In a recent post How to make money with Squidoo – Are You Disappointed With Your Squidoo Earnings? I wrote an open letter to Squidoo Lensmaster RWoman, who was spending a lot of time networking on Squidoo only to realise that this is not what produces an income. In Part 2 of my letter, I discuss what she needs to do, now that she is thinking along the right lines.
Dear Deanna
In my last letter I discussed how networking within the Squidoo Community may be a good thing to do, but how this will not get you long term success with your lenses. I said that the two things that will help you are:
- Making more lenses that sell products that people are looking for
- Getting targetted traffic to those lenses
And the key to all of this is using keyword research to narrow the niche and establish backlinks.
Paula Atwell has written a post about Backlinks and is going to follow up with a series of articles so I won’t go into it in too much detail here. However, what I will say is that I personally am finding that a combination of thorough keyword research plus some quality backlinks to my lenses are getting me on to the first page of Google AND some of these lenses are converting nicely to sales.
We also discuss backlinks in the Squidoo Step by Step Guidebook, which is currently undergoing a major revision and the new Guidebook will have an updated list of sites, from which you can get quality backlinks.
You will note that I make no mention of Lens Promotion. This is deliberate, because as I said in my last letter, promoting your lenses within the Squidoo Community may give them a temporary boost but it is traffic from OUTSIDE Squidoo that will determine the lens’ success.
The only way you can stand a good chance of getting traffic is to do keyword research and find the phrases that people are using to search for the information (and products) they are looking for. The worse thing you can do is to assume that you just know what people are looking for.
So even if you are convinced you have a “hot topic”, one that you just cannot fail with, it is essential to do your keyword research, or you could just be wasting your time. The phrases YOU may use to find information are not necessarily the phrases that the majority of searchers are typing into that Google Search Box.
I have two examples of keyword optimized Squidoo lenses to give you:
These are huuuuge topics. There’s massive competition but following some thorough keyword research, I am ranking at #1 on Google for the Wii lens, with 14,000,000 competing pages, and the second page of Google for the Royal Wedding, which has 17,800,000 competing pages.
Check out the URLs of those lenses – you can see the keywords I found that give me high search volume but have low competition and they are probably not what you would have thought. The Wii Lens uses the wrong name for the product and the Royal Wedding URL is grammatically incorrect – BUT IT DOES NOT MATTER! These phrases get me traffic and in the case of the Wii Draw, it is my best sales lens.The Wedding lens is maintaining a good lens rank so I get tier payments.
I am a stickler for good grammar and spelling, but I certainly am not averse to using incorrect grammar and spellings on my lenses, which brings me traffic.
And although both lenses have had visits from within the Squidoo community, it is the Google traffic that is boosting and maintaining the lensrank.
I explain how to use the free Google Adwords Keyword Research tool in my Squidoo lens: How to Research Keywords, but when you have mastered the technique, you may want to invest in a more advanced Keyword Research Tool: Market Samurai.
Market Samurai has a free trial and even if you decide not to go ahead a pay for the full version, you will be left with an awesome keyword research tool that will show you how you may be able to beat the competition for high ranking keywords.
Blogging is a great way to get backlinks to your lenses but sometimes people worry too much about whether anyone will see those blog posts. In some situations, just having the backlink to the lens will be worth more than any traffic that comes to the blog.
In a future post I will outline everything I said recently in a Giant Squid Open Mike Broadcast on Blog Talk Radio, but you can listen to the Archive: Blogging for Backlinks – not for Traffic.
I hope this helps you Deanna – good luck
AJ
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