "busier than a one-legged man in an a$$-kicking contest" trying to promote it -- because none of your strategies will work!

• What is "niche content?"

For our purposes, niche content is text (or images, or other media... but here I'm talking about written words) that addresses a very specific area of interest. The reason you want a niche for your content is because the more specific your topic is, the more likely it is that people searching for it will actually find your page.

Don't go running amok in a fit of social networking, SEO optimization, and advanced affiliate marketing tricks if you know that your lens is weak on content.

The best way to give your lens high-quality, relevant content that is both readable and easy for search engines to find is to write it yourself. But if this seems too intimidating a task at the moment, try searching Creative Commons for articles that you can legally use on your own page. Don't forget to check to see what the author's requirements are (i.e. whether he or she asks to be credited with an author byline and/or link) and be sure to follow them.

• If it has an overly broad focus, it's not niche content.

If you write a Squidoo page on, say, "the best technology products" and then post every affiliate link to tech stuff that you can possibly generate, that's not niche content. It's just a big waste of your links.

Why is it a waste? Because there are already many, many websites that review products in the general category of "technology," and they all have way more content than you could create in a lifetime. Those websites will get all of the traffic from people searching for technology reviews, and you will get none. This rule applies to most overly broad topics that Squidoo publishers mistakenly use to try to generate commissions from affiliate links.


• If it is specific and targeted but there are already multiple pages by other Squids covering the exact same topic, it's probably not niche content.

Here, I'm referring to Squidoo pages designed for the sole purpose of promoting a single product or product line. They tend to feature a small number of affiliate links that fit in well with the page's main topic. If this is your affiliate link promotion strategy, you may have been following the advice of marketing experts who say it's best to limit the number of products you promote on a single web page.

The problem is, many of these pages read like clones of each other, and they continue to spit out new clones at alarming rates. This phenomenon is not only creepy ("we are LensBorg"), it's also rapidly approaching uselessness from an affiliate marketing perspective.


• However:

If you include lots of original, well-written text combined with a fresh, creative layout and striking graphics, your page could bury all those LensBorg clones in the dust. Time to crush some clones!

Are you freaking out yet? Relax! I'm not saying you can't have Squidoo pages that aren't chock full of amazing, Nobel-prize-worthy content. Go ahead and make those pages; just don't expect them to be money-makers. Don't bother posting affiliate links on them. Use your weaker pages primarily as traffic boosters for your strongest web creations: the blogs, pages and sites where you've got the most original, useful, and engaging material.

Photo: Greg Biche

Smart affiliate publishers have their own domain names. All the cool kids are doing it.

Getting a domain for your web content will boost your search engine ranking, as well as help people who've already been to your page remember where it is and come back.

The best domain names are composed of the following: one word, or up to three words combined without hyphens between them, followed by .com. One or two words is better than three, but I have found that most of the one- or two-word domains I've been interested in were already taken.

This might not be the case for your niche topic, so don't assume the domain of your dreams is taken; check DomainBots to see if it's available. You can also use DomainBots to get suggestions for a domain name based on keywords you type in.

I recommend registering a .com domain name, because that's the first extension most people think of when they look for a website by typing a url directly into their browser or into Google.

• Don't fall into the trap of registering a .info domain just because it's cheap.

Your site will not rank as well in searches with a .info domain because this extension has often been used by people who buy domains in bulk in order to spam (flood) the search engines.

Once you've settled on the domain name you want, you have lots of choices about where to buy it. Some people buy domains without also purchasing web hosting, but in my opinion this is a waste of money. You want a real web presence, not just a name that gets forwarded to someone else's site.

Yes, you can benefit from domain forwarding, but the best way to use it is if you already have a live website with its own domain and you want to buy up all the other extensions for your domain so that yoursite.com won't be competing with, say, yoursite.net or yoursite.us for traffic.

If you don't have already have your own site, or even if you have a blog hosted somewhere else, it's worth getting at least a bare-bones hosting package to go along with your domain name. At Hostgator, you can get your domain name for free when you purchase their user-friendly, multi-featured basic web hosting for $4.95 a month.

If you've already been generating tons of awesome niche content on your blog, you can have Hostgator transfer the blog to your own domain for free (other hosts charge for this service).

Now it's time to put all those affiliate IDs, social networking links, and promotion tricks to use where they really belong: on your own site. This is what the peacock wants you to do, or else he will attack... and you don't want that.

• Make sure your site is optimized for search engines.
Search engine optimization is a huge topic, and I'm not going to try to tackle it here. If you need information about SEO techniques, Greekgeek's Squidoo Tips: Search Engine Optimization lens is an excellent resource.


• Use your strongest Squidoo creation (remember, the page with all that awesome niche content?) and your profile bio to link to your website.
  


• If your site includes a blog (and it should), use the RSS feed module to feed the blog into your published content on Squidoo.
  


• Use opt-in forms on your Squidoo pages (yes, they are available) to get people to sign up for your site's newsletter.
  


• Use regular Squidcasts to let your fans know about updates to your content, and about the latest awesome thing you've got going on at your website.
  


• You can subscribe to receive casts from any Squidoo page. On Bloglines, simply enter the URL of the page into the feed finder.
I subscribe to all of my own published content on Squidoo, and to a handful of my favorites from other lensmasters.

Get the idea? I hope this has been helpful, and I wish you the best of luck in your work as an affiliate publisher.