Part III:  Featured Article

Maximising exposure with squidoo

Maximising exposure with squidoo   by Dmitry Dowzhenko

This article we are going to look into the importance of building links for your lenses, and how to use squidoo for the maximum marketing purposes.

You can link several lenses together all of a similar theme, this allows you to create many small niche pages that will hopefully be able to direct traffic towards your sales lenses and ultimately get them to visit your website and or blog. Just what can you do to maximise the marketing potential of the squidoo lens?

A squidoo website should be considered as any other website or blog built in the Web 2.0 environment. Back links and page rank are very important to your squidoo lens, just as important as they are to any other website.

The best way to increase the back links and PR of your lenses is to visit many of the other social bookmarking sites such as Yahoo my site, and del.icio.us, currently I use around 10 different sites and use them to add links back to your squidoo lenses. These one way links provide your lenses with a much needed page rank. If you don't sell anything from your lenses then you could even get a link to it from Wikipedia.

Ideally you want to point your lens to your website, therefore over some time any page rank will filter down to your website, this is why the page rank of your lens is so important.

You should not treat your lenses as a sales platform, rather you should use them as a method of getting people to your site. If you try to make money on your lenses this can be offputting and distracting for visitors. I'd avoid adding any Amazon and eBay modules to your squidoo lens.

The reason for having your lens in the first place is to get leads to visit your site, this is known as capturing your leads. Many people forget to do this though! The best way to capture your leads is to offer some sort of free bonus. Everybody loves something that's free, so offer a free report, eBook or newsletter subscription.

Many marketing people simply don't think of offering these freebies directly from their lenses. Many people seem to assume that they will capture the leads when they get to your site, however if you try to capture them on your lens you have much more chance of doing so. I personally get many signups directly from my lens, I am pretty sure that these people would of simply closed it if the information wasn't readily available.

It is a little difficult to place a opt-in form into a squidoo lens, however that doesn't mean that it's impossible. You can't just copy and paste code that you've got from the website, you need to use an iframe, this is a window inside another website. You then host the opt-in form on another website, and use the iframe tags in your lens.

So just in case you fell asleep part way through that you should treat your squidoo lens as if it were a regular website, use several different social bookmarking techniques to improve the lenses page rank. Restrict the number of exit routes you have from your lens, and add an opt-in form on your lens to capture as many leads as possible.
 

About the Author

Order Professionaly Written Private Label Articles at http://infite.com