Advantages of Using Squidoo for Affiliate Marketing

1. Fast Google Indexing- Your lens with its targeted keywords can be indexed as quickly as 2-3 days. The time it takes to index varies, but you will find that it is much faster at indexing than most other marketing avenues.

2. High Google Rankings- When you target your lens to a specific keyword, your lens will often rank in the first 1-3 pages of Google. Google loves Squidoo and you should take advantage of this as much as you can.

3. Simplicity- The best part about using Squidoo is its simplicity. I can get a lens set up in less than 5 minutes with everything ready to go, including RSS. Most it will require 30mins to get it filled with useful content and modules :)

4. No Charge- The Best part is that Squidoo is free to use and you can make an unlimited number of lenses.
WARNING: Its is really addictive

5. Little/No Regulation- This used to be the case, but now there is much more regulation of lenses, as you now have to have unique content on each lens that you could not find at the site you're linking to. Still you have much more freedom than Ezinearticles in terms of what you are promoting, your ad copy, etc. You won't be breaking their TOS by selling affiliate products. But...
I do not recommend simply spamming Squidoo with affiliate links. Squidoo will actually delete lens that are 'spammy' in nature. If you follow my recommendations, you will be contributing to the Squidoo community as well as be able to make a nice additional income with it :) and that is cool

Crucial to any marketing campaign's success is good research. Its not the only element, but one of the very important fundamental elements. If you are not getting sales, your product just might not be very desirable, or maybe the product does not fit in well with your advertising medium.

I am assuming that you know nothing about product selection. If you do, you should use products that you are familiar with at first and then try my niche ideas. I am not going to tell you exactly what products to market on Squidoo.

However, I can give you niche ideas that have worked for me; i guess i am too generous :)

1. Internet Marketing- Anything involving making money online from home is great at selling on Squidoo. You should discuss how you have used the product to make money, how other products are no good, and how this product will bring X amount of dollars, talk in specific numbers.

2. Electronics- Electronics related lenses are hot, they drive traffic like crazy. Many of the top lenses are related to electronics, and they are selling. Clickbank is a real good legit affiliate and its products like Zune, iPod, and MP3 music websites are really popular.

3. World of Warcraft- WOW is a hot gaming niche. Anything related to the top WOW keywords will do well on Squidoo. I have been playing the game and been a fan ;). There are plenty of products to choose from on Clickbank.

4. Weight Loss- People are eager to learn how they can lose more weight, and although this market is saturated, you can discuss weight loss diets and how they have worked for you. Always have a proof behind your cause and make sure it is legit and safe. Squidoo's powerful rankings should help you offset the competition.

Don't Reinvent The Wheel- Follow The Leader

Here is a link you should frequent regularly for lens ideas:

http://www.squidoo.com/browse/top_lenses/traffic

This has the top 100 lenses on Squidoo by traffic. Do you Notice anything interesting? A lot of the top lenses in terms of traffic are affiliate marketers, who have targeted their lenses with keywords. Most, if not all of these lenses are getting traffic from Google and other search engines. You can bet these marketers are making a large amount of money from
these lenses. Look at the products they are promoting and copy their style. As you can see, you don't get rich by reinventing the wheel.

The best idea for lens creation is to make one lens per keyword, much like article marketing with USfreeads or Ezinearticles. Since Squidoo is a very
highly ranked site on Google, your lens will get spidered quickly and can dominate the keyterm phrase that you use for your title and URL, so you should be very selective. There are multiple ways that you can research keywords. I prefer to use two methods, my personal spy on your competition method, and Keyword Elite. There are free tools out there, but basically you should try to have at least one keyword software to use along with these tools, and you should definitely find out the keywords that your competition is using, and start your campaigns based off of that.

I would choose a keyword phrase that is searched at least 2000 times per month or more on Overture. Your competing results can be anywhere from 2,000-20,000. I would put a cap around 50,000, and try to keep most
competing results less than 20,000. I'm not sure if you should worry too much about the competing results because I've seen Squidoo lenses dominate over 50,000 targeted results. But, don't be too overzealous, you can't compete for terms like "make money" obviously. I'll talk more about how to choose keywords later on.

Try to use at least 3-4 keywords because longer keyword phrases just work better with getting on the first page of Google. And make sure there is some evidence that your term is searched for. But, I have seen lenses dominate two keyword phrases, so this is by no means a definite rule.

I use a variety of keyword selection tools. Google's keyword tool is one of the best free tools. The reason why I use this is that obviously Google's data is the most reliable for keywords on its own engine.