The Secret to Making Money With Squidoo – Part 1
So, whats the buzz about this website called Squidoo? Founded in 2006, it has become an SEO heaven, authority site for niche markets and a new way to search for “information” instead of “links. When you do a querie on your favorite search engine, chances are you’ll find millions of results (links) related to your search. However, a search on Squidoo will return the most relevant information on the subject. Being in the top 300 of visited websites online, their traffic has seen steady growth in the last 3 months….49.2% to be exact.
The difference between Squidoo and other information based sites, such as Wikipedia…they are not a non-profit company, and the goal is to make money. Since I can guess the next question you’ll ask, here’s the secret to making money with Squidoo:
First off, using the Squidoo platform, there is a variety of ways you can go about making money. You have the option of posting links to your own affiliate products, or, use some of the affiliate modules such as Amazon or Cafe Press and receive 50% on all of the revenue you generate. This is one cool thing about the site…all revenue is split down the middle with Lens Masters, and 5% is donated to charity.
Become The “Know It All”: Depending on which topic you pick, the goal is to create a lens that is focused and easy to understand. I want to take a look at and break down some one of the top lenses for a specific niche. Since we all like food, and everyone can relate to it, today’s experiment (this reminds me of 10th grade biology), will be the Squidoo Lens: Best Baked Macaroni and Cheese.
- Provide Useful Content… The very first thing you see is a quality picture to a tasty bowl of Mac & Cheese. One problem I see alot of lenses running into, is not providing enough visual aids. Instead of creating a bunch of text about your subject, you have to make the user “feel” good. It’s been said before, “people will always forget what you said…but they’ll always remember how you made them feel.” If it looks like a spam post, most of the time it is.
- Lesson # 1 – Add in as many pictures as possible. There has to be a way to capture the “share of mind.” Whenever the user thinks of this post later, it will be your cool graphics they remember.
- Lesson # 2 – Not only should you provide useful content, but your titles and headings need to alert “you have useful content begging to be read.” Check out the heading above the picture: The text, “My Mom’s Tried and True Recipe…Our Family Favorite,” makes the page sound personable, and people like trying things used by others.
- Lesson # 3 – Not only does this lens sh
are the family favorite recipe, but she goes the extra mile to give an alternative. Take a look at the Low Cal Alternative “mom just e-mailed to me.” She keeps all visitors wishes in mind with the a health concious option.
- You’re Not Just Creating Another Lens…The next page you set up on Squidoo will be geared towards bringing in the most organic traffic, while providing useful content to the user. Keep in mind, when you start a lens, you immediatly have a PR6 website to start placing links on. To maximize the use of this goldmine, do exactly as I say:
- Lesson #1 – It’s all in the URL. Why do you think Best Baked Mac And Cheese is successful? Well, Best Baked Mac and Cheese is in the URL. http://www.squidoo.com/best_baked_mac_and_cheese. When you set up a Squidoo lense, you are given the oppertunity to pick a permanent URL. Squidoo.com/whatever you want. Since the site is still growing, and every niche hasn’t been picked up yet you can still pick up some pretty good ones. Make sure the topic of your lens is in the URL.
- Lesson # 2 – Don’t just create the modules and expect them to do the work. For instance, if you opted to use the Amazon Product Module, be sure to use the Title and Sub-Title. Whenever your lens is indexed by search engines, the modules are seen as important headings, and this will increase your search ranking for that topic. We’ll be covering the topic of modules tomorrow.
- Lesson # 3 – Just like we covered using images for site usability, graphics also play a large role in SEO. Apply the following tips when using images on your lens:
- Name the image with the topic your tareting. Example: best-baked-mac-and-chees.jpg.
- Don’t forget the alt tag when using images and custom HTML. The Alt tag provides “alternate” text for the image. Example: alt=”best mac and cheese.”
- Be sure to host the images on your site. If you don’t have one…go to GoDaddy and set one up. This means the images will be picked up by Google Images.
