Social Media Continued - Squidoo

Last month I wrote about Twitter for affiliate management and put some ideas out there as to how affiliates can use this social media tool. I got some good responses both as comments to my blog and via email. Social media is hot right now but it is by no means a fad. Consumers are becoming more empowered with each passing day and these tools are only expanding the reach and opportunity of retailers and affiliates alike. It’s starting to change the face of marketing online.

One of the portals/tools that I’d like to highlight today is Squidoo. I have really grown to love this site and what they want to do for the Internet and how they empower the customer to earn money via sharing their personal passions and expertise via lenses. It’s the first extension of affiliate marketing into social media that I have seen and represents a direction that I believe acquisitions will be heading in the future - monetizing the word of mouth that is already going on.

So what exactly is Squidoo? From their site: Squidoo is the world’s most popular site for people who want to build a page about their passions. Highlight books, blogs, vids, online shops, or just spread the word about stuff you love. Squidoo’s goal as a platform is to bring the power of recommendation to search. Squidoo’s goal as a co-op is to pay as much money as we can to our lensmasters and to charity. And Squidoo’s goal as a community is to have fun along the way, and meet new ideas and the people behind them.

What is a lense? From their site: A lens is one person’s view on a topic that matters to her. It’s an easy-to-build, single web page that can point to blogs, favorite links, RSS feeds, Flickr photos, Google maps, your eBay auctions, CafePress designs, Amazon books or music, and more. Then, when someone is looking for recommended information, fast, your lens gets him started and sends him off in the right direction. Win, win!

I read a description of Squidoo on their site a while ago, although I couldn’t find it when I started writing this, that described Squidoo like this: when you search for something on the search engines, you are sort of pecking around, finding bits of information and parts of your answer but never the whole answer. A lens is a compilation of information, comments and links about one specific topic that jumpstarts your search and tries to provide you with a complete answer. I think that is a pretty good description.

Since Squidoo is designed to empower it’s lens masters to make money for themselves or give their earnings to charity, it lends itself quite well to affiliate marketing and many are taking advantage of it. Here are some of the best lenses and a few of mine:

Funky, Chic and Cool Laptop Bags
HomeSchool Happenings
Tour de France
Cycling Videos

Squidoo allows you to create many modules in order to customize your pages. It has several build in modules that allow you to earn money via amazon, ebay, cafe press and some others. I created my lenses for to see exactly how much you can tailor each page. In my cycling videos lens I added my own html with my own Amazon and Walmart links to some of the best cycling videos that I myself enjoy. It worked pretty flawlessly as the portal allows a lot of standard html code. Customization is pretty easy if you know what you are doing.

How can affiliate use it? (probably wondering why it took me so long to get to the point)

1. To drive traffic. Creating a lens on your topic with outbound links to your site can help you get traffic to your main portal. And hey, how doesn’t need another traffic source.
2. To establish yourself as an expert. Are your marketing in a niche? A lens on your niche that showcases all your knowledge and links to your site(s) can help propel you as an expert in your field.
3. Earn money straight from your lens. There are a myriad of ways to earn money directly from your lens. There are even tutorials on how to do this.
4. Inbound links. Are you constantly on the hunt for links to your site. Here you can give yourself a few.
5. Well, because it is fun dangit. It took me a while to really understand what a lens was and why I would have one. But once I started building my own, it became addictive, it’s just fun.

But here is the catch. Your lenses have to be good. I know it may seem logical and elementary, but you have to create something worth reading. And hey, this isn’t just good advice for your Squidoo lens, it’s good advice for all the sites you operate. Good content will find an audience, the audience will find it and forward it to friends. If you throw up a purely commercial lens with only outbound links and no real content, no one will read it, no one will link to it and it will do absolutely nothing for you overall. There are a lot of these out there, just go through the shopping category. If you add some great content to the community, the community will reward you, people will link to you and you may have a great revenue source. Check out that first Lens I listed, Seth Godin himself pointed that one at as a good example.

I highly recommend before you build your first lens that you do some thorough browsing around and look closely at the category you wish to write a lens for. See what is there for your topic already and try and find an area that isn’t being targeted (you’ve heard this advice before in search marketing and affiliate marketing overall, service a previously un-serviced niche).

There are a lot of tools out there in the social media arena and there are a lot more coming down the pipe. Affiliates have a huge opportunity to use some of these things to service their customers and members in new ways and produce new revenue streams for themselves and for their merchant partners. I’m excited to see how some of the more ingenuative affiliates use these tools in the years to come.

Our Twitter account, ConvAffiliates, has been a great experiment that we are continuing to use. We have notified affiliates of one day specials, affiliate promotions, top sellers and other information that they have found useful in working with our programs. Are you following our Twitter account, let us know what you think. Anyone expand on the ideas I threw out there last month?

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