Squidoo Marketing 101 Tips and Tricks

Picking the right niche for your Squidoo lens is the MOST important decision you will make when creating a lens. And it all starts by find keywords that generate traffic.

Picking keywords is a art form that many just don't master. But it is the backbone to any successful website on the net today. Picking the right keywords and optimizing your site for those keywords will give you a leg up on competition that in all accounts don't want you to succeed.

So how do you pick a good keyword?
1. Brainstorm - Brainstorming is the act of putting down topics on a piece of paper that you are interested in. For example, I am interested in fishing and biking. These will be my high end top level keywords that I will start with.

2. Break Down - Now its time to break down your top level keywords in 2nd level smaller categories. For example: fishing lures or bike peddles. Try to fill up your sheet of paper with top level and 2nd level keywords. Remember the more keywords that you think of the more chances you will find a niche that will work for you.

3. Keyword Research - Now its time use tools to find out if any of your keywords have a niche that you can capitalize on. I like to use wordtracker for this and Google Keyword Tool to make sure the keyword has traffic. Wordtracker will evaluate your keywords and give you a good choice as to if has a high probability of becoming #1 in Google's search without much effort. Once you find the keyword verify the traffic with Google's keyword tool. If the keyword has traffic you have found your niche.

4. Create your lens - Now it is time to create a squidoo lens. Do you have your main keyword ready. This is the keyword with the most traffic potential. Take that keyword and create a lens that has the keyword in the title and as the URL address. If the address is taken for example if nikeshoes was taken try a variation of the keyword. For example, nike-shoes or best-nike-shoes or nikeshoesoutlet and now you have a lens.

Now it is time to start filling out the lens wizard.

For an intense instruction in finding a niche I recommend seobook.

Depending on the type of lens that you choose to write you will need to get acquainted with the Squidoo Modules.

Squidoo modules are individual squidoo website building blocks. This is a simple as I can explain it. They allow you the lensmaster to create blocks of lens information without having to write programming code. The coding is done for you.

So what are the right modules? Well, I can't say that any module is not right for your needs. For me with the kind of lens that I have created I mainly used the RSS feed modules, the text module, the twitter module, the table of contents module, the amazon module, the flickr module, the youtube module and the guestbook module. Not to say any of the other modules are not as good. I just have not had the chance to use them.

But I can say that for the two top modules that should be used in any lens are the table of contents module and the twitter module.

The table of contents module helps to navigate you lens. Thereby, getting information fast in front of your visitors. Twitter helps to get the word out about what you are doing. Its great to create a community of people that will visit your work over and over again over the years.

The introduction to your lens sets up the entire user experience for each and every visitor of your lens. So it is important that you establish a positive and uplifting spirit in the beginning.

Now is the time to use some of your SEO (search engine marketing) skills. Search engine spiders, small programs that search your website for keywords, are looking around your site every day looking for your keywords. So, why don't you make it easy for them to find them.

The first paragraph of your introduction should have your keyword mentioned twice and the keywords should be in bold or italic. Each tell the spider that these words are emphasized and are keywords for your site.

The second paragraph of your introduction should have your keyword mentioned once and also it needs to be in bold or italic.

Any subsequent paragraph should only have variations of your keyword. Variations like synonyms. Sprinkle these synonyms all around your site in other articles and such.

One warning, make your wording seen normal. Stuffing keywords in your introduction will not work and Google looks down on this type of website development.

This is also your first chance to get your visitors to click over to your affiliate. I tend to create links directly to my affiliates right below my introduction paragraphs. This usually pays off as most visitors will not stay on your lens for a second or two. Most visitors will size up your lens in the first seconds. If they like it they will stay if not they will click away. Why not give them a few choices before they leave.

For an intense instruction in finding a niche I recommend seobook.

Affiliate programs are you gateway to making all of your work on Squidoo lens profitable. And there are plenty of affiliate program to cover just about any subject that you may want to create a lens about.

Of course Squidoo provides basic affiliate programs that you can profit share with them. These include:

1. eBay - eBay has just about anything you may want to promote. From Adsense websites to cameras eBay has them.
2. Amazon - Amazon is also a all in one solution. With so much to choose from you can't go wrong.
3. Cafepress - Cafepress specializes in t-sirts of all type. They also allow you to design your own t-shirts that you can promote to your visitors.

But what if you don't want to profit share with Squidoo. Maybe you Squidoo does not have a relationship with a company that has the product that you are promoting. In this case it is time to find someone that you can affilate yourself with that sells your product.

There are many companies that can help you out with this.

1. Commission Junction (cj.com) - One the the biggest affiliate hubs available today. They have companies like gamefly.com and shoes.com.
2. Linkshare (linkshare.com) - Another large affiliate marketng hub with companies like netflix.com and macys.com.
3. Clickbank - How about promoting information. Clickbank has a large selection of ebooks that pretty much covers just about any topic.

4. Neverblueads.com - a smaller affiliate hub but they have great programs that will pay you for just getting people to sign up for surveys and promotions.

5. shareasale.com - Just like linkshare and commision junction. Compare programs you may find companies with higher payouts.

6. Amazon.com - You can also use amazon to get a full share of a commission.

7. eBay.com - Now, I use eBay very aggressively in my lens. I take the feeds from eBay's pages and load my affiliate id in them and put the RSS feed in the RSS feed module to pull down live auctions to my lens. This a very powerful technique that can bring about large amounts of income.

What does all of these have in common. They all allow you to create a audience that is in tune to your niche that you are promoting.

Digg.com - Digg is another way to get your information into the search engines quick. Mainly because digg has Google ear. You see Google frequently visits digg to find information that they can include into there search engine. If they find something that they feel is necessary they will add it to there serps. This could be as quick as a day. I am not kidding a day. Also, digg itself sends a lot a traffic to sources that are extraordinary. If the user of digg vote for your resource enough you will end up on the front page of digg. And this is were all the magic happens. Because a front page entry gets hundreds if not thousands of clicks a day.

Digging a lens on squidoo is simple. On the sidebar of all lens is a link directly to digg, twitter, delicious and other social websites. Just click the link and you will be sent to digg's submit page. Here just fill out the form with the title of the site, the short paragraph describing the site and the topic of the site. Go to the bottom of the page and type in the catcha and hit next. Promise that the site is not a duplicate and your done. Your site is now in digg.

Stumble.com - is another powerful social marketing site like digg, but I would not use the same technique as digg. Yes, I would stumble your site. If it is an interesting topic this will bring instant traffic to your site. Next, use the blog in your stumble account to start making blogs about your site and start making friends. This will draw visitors to read and click to your site. Be careful to make friend with people that are looking for your information as you are only able to make 200 friends per account.

Delicious.com - The same type of site as digg but much easier to enter information.

All of these sites are meant to bring instant traffic to your site.

Google is a lover of links. A link represents a vote of a websites validity. The more votes the more relevant Google believes your website to be. But it is important to find links from websites that are related to the content on your website. Although, Google will count links from websites that have nothing to do with the content of your website. But they count links with relevant content higher.

Lensmaster don't like to have comments added to there sites that are not true. So, if you are going to leave a comment make sure you have read the material and you are truly admiring the material.

In your comments create a link back to your lens. Something like this: I truly loved your material on keyword generation. I tried the technique and Google entered my website in the number 3 position of page one. Check out my site at: coach outlet store.

Myspace and Facebook are two of the top leading in social websites. And learning how to market to visitors of Myspace and Facebook can increase your traffic upwards and beyond any of the techniques mentioned thus far.

The trick to marketing on both of these engines is finding and acquiring friends. I want you to take a look at some of the youtube videos at the bottom on making money on myspace. They describe finding friends by finding groups that are specifically in line with your niche. Once you have found people that are inline with your niche then make friends with them.

As they become friends they will visit your facebook or myspace page. On your page have links back to your Squidoo lens as well as blogs about certain areas of your niche. Remember to keep adding niche content so your visitors will keep coming back.

Each day leave a bulletin about your niche for your friend to attract them back.

Next start leaving comments to on your friends profiles. This will attract new fiends to your profile.

The final tip is to create a group of your very own and once again start recruiting. The more people that you recruit the higher the traffic.

Joining Squidoo Groups is one of the easiest ways to increase you links to your lens. Squidoo also makes the process very easy and straight forward. Just find a group that is related to your lens, open the group and on the sidebar click the add an existing lens to this group. Hit OK and wait to see if the administrator accepts your lens into there group.

But what if there is not a group related to your lens. In this case it is time for you to create your own group and start promoting it.

Hubpages is on the same line as squidoo except squidoo is a lot more popular and hubpages profit shares with adsense.

Hubpages is perfect for getting just a few more links to your lens. Create hubpages on each individual keywords in your lens and link the page directly back to your lens.

Hubpages has more information on how to create a hubpage.

Of all the marketing techniques available today, article marketing has got to be the easiest and most rewarding technique available. This is not a understatment. Article marketing is easy to master and takes just a fraction of the time to master as some of the best techniques used today. Unlike link promotion or blog creation, article marketing only takes three steps.

1. Find a article posting site - I will tell you more about this later.

2. Write a article that you are interested and include links back to your predetermined websites.

3. Post the article.

That is it. The rest is up to ezine owners looking for content for their sites. That is great for you, as ezine owners grab up your content that create incoming links to your site. Which in turn creates high page ranks for your website and creates more search engine traffic for you.

Learn more about article marketing

Squidoo Forums is the last subject that I want to touch on. Forums in them selfs are especially powerful when promoting a new or old website. Squidoo forums is not an exception from the rule.

Squidoo forums is a place were if you have problems you can post a question and the user base of squidoo can answer and help you through your problemm.

But it is much more than that. Its is also another way to get links and eyeballs back onto your lens.

You may ask how is this done?

Well, it is done by participating in forum discussions and having your signature lead back to your lens.

Your signature is basically your business card. It directs would be customers were to get information pertaining to subject matter that they want more information on. So, it is important to have wording in your signature that talks exactly to your niche subject matter. For example, I may want to create a signature like this one: Squidoo Marketing for this site. The wording speaks to exactly what this site is all about without getting to wordy. It also has my keyword in it which gives me points with the search engines. The more points the higher I will be in the search engine serps.

Participation in the forum is mandatory to driving traffic with this technique so try to participate as often as you can.

Every Squidoo lensmaster is automatically a part of the forum so don't worry about being accepted.

Visit the Squidoo Forum

Are you looking for a quick and easy way to promote your brand new lens. If so PPC marketing could be your ticket. But, expect that you will pay a pretty penny to get started.

First off I don't recommend using PPC marketing unless you get a little training. I say this because PPC marketing get very expensive very quick. And the novice can get burned and loose a lot of money without know basic knowledge.

I myself am not a expect of PPC marketing, but I have read a few courses to get a basic to intermediate knowledge of the subject matter. To that end I would like to recommend that you read Google's tutorial..

Squidoo lens tend to do well in PPC campaigns. If you have any experience with PPC marketing and Google Adwords you may have found out that Google tends to charge extra money to new sites. Mainly because of new sites don't have the necessary page rank. But because as a squidoo community we all use the top level www.squidoo.com domain, all squidoo lens usually have the page juice needed to get pretty good click rates in Google adwords. That said there are exceptions. Some keywords are just too expensive. Like keywords for name brand items. Some of these keywords just demand high click through rates. Some as high as $1.00 to $3.00 dollars???? Avoid these high rates if your just starting out. If you don't have the bank, you will not be able to compete.

PPC marketing is a fast way to drive traffic but be very cautious and watch your campaign so you don't get ripped off..