Using Squidoo for Maximum Marketing Impact

In my previous article I discussed how you can use a series of inter-linked lenses to increase your traffic and therefore sales potential. In this article I?m going to talk about the importance of building links and PR for your lenses and how to use Squidoo for maximum marketing impact.

In my previous article I talked about building a series of interlinked ?hobbyist? and ?sales? lenses. In this way you can create a series of sub-niche pages that will drive traffic to either your ?sales? lenses or your website or blog. In effect, to create a mini-website in Squidoo. So, how can you further maximise the potential of your lenses?

Social Bookmarking

An important point to remember again here, is that your Squidoo ?website? should be treated as would any other site or blog in the Web 2.0 environment. So that means back links and PR are just as important.

The best thing to do is visit any number of the popular social bookmarking sites, like Blogmemes, del.icio.us, Rawsugar, etc. (I use 10 -12) and add links there to your ?hobbyist? lenses. These one way incoming links, with their PR, will then filter throughout your lenses. If you keep your ?hobbyist? lens purely that. i.e. no selling on them at all, you could even consider adding a link to it from Wikipedia.

In addition, if your lenses also link to your website or blog, that PR will eventually filter to those as well.

Remember also to keep the distraction down on your lenses. You should not try to make money directly from your lenses, from a percentage of the adsense revenue, etc. Your purpose is to get visitors to your sales lenses or sales pages in your site. So steer clear of adding the Amazon, eBay link modules.

Capture Your Leads

The most important point, and one that a surprising number of current lens users are missing, is capture your leads.

The best way to do this is to give away a free bonus, a free report or tip sheet or a subscription to your newsletter if you have one.

I?m surprised at how many marketers are not doing this directly from their lenses. Perhaps many are using their lenses to direct people to their sites or blogs and they assume they will capture the lead there. I think this is missing a huge opportunity. I know I have had many sign ups from my lenses who never go further than the lens.

It is also technically tricky to get an opt-in form on a Squidoo lens. There?s a bit more to it than just cutting and pasting the code from your autoresponder service provider. It?s not the purpose of these articles to go into the technicals but you use what is called an iframe…which is simply putting a window of a size you specify inside of another website…so in essence it is almost like displaying a image in a blog post…you have to upload the image and place it between ?img? tags…

It is similar but you have your opt-in form set up on a separate website…and use the iframe tags to place it on your lens…

There is lens on it in Squidoo http://www.squidoo.com/iframes

So to sum up, you should treat your Squidoo Lenses in the same way as a website? employ social bookmarking techniques for indexing and PR, keep the exits from your lenses to only those you want and, whatever you do, get your opt-in form on all your lenses and capture those leads.

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