Squidoo Tips

Increase Squidoo Income with Affiliate Programs

Did you know that there are other ways to earn money with Squidoo besides the Adsense revenue share and the modules such as Amazon and eBay? You betcha! In fact, almost all of my Squidoo income comes from other sources than Squidoo’s “sell stuff” modules. What I use are affiliate programs, which are programs offered by companies that work with big retailers such as Wal-Mart, Microsoft, and even Hanes and act as a sort of “bridge” between us and the retailer. We can then sell the products offered by these retailers, and receive a commission for doing so.

Why do retailers do this? Well, they spend millions and millions of dollars each year on advertising. When we partner up with them through affiliate programs and promote their products for them, we do it at our own risk. Since it’s cheaper and safer (for them) in the long run to just pay affiliates (us) a cut of the profit for selling something, these big companies prefer to do this and be able to spend less on advertising costs. We spend our time promoting their products, get a share of the profit for each product purchased through us, and the company spends less on advertising. It’s usually a win-win situation.

To join an affiliate program and start promoting products is very easy. There are literally dozens of big affiliate programs that are partnered with hundreds (thousands?) of companies. Some of the bigger and most prestigious ones include Linkshare, Commission Junction, and Pepperjam Network. Simply sign up with one of these programs (free, never pay to join an affiliate program) and look for some products that are relevant to your lenses. Usually, all you have to do is copy and paste some HTML code into your lens and it will generate a link or picture people can click through to buy the product. You’ll then receive a commission for each item sold.

I’ve seen a LOT of lenses that have had great potential for earning money, but their owners don’t seem to know about affiliate programs and a lot of opportunity is lost. All they would have to do is join one of the programs listed above and earn some money for their hard work of creating a great lens. Most of these lenses have some of the Squidoo money making modules such as Amazon, and I have no idea how well they’re doing on that, but there can be other more rewarding alternatives. Don’t get me wrong, Amazon is great–there just are often alternatives that are more targeted. For instance, if you build a lens reviewing art supplies, wouldn’t you rather buy them from a trusted art supply store instead of an all-in-one superstore like Amazon that sells tens of thousands of products ranging anywhere from computers to lingerie to even groceries? I know I would, and I think that a lot of people would agree.

Also, like I mentioned earlier, never pay to join an affiliate program. You should never have to pay to promote other people’s products for them, and any affiliate program that tries to charge you for the “privilege” of making them money is almost always a scam. Stick with the guys that have built up a good reputation, and be sure to check out each affiliate program before you join it to be sure it’s legit. A simple Google search of the program’s name should bring up enough reviews and information to verify it. If you see a bunch of people complaining about it, then find a different program to work with. There are plenty out there. I’m working on a list of trustful affiliate programs that I recommend, so stay tuned for that.

And, if you join Linkshare, Commission Junction, or Pepperjam Network and are having trouble getting started, just shoot me an email and I’ll see what I can do to help you out.

30 Ways to Increase Squidoo Traffic

Proper promotion is one of the keys to SquidSuccess, and here I’ve made up a list of ways to promote lenses that I have found particularly useful. Have any to add that I missed? Feel free to add them in a comment below.

1. Make something worth talking about and repeating.

2. Add unique, updated, and useful content to your lens.

3. Add new tags to your lens. You can have up to 40.

4. Submit your lens to one of the many lens groups, or create your own.

5. Join StumbleUpon and submit your lens.

6. Add your lens RSS feed to Zimbio and submit your lenses to appropriate Wikizines (Zimbio’s groups).

7. Submit your lenses to Lensroll (but only a couple a day please!)

8. Post to social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Del.icio.us–but don’t be spammy about it!

9. Comment on other people’s lenses with related, useful comments and links.

10. Comment on related blogs with a link to your related lens.

11. Start up your own blog, completely free, and promote your lenses there.

12. Build a few lenses on the same topic and cross-promote them.

13. Write good articles about your lens topic and submit them to places like ezinearticles, of course don’t forget to link to your lens.

14. Promote your lens on social networks like MySpace and Facebook.

15. Put links to one or two of your lenses in your signature at forums you hang out at.

16. Ask for feedback and help about your lens on SquidU.

17. Tell your friends about your lenses.

18. Include a link to one of your lenses in your email signature.

19. Build your lenses around specific keywords with low competition, by using tools such as Google’s Keyword Tool.

20. Start up a Monkeybrain and disagree with someone about something. Create a (fun) controversy.

21. Include interactive stuff in your lenses like polls, plexos, and guestbooks.

22. Focus on a few things about a topic in your lens; don’t try to include everything.

23. Ping your lens and notify the search engines and some directories of its creation or change.

24. Submit your lenses to Squidoo directories like Isle of Squid, Squoogle, Squidom, and LensMasterWorld.

25. Build linkbait lenses–lenses that people find useful and interesting and will likely link to, thus bringing you more traffic.

26. Improve your writing skills by taking a class at a local community college or something. It’s worth the investment.

27. Be original and creative about your lenses. Don’t copy other people’s work–they will hate you for it and so will the search engines.

28. Edit your lenses often and add more UUU (unique, updated, useful) content. Can’t emphasize this enough.

29. Fill a need. Find something people want badly and build the bridge that takes them to it.

30. Above all, don’t spam. It pays to take the time to create something of quality.

How to Promote Your Lenses Without Being Labeled a Spammer

Proper promotion is the key to success in the marketing world. You can make the coolest, most awesome, wonderful website (or lens), but if nobody knows about it, it won’t get any visits. And therefore no sales and no money. I know firsthand all about this. I’ve made really cool sites in the past, before I knew a thing about promotion. I would just make them and wait for the people to start pouring in to visit and buy things. This might be possible with a brick-and-mortar business on Main Street, but on the Internet, you gotta promote your site aggressively to get traffic.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to promote your web creations. One way could get you good traffic and good feedback from visitors, another way could get you labeled as a spammer and a nuisance. I like getting comments on my Squidoo lenses, and it’s always fun to wake up in the morning with an email saying Squidoo: You have new comments! and seeing that someone left a quality comment that contributes to my lens and also links to one of their lenses on a similar topic for further reading.

I really don’t mind when people leave a link to their related lens if they leave a good comment and the lens they link to is relevant. However, I despise commenters who post a garbage comment on my coin collecting lens like:

“Hey! Nice lens! Now check out mine on wrinkle cream!”

Huh? Since when did coin collecting and wrinkle cream have anything in common? Plus, you didn’t even contribute anything to my lens. Why should I approve your comment? DELETE! In my book, people who do this are spammers, the same people who send me unwanted emails selling me pills–they contribute nothing. This is definitely the wrong way to promote lenses.

Squidoo lenses are really liked by the search engines, and that feeling of affection is increased by building backlinks to them by using social bookmarking sites and writing articles with links to them, for instance. Unfortunately, there are people who maliciously take advantage of this and ruin it for the rest of us who work hard.

Because of them, the same people who post useless comments on my lenses, sites like Propeller, which was once awesome for building backlinks to lenses, have now banned Squidoo lenses. There are other sites that have begun to shun Squidoo, and Squidoo’s reputation has been permanently damaged because of people who promote their lenses the wrong way.

If you’re going to comment on someone else’s lens and link to one of yours, make sure it’s a quality and relevant one. Really, it’s worth it in the long run to take 20 seconds to type out something useful and link to one of your lenses that’s similar in topic. The same applies to social bookmarking and other linkbuilding–don’t overwhelm the site with links to your lenses and be sure to write decent descriptions and tags.

The right way to promote your lenses, the way that will get your comments approved by people like me, and the way that will get you backlinks and search engine love is to contribute something of quality. Like it or not, quality and relevance is becoming king now, and those who practice it will triumph in the end.

SquidTop: Squidoo Blogging Heaven

Squidoo by itself is an incredibly powerful tool. So is blogging. But when combined together, the results are mindblowing. Squidoo and blogging just seem to go hand-in-hand; it’s as if the two were meant to always be together.

Captain Squid realized this and so he and I put our heads together and created SquidTop, a place where Squidoo lensmasters can create their very own SquidBlog and promote their latest lenses, and talk with other lensmasters about Squidoo. And they can all do it completely free. It’s pretty much Squidoo blogging heaven.

Additionally, SquidTop has some pretty nice features, like Adsense revenue sharing, Twitter integration, and much more. New features are being added all the time, too! To top it all off (no pun intended), SquidTop is based on the Wordpress blogging platform, so if you’ve used Wordpress before you’ll feel right at home.

What the best part about SquidTop though is that it is absolutely adored by the search engines. Google comes back to visit dozens of times each day, and new blog posts are indexed within hours. That’s hours. Not days or weeks, but hours. This is some pretty powerful stuff!

Several people, myself included, have experimented with this and have noticed that when blogged about on SquidTop, lenses get indexed really quickly. So if you’ve got some lenses that you’re having a tough time getting indexed in the search engines, blogging about them on SquidTop will jumpstart the process. Or, if you just want to give some of your lenses a boost higher in search engine rankings, SquidTop will help with that.

If you haven’t started your own custom Squidoo blog yet, head on over to SquidTop, click the blue “Sign Up” button in the top right and start blogging away!