What is Squidoo?
Squidoo is a simple way to boost your affiliate sales.
It lets you create as many one page websites as you like. Each one is focused on a single topic – Squidoo call the web pages you create a “lens” because of this focus.
You are then free to do near enough whatever you like on your lens, including adding affiliate links into it.
You get a heap of modules that can be added into your Squidoo lens. These include:
- Basic text modules
- Lists (you can make a list in a text module as well, these just make it simpler)
- Polls
- Attention grabbers such as yellow “sticky” notes
- YouTube videos (these can be your own or other people’s)
- Flickr photos
- Wikipedia entries (good for the boring but necessary factual information)
- Amazon lists
- Plexos (lists where your lens visitors vote the entries up and down)
- Guest book
There’s more you can do as well – just explore them when you sign up to Squidoo for free.
There are several things you should know about Squidoo:
- Most of the time, Google and the other search engines like Squidoo lenses. Which means it’s fairly easy to get indexed high in the results for your chosen keywords. Obviously this will be better if your keywords aren’t about ultra high competition words such as “diet”.
- Near enough all article directories allow links to your Squidoo lens from the article resource box. So you can use articles to promote your affiliate links in Squidoo. This is a neat way to get around the rules that often prohibit you from linking your article to an affiliate link.
- You can join groups in Squidoo. These will get extra links to your lens from other Squidoo pages, boosting your incoming links and helping your search engine results.
When you start out, you should be able to create a decent Squidoo lens in around 2 hours. This includes writing about your topic – you should aim for about three short articles (say 250 words or so each) in your lens, each targeting a different keyword phrase related to the main product you are promoting.
You don’t have to restrict yourself to just one product unless you want to. I’ve done single product lenses and multi-product ones (all on the same theme in any given lens) and both have worked well.
The only negative I’ve got with Squidoo is that you can’t directly put in an email signup form. This is because they had problems with spammers and had to put an end to this option. But you can put in a module that is one click away from your signup form, so it’s still possible to build your list this way. Offer an incentive such as a free ebook and you’ll get people to do this.
If you want to take your Squidoo lens building seriously, the best author I’ve come across on the subject is Tiffany Dow. I’ve bought several of her books on Squidoo and found them to be easy to read and full of practical information. The best of the bunch is this one: Social Networking on Squidoo. It will get you up and running in no time at all.
Whatever affiliate product you’re promoting, it’s quick and easy to add a Squidoo lens to the tools you use to promote it.
This is a great artcle regarding lenses. I done a search to see if you could add affiliate links to squidoo and this article answered my question and more. I have my own products which I promote but wanted to get into affiliate marketing a little and I thought Squidoo would be ideal.
Thanks!
Quick update:
Just recently, Squidoo have been changing their minds about the content they list.
Partly this is to do with making sure they stay well placed in the search engines. But they’re pretty much “judge and jury” in this matter, so if they lock your lens for whatever reason, it will likely stay locked. The attitude is along the lines of “You were a good friend yesterday but I don’t want to know you today”. So much for Seth’s views on keeping customers which seem to be “do as I say, not as I do” in this instance.
In view of that, I’m moving much of my content from Squidoo onto my own sites and following the ideas put forward by Jay Holt in Affilimax Conversions. It’s a good, common sense system and is working well for me.
I was also looking to make sure I could add some affiliate links to Squidoo…It looks like I can. YAY!
Thats very good information from all the posts,it seems googles laws have to be considered by all including sites like squidoo they rule the roost,they can be so good for you or they can make it hard,people loose a lot of time and money having to rejig content I think they should consider this a lot more when moving the goal posts,united we stand divided we fall, more of us should have a say in how it works.
I made 4 Squidoo Lens in the last month, and have yet to see any of them in the Google search results.
If all you do is make a Squidoo page and leave it then it’s much the same as any other web page and can get lost in the millions of pages Google have indexed. You need to do some other work (article writing for instance) to boost its importance.
To be frank, squidoo is no longer the google’s favourite, like it was a couple of years ago. Now I see some good use of Squidoo as a satellite for helping the money site rank higher. It also helps to flip site for higher price since you can add Sqiudoo account with some lens supporting the site.
As for rankings, I tend to see Squidoo less and less for many keywords that are bringing in good money .
Squidoo still gets good results for me but it needs backlinks (like most everything else on the web) otherwise it gets lost.
By far the best Squidoo tutorial I’ve ever seen. Who knew Squidoo can be so useful and effective for making money online?