The Ultimate Squidoo Marketing Guide

Here's an excellent example on how powerful Squidoo.com is:

Head over to http://www.google.com

Type in "free psp game downloads"

What comes up?

The first two results are Squidoo lenses!

This keyword gets searched for thousands of times per month! This is one of the top Squidoo lenses, and you can see why. The power of Squidoo is quite clear.

The best part about Squidoo is that you use your already made advertisements and articles as excellent keyword rich content for your lens.

I will discuss later how exactly to integrate Squidoo into article marketing with very little effort in a whole section devoted to it.

For many of the keywords/keyphrases I target my lens for, I get ranked on the 1st or 2nd page of Google! This is where most of my traffic/sales comefrom, and yours will too.

I don't know why there hasn't been more fuss over this website. I think there are several marketers making good money with Squidoo, but are keeping quiet about it.

Squidoo is basically an information website. "Lenses" are informational websites, usually no more than 1-2 pages long, that offer the user "expert knowledge" on just about anything. It could be of any topic and any niche.

I've seen people promote their own websites, creating interactive voting pages, create top 10 lists, discuss the latest online games, fashion, and a wide variety of topics.

I have also seen affiliate marketers successfully create one page sales/review lenses that drive tons of traffic from search engines and are ranked highly for specific keyphrases. This marketing potential of Squidoo is what my guide is focused on.

"Lensmasters" are the people who create lenses. They are viewed by people as credible sources of information on just about everything. As a marketer using Squidoo to promote your products, you have much more control over its content than article websites like Ezinearticles.com Ezinearticles will
reprimand you for promoting affiliate products.

There are hundreds of topics that people have made lenses on. I have found it a most simple and powerful method to getting high quality traffic and more sales.

I'm not even spending very much time marketing with Squidoo, most of the time I spend writing articles and doing SEO on my affiliate websites, which have also proven successful for me. You can also try this excellent tool SEO ELITE which helps me alot in Search engine optimization.

If I use Squidoo, I don't spend more than 15-30 minutes per day, which is enough time to set up 4-6 lenses. Now I am starting to devote more time to it as Squidoo is becoming more and more profitable for my affiliate marketing efforts.

If you follow my strategies straight out, you should be getting lots of sales in less than a month. You may very well pass my success with Squidoo, and I expect you to once you implement these strategies full out.

Some people claim that you can not make much money with Squidoo. That is nonsense. They are not utilizing Squidoo in the correct manner.

If you think you are going to make big money from the optional integrated eBay and Amazon mini-stores, you are wrong. At least right now, these are not the best option for making money on Squidoo.

The most efficient and effective way to make money on Squidoo is to offer independent reviews on desirable products and optimize your lens for your niche's top keywords.

I am going to tell you exactly how you should design your lens to get the maximum amount of traffic and sales in the shortest period of time.

Follow my directions exactly and you will be on the way to earning a nice residual income in a month or less.

The first thing you should do is make your biography. I recommend putting a back-link to your blog or related website if you have one.

My suggestion is to go to http://www.creativecommons.org and browse through flickr images. Here you can find images of people that have
allowed their pictures to be used in commercial avenues, such as Squidoo or other websites.

Do not click on the box that says "make this your default bio." You shouldn't do that because for each lens you should have a separate biography for each lens that is specific for your lens's content. Believe me, it is well worth it to have a couple sentences of unique information in your bio for each lens. Again, you want to be viewed as an independent expert.

You should have at the very least one biography for each product that you market. Make sure you search for those which are licensed for commercial use.

When you find a nice looking lady or fellow, download that image and add it to your "lensmaster photo" Your bio should be a short description on what you like about your lens topic. Always say that you are an "enthusiast" of whatever you are promoting, otherwise you will not be viewed as credible. For weight loss you might say,

"Hi my name is Sarah Nichols and I am a weight loss enthusiast. I write articles and review products related to weight loss and I have a blog all about weight loss news that can be found here (your blog link here)."

Squidoo modules are basically different interactive content boxes that you can add to your lens. There are a number of module selections that you can choose from, and every now and then a new one is added.

The modules that Squidoo has of now include customized eBay listings, Amazon listings, Guestbook, and other options.

Although at first I recommended using very little to no modules, but the rules have changed a little bit. A lot of affiliate marketers have now invaded Squidoo (probably partially due to my book) and Squidoo has started to enforce a "spam" definition of lens content. Basically, any lens that does not have information which could not be found anywhere else is subject to deletion.

Here is a good forum thread about what can be defined as "spam" by Gil, the Chief Software Engineer at Squidoo: http://www.squidu.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2048

Gil has told me that "basically, as long as your lens can be considered valuable on its own (without visiting another website) you're okay"

Therefore you are going to need at least 4+ modules on each Squidoo lens that has information that you could not find on the site that you are linking to, or another website.

A quick way to get unique Squidoo content is to start off with these 5

Modules:

1.) Amazon Standard Module

2.) eBay Module

3.) The Onion Daily (this one is a humor module and may not be relevant)

4.) Write Module

5.) Another Write Module

The only fields you need to add on the Amazon and eBay module are search terms related to your lens content. So if you're selling something like Video
Games, be sure to type in these keywords so that the stores will automatically display these items.

The reason why I chose the above is because these are easy to add do not require much specific content.

The money that I have made with these stores is always minimal, by far most of the money comes from affiliate selling. This is why you should not worry too much about how interesting the displayed products are. If your lens starts to shoot up in the rankings, experiment with it, but don't worry too much about it.

For the first 'write' module, you should put iFrame code to your opt-in list, which is discussed in the bonus "How To Build A Massive List With Squidoo". If you are not interested in building a list with Squidoo, then feel free to add just 1 write module.

However, I highly recommend using Squidoo to build your list up.

For the second write module, you should include some unique information on your lens topic. You can get articles aplenty from

http://www.ezinearticles.com or from any article directory. Be sure to credit the author if the article is not yours. The most obvious preference is to use articles that you already own first.

If you are selling iPod games, put up information on how to transfer songs to your iPod. That will help ensure that your lens won't get deleted.

If you are wondering if you need to update the lens thereafter or do anything else to keep the lens content fresh, the answer is no, unless your lens starts to increase in traffic, or if your lenses are starting to be deleted.

If for some reason your lens is considered as spam, Squidoo may delete your lenses.

If you are having lenses deleted because of spam consideration, then you should add more unique content to your lenses.

If you see an increase in traffic as the weeks progress, you can add more content to your lens. If your lens is in the top 100, you definitely should
have a variety of interesting content so that your lens is considered useful by the community. :)

An awesome tool for Keyword Research that I highly recommend and also use is the Keyword Elite

Keyword Elite is better than the free keyword tools above and will save you a lot of time.

This tool "digs" a little deeper than the free tools, and gives you highly targeted keyword phrases, which give you a higher chance of being ranked on Google's first page.

It is not that expensive and worth every penny. But still if you can't afford Keyword Elite, don't get it yet. You can start with the above free tools, but once you make some money, this tool will definitely help you get more traffic to your Squidoo lenses, as it will pick out highly targeted keyword phrases.

Note that this keyword research tool is far cheaper than most other ones and also comes with more options.

If you want to guarantee traffic, look for keywords with less than 10,000 results, if you want to take a slight risk and try to compete with more competitive keywords, then look for keywords with 10-50,000 results.

You must be extremely careful not to be viewed as a spammer, as Digg very quickly will delete your account if you are though to be spamming the site in any way.

Here is how to, "digg" each lens.

Basically for each of your lenses you should go to your lens' address i.e.

http://www.squidoo.com/yourlensname

Click on the button on the right side of the page that says "digg" If my lens topic is 'weight loss diets' then I put 'weight loss diets' as the tags, separated by spaces.

Add as many tags as you wish related to your niche, but no need to spend too much time on this. For digg, you should title your story with your lens keywords.

Then type one or two sentences summarizing what your lens is about.

I might say, "Here is my review of _____ a weight loss pill that works based upon Proactol. This pill has worked for thousands including myself and has been approved by medical doctors."

When you are submitting your lenses to digg, the best option is to space out your submissions throughout the day. You have the option to select the
category that your story shows up on digg.com. Make sure you try to alternate the category as well if possible.

This is important because if your Digg account is deleted, at least all of your eggs won't be in one basket (meaning that if I had submitted all my weight
loss lenses to one Digg account, and it is deleted, then I no longer am promoting weight loss on Digg).

This should help you maintain your lens rank on Google, and not to mention extra clicks from those websites. It is truly incredible how much difference it makes to do this on each lens.

If you want to get traffic from other Squidoo users, a great way is to join groups. Groups are basically lists of related Squidoo lenses. To join a group, click on the "Groups" link at the top of Squidoo. On the right there is a link for "most active groups." Click on that link, and join each and every group that is related to your lens. I don't do this much, but when I do, I always notice that my lens rank goes up at least a little bit. This is more than likely due to other Squidoo users voting for the lens.

If you follow the strategies I have laid out above, you will be well on your way to a solid residual income with Squidoo.

I think that every marketer should know how to utilize Squidoo to make sales, if only for the short amount of time it takes to set up lenses. I recommend getting some income established with my strategies, and later experimenting with new ideas.

Perhaps you can use Squidoo to start a service business, or try selling Paydotcom products on Squidoo. Or maybe you will use Squidoo solely to
build your list up. The opportunities are quite endless. Armed with the knowledge in this guide, you are well on your way to experiencing the benefits of Marketing Squidoo.

GOOD LUCK WITH YOUR SALES ;)