Squidoo Tip #13. Own Your Topic on Google

When it comes to getting a permanent spot on the 1st page of Google, Expertise is your key to Success. A combination of Squidoo's high PR (Search Engine popularity) and Topic Expertise is a perfect recipe for owning your Topic on Google. What do I mean by "Own Your Topic on Google"? Make your Squidoo Lens the best resource on your topic available online. If you are sharing "best mac & cheese" recipes, make sure that you have the best collection of  mac & cheese recipes available online. It is great to have 50-100 or more lenses on Squidoo, but it is even better to have 25 well-researched lenses that can answer just about any question about the topic. Google likes aged content - webpages that have been around for a while and have been getting content updates on a regular basis. Don't stop adding content to your lens after you publish it. Add relevant information at least a couple times per month, and you have a good shot at getting Google's attention. Learn everything you can about your niche and the topics you choose to cover, and you will be well on your way to making a steady monthly income on Squidoo.

Make Money with Squidoo. Squidoo Tip #12.



Make Money with Squidoo

Squidoo Affiliate Marketing Tip
If you are new to Squidoo and are not familiar with internet marketing, this information may be helpful: Affiliate Marketing. But basically, affiliate marketers help consumers find goods and services that may be beneficial to the consumers. Many companies have affiliate programs. They provide links to affiliates and pay commissions (typically 4-10%, but may be as much as 75%) for every sale completed through the link. Companies may also provide you with banners, photos of products, and products feed. Squidoo participates in Amazon, Ebay, and Zazzle affiliate programs. When you sell an item using Squidoo affiliate modules, Squidoo gets commissions and then splits the commissions with you.

So what is my Squidoo affiliate marketing tip? 3 days ago I got a $105 check from an affiliate network I registered for several months ago. It was a very unexpected surprise and it made my day. I made only 1 Sale through a banner I placed on one of my Squidoo lenses. $105 for only 1 Sale! So my tip is not to limit yourself to affiliate programs available through Squidoo. My suggestion is to sign up with Several Affiliate networks by providing your Squidoo lensmaster account as your web address, and if you have a website or a blog too, make sure to mention it as well. Affiliate networks are great because you don't have to sign up with every merchant. Instead, you have an independent company track your sales and combine all commissions you get into one check. You get an opportunity to become an affiliate for Target.com, Walmart.com, Kmart.com, GoDaddy.com, and thousands of other sites. You get excellent photos for your Squidoo lenses and are able to give your readers more product options. Here are the Affiliate Networks I recommend:

1) LinkShare
2) Shareasale
3) Google Affiliate Network

I don't like to recommend Clickbank - although many of the Clickbank products offer the most competitive commissions, there are also plenty of spammy products that can trigger Squidoo spam filter and even get your lens locked. There is one product I would recommend to all Squidoo lensmasters - One Week Marketing (great tips from potpiegirl).

Squidoo Tip #7 - Increase Clickouts to make more money on Squidoo.

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Squidoo uses the number of Clickouts as one of the parameters in determining your Squidoo Lens rank. Why are they so important? When visitors land on your Squidoo page, they are looking for answers and solutions. And it is your goal to give them the information that is relevant to their searches. Ideally, you want the visitor to spend at least a few minutes reading over your lens and then send them on to a different page - it may be a product you are promoting, or a site that may be interesting to your reader, or maybe one of your lenses on a related topic (hey, a clickout and an extra lens view - can't get much better then that, unless you are trying to make a sale, of course...)

The last thing you want to happen is for the visitor to glance over your lens and click back to other Google Search results. Click backs will have a negative impact on your lens' Google rankings. Google lets your readers decide on the relevance of your lens' contents to the keywords used throughout the lens. By Generating Clickouts, you optimize your Squidoo lens for Search Engines. It is a great way to send a reader on to a different site and keep them from clicking the "Go Back" button. Clickouts will give you a better Google Search placement and will help your lenses make it into the Tier 1 and 2.

In my Squidoo Earnings Diary, I feature my top performing lenses, give links to my blog, link to articles that may be interesting to other Squidoo lensmasters, and feature Amazon products. If someone clicks on a Google Adwords ad, Squidoo will also count that as a valuable Clickout. I also like to take advantage of the Google Search Module to help my readers find useful information on relevant topics.

As always, I hope you are making money on Squidoo. I would like to hear from you - would you like to share your Squidoo SEO tips?

Squidoo is a waste of time...

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Today I ran into an article about Squidoo being a waste of time. That's exactly how I felt after my first couple months on Squidoo. $0.25 for hours of work seemed unfair and seeing little to no lens traffic was simply depressing. I can totally see how some people can feel that Squidoo is a waste of time. But I also know of several lensmasters that have 15-30 Tier 1 lenses, along with 25-50 Tier 2 lenses, and hundreds of Tier 3 Squidoo lenses. They get $500-$1000+ from Squidoo per month along with affiliate commissions from Ebay, Amazon, Zazzle, LinkShare, ShareASale, Commission Junction, and Clickbank. Squidoo can certainly be a waste of time, but for the lensmasters who have figured  out the "magic formula", Squidoo is a nice source of income.

As of today, I have three lenses in Tier 1, two lenses in Tier 2, two lenses that keep on jumping between Tiers 2 and 3, and ten Tier 3 lenses. If I was to get a paycheck from Squidoo today, I could probably count on around $100 plus a couple dollars in affiliate commissions for my Amazon and Ebay Sales. $100 per month in Squidoo Earnings is certainly better than 25 cents. Would I say it's a good compensation for the time I spend on Squidoo? It will be, if I manage to keep the traffic to my top lenses steady for several months while also building new lenses. Squidoo lenses are also a valuable tool in promoting my Etsy store, so I always remember about the money I save on blog advertising by publishing my own articles.

How do you feel about Squidoo? Are you wasting your time? or do you think that your hard work will pay off in the future? As always, comments are welcome!

Squidoo Tip #4 - Do include YouTube modules in your lenses



Image: Idea go / FreeDigitalPhotos.net  

Why would you want to include YouTube Video Module in a Squidoo lens? Not only will you add great relevant content to your lens and bring more value to your readers, you will also optimize your content for Google. One of the things that Google takes in consideration when figuring out where your lens should be in the Google rankings is how much time your readers spend on your site and whether they click back to Google Search results. By displaying the right YouTube Videos on your lens, you answer the readers questions, keep the reader on your Squidoo page for a couple extra minutes, prove to Google that your content is relevant to the key words, and therefore, your Squidoo lens gets a better ranking in the Search Engine Results. Squidoo is a big authority on Google. So if you use the right key words throughout your content, display YouTube Videos, engage your reader, and provide the information the reader is searching for, you will have good chances of landing on Google's 1st page. As always, please feel free to leave your comments and link to your Squidoo lenses.

Squdoo Tips. Tip # 1 - Pick a niche for your Squidoo lenses.

What is a marketing niche? Why would you want to pick a niche for your Squidoo lenses?
I love writing on a variety of topics. And that's what I initially started out doing on Squidoo - I had a lens about my dog, a lens about Christmas gifts, a lens about a steam mop I use, and so on. My lenses weren't supporting each other and the few views I was accidentally getting here and there didn't result in any additional traffic to the other lenses.

Image: Naito8 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

When compared to mass marketing, niche marketing can be described as "targeted to a certain group of people". The best way to make money on Squidoo is to build a lens around a product or one very specific topic that people are searching for. Then build more lenses in the same niche. What would be a good niche? Recipes lenses do really well on Squidoo. Let's take "Casserole Recipes" - you can build lenses "Beef Casserole Recipes", "Chicken Casserole Recipes", "Potato Casserole Recipes", and so on. You can feature your other casserole recipes in Squidoo lens' Sidebar or at the bottom of each lens. You can make one lens that includes links to all the recipes. With recipe lenses, picking a product to promote is not very difficult. But like Seth Godin suggests in one of his books, make sure you have a banana you are selling, and that banana is very obvious. When given too many options, consumers get lost  and end up leaving without making a purchase - and that's the one thing you want to avoid.
So if you are interested in making money on Squidoo, my tip today is to pick a niche for your Squidoo lenses and write, write, and write some more. Connect your lenses to each other and get several lens' views out of every visitor that comes to your Squidoo lens. Looking forward to hearing about your Squidoo experiences. Please feel free to leave me a comment and a backlink to one of your lenses :)