Although we often think of Squidoo as a be all or end all for generating income from affiliate marketing, Squidoo is just as good or even better at driving traffic to other websites.
Because Squidoo always has a jump on an unknown website when it comes to Google recognition, and indexing, and generally has a boost in search engine ratings, Squidoo is an ideal place to write articles that will drive traffic to your own website where you can earn more money directly from selling your own products and services or affiliate products and services.
I will give you two examples that I myself am participating in, one that is active, and one that will start in January.
The first example is a website that, if you follow me at all, you have heard of before: Lake Erie Artists Gallery.
If you pay attention, you will notice that I am building the main website by adding both content pages and products to capture more varied keywords from the site itself. This particular site is about 4 or 5 years old which helps it show up pretty quickly in searches because there is a lot of history. This site is currently at a PR2 but goes up and down between 2 and 4 throughout the year. My biggest concern is to drive more buying traffic to the site, and then have stuff for them to buy when they get there. I will be working both ends of this spectrum all of next year by creating Squidoo lenses about individual artists and/or product lines that I carry to drive traffic to the site, and by continuing to add products for people to buy. If I do this for an entire year consistently, what do you think will happen?
The second example is a brand new website that Bev and I are working on together. This website is called DIY – Do It Yourself Reviews, and it is really an experiment by Bev and myself on writing product reviews that primarily drive traffic to Amazon.
You will be able to watch this site grow, starting in the first week of January, when we get it going. Our plan is to add 2 reviews per week. To help support this new site, I am already setting up [intlink id="1080" type="post"]RSS feeds[/intlink] to Twitter, and adding the feeds to lenses and hubs. I am also creating some outlying product reviews that will send traffic to this website. Again, with Bev and I adding 2 reviews per week, how much traffic do you think we can build by the end of the year? This blog is going to earn income from affiliate products, but we won’t have to share it with anyone else. And we can use the power of Squidoo’s reputation on Google to send traffic to the site.
There are other high ranking Google article sites that will also help drive traffic to your own website. My personal favorite is Hubpages, but Ezine Articles comes in a close second. And there are many more.
Once you learn the techniques to make your Squidoo lenses successful, there is no reason why you cannot stretch out your wings, and build your own website or support an existing one with your skills. Squidoo can help you get there faster.
About lakeerieartists
Sounds like you are formulating a good backlinking strategy to apply to these sites Paula. It is great to get a lens on the first page of Google, but the buzz of searching for your keywords and then realising that nearly all and even all the links are to your pages is faBtastic!
And that is what people need to aim for – once you have mastered the art of keyword research and learned how to get a lens onto the first page of Google, then your next goal should be to get content from various sources onto that first page. Your aim should be to have the lens + articles on Hubpages, ezine and other article directories + blog posts ALL on the first page, so whichever link people click on, then it is yours.
And it can be done
This should be an interesting project to follow. I started a blog a few years back in the interest of driving more buying traffic to my gallery website. It was not as successful as I hoped. While I’ve got a good readership it is primarily artists who are big investors in others art. So while I’ve sold work directly through my blog and of course some off the website it not as many sales as I would like. Living in the boonies in rural Iowa, and me getting older so not liking all the hauling and toting as much, not to mention art fair thing not being as lucrative as in the past, I’m looking for ways to boost my art income and yet stay home.
The DIY blog is off to a great start. Much success with it, Paula and Bev!
My problem is that I don’t know of a way to make a site that looks good. I can set up a blog, but they seem to be geared towards content that is constantly being updated. I have set up Joomla, but it seems to have its limitations as well, or I don’t know how to utilize it fully. Nobody is going to want to look at a boring text page. It’s easy to make a page that looks good with Squidoo… I don’t seem to have the tools to make something that looks good somewhere else.
My husband makes flash sites… he spends days working on two very simple pages of content. That’s just too much work.
Well, you can set up a WordPress site/blog, and instead of using the blog posts to publish, you can use the pages. Then they would be static. Frankly, you could set up 100′s of static WordPress one or two page sites like that.
How do you set up an RSS feed to Twitter? And how many arms do you have Paula? I am already amazed at how much you write and you are doing more?!
@Brooke, I’m not really sure what you need but WP also has Zemanta which lets you add a picture very easily to help make the posts look good. I don’t think you can do it for pages, just posts I think.
Okay, you guys have inspired me to write two new posts. One about Twitterfeed and one about some basic WP things. That one may have to be a series.
Two arms, two legs, just like everyone else.
Instead of a post, I wrote a new lens about Adding an RSS Feed to Twitter Using Twitterfeed