I’m starting to think I’m on a roll lately. A roll of coming across new marketers that I like, and material that I actually appreciate.

I started reading some material last week from a lady who I know has many fans on my own list. Her name seems to pop up in emails to me, in my forums, blog comments, everywhere, so I thought it was time to see what the fuss was about.

We differ in that her primary focus is the use of hub sites, in particular Squidoo for the generation of traffic and even income from the web. Turns out she has some very intelligent things to say re: Squidoo for generating traffic to your niche sites and for monetization.

I managed to get this guest post from her on the subject so I thought I’d share with you:

Increasing Blog Traffic With Squidoo

In my opinion, Squidoo is an excellent platform to use to drive traffic to your blog (or blogs). At PotPieGirl.com, the traffic I get from Squidoo has a much lower bounce rate than other referral traffic sources. Visitors via Squidoo tend to not only spend longer on my site, but also read deeper than any of my other sources of traffic. Squidoo visitors actually spend, on average, 2 minutes longer than any other site visitors. All in all, Squidoo is an excellent way to increase the traffic to your blog, increase awareness of your blog, and add to the reader experience of your Squidoo lens! That’s a win/win/win in my book.

So, for all those that have heard of Squidoo, but have no clue what it is and how it works… and for all those that have blogs, and have Squidoo lenses, but don’t know the best way to tie them all together… this post is for you.

What Is Squidoo?

Squidoo.com is a web site that allows users to create a free account which allows them the access to create as many individual pages on the Squidoo site that they want. A user on Squidoo is called a ‘lensmaster‘ and a page on the Squidoo site is called a ‘lens‘.

You can compare a Squidoo lens to a camera lens in the sense that both focus in on a subject. High-quality lenses will have unique content, images, RSS feeds, and yes, even affiliate products and merchandise that all center on a single topic. Most users catch on to making these Squidoo pages fairly easily and then learn to fine tune and SEO optimize their Squidoo lenses for better performance in the search engines.

Squidoo is VERY user-friendly and has a fabulous team and community behind it. Squidoo also will pay you, the lensmaster, a little bit each month as a co-op share of the revenue earned on the entire site from AdSense and other advertisements.

How Will Squidoo Improve My Blog?

There are three wonderful ways that utilizing Squidoo in your blog promotion can really help your blog.

1) Increase your blog traffic - Every time you get another exposure point on the internet for your blog with a link to your posts or home page in it, you increase your chances at more traffic fro your blog.

2) Provide a Strong Back Link To Your Blog - The Squidoo.com site is currently a PR7 and each individual lens (Squidoo page) will develop Page Rank of its own. This alone, can provide you with very valuable back links to your blog which, in turn, can greatly improve the Page Rank of your blog and your rankings in the search engines.

3) Increase Search Engine Exposure For Your Blog

Aside from these two reasons, because of Squidoo’s high Page Rank, these individual pages (lenses) you create have an opportunity to rank very well in the search engines on their own. Instead of having one or two pages of your blog ranking for your key terms in the search engines, you can increase your exposure with lenses you have also made – and end up having 3-4 positions covered for a search.

Squidoo is free. Squidoo pays YOU. Squidoo is powerful. Got it?

How to Improve Your Blog Using Squidoo

Blogs have a wonderful little option attached to them called a RSS feed. On any, or all, of your lenses, you can put the RSS feed of your lens for a big boost in exposure for your blog. If, for example, your blog is about cars – you could make a lens about blue cars, and red cars, and green cars, and new cars, etc etc, and each of those pages can include an RSS feed of your blog. Not only will this help your search engine exposure for each individual ‘long tail’ keyword, you have also just greatly improved the exposure of the content of your blog to people who are LOOKING for that kind of information. As I said, QUALITY traffic.

Now, here is the thing about RSS feeds that are found on Squidoo lenses. They do NOT create backlinks to the web pages listed in the feed. Google cannot read them.

If you already have a Squidoo lens that has an RSS feed on it using the RSS module, go ahead and Google the url for your lens. Now, take a look at the ‘cached’ version of your lens. You will see in that cache Google has that the RSS feed areas all render with the little spinning wheel icon and the words “fetching rss feed… please stand by“. Apparently, these RSS feeds load after the Squidoo lens does, and Google can’t read them.

Just for fun, look at this Google search for “fetching rss feed… please stand by”. Yup, looks like quite a few web pages get indexed for this term… haha!

All this means is the feed content from your RSS feed will not create a back link to your blog. In order to get a backlink to your blog, you will need to create a regualr HTML text link on your lens. Be sure to not have more than 9 links OUT on your lens to the same domain (RSS feeds do not count). This is a new policy change with Squidoo.

Squidoo and Blogs Go Together Like Peas n’ Carrots!

Ok, sorry for the Forrest Gump reference, but seriously, Squidoo and blogs are made for each other. The traffic I receive to my main blog from the Squidoo site accounts for about 38% of my traffic. Naturally, organic traffic from the search engines is my biggest traffic source as well as all my wonderful return readers.

Also an interesting stat is that out of all the traffic that got here from Squidoo the past 2 months, over 72% of those folks came to PotPieGirl.com for the first time! Now THAT is great exposure!

How Do I Add My RSS Feed To My Squidoo Lens?

Adding your RSS feed to a Squidoo page is easy, easy, easy. Go into ‘edit’ mode for your lens. Choose to “add modules”, and right there you will see “RSS- Add Your Blog”

Click the green plus sign to Add a RSS module, then click “add”.

Now, when you are back in the edit/workshop mode for your lens, look for your new RSS module. Open the module to edit, and fill in the needed information.

Fill in like this:

Now click ‘save’ and you’re done!

Do this on all your lenses that are relevant to your blog or niche blog. Remember, when trying to get traffic to your blog, the best way is to generate exposure everywhere you can. Every visitor helps. And who knows? One visitor might tell a friend, and they’ll tell a friend, and so on and so on….

Bottom Line on Blog Exposure With Squidoo

If you have a blog (or many blogs) get to Squidoo and make some lenses! Just think, if ONE little Squidoo lens might bring you 20 new visitors a day…. what if you made TWENTY Squidoo pages? I’m telling you – It is a win/win situation all the way around! (And it sure beats PAYING for traffic!)

Don’t Know How To Use Squidoo?

No problem! I have a great ( and FREE) guide that walks you all the way through setting up a Squidoo account to getting your first Squidoo lens (web page) live and online. You can get my free Squidoo 101 guide here – or just click the picture of the book.

Andrew, thank you for having me! It was truly an honor to be able to guest post here!

]]> http://andrewhansen.name/traffic-generation/how-to-increase-blog-traffic-with-squidoo/feed/ 24 http://andrewhansen.name/traffic-generation/problogger-on-fast-traffic/ http://andrewhansen.name/traffic-generation/problogger-on-fast-traffic/#comments Sat, 31 Jan 2009 16:31:11 +0000 admin http://andrewhansen.name/?p=195

I clicked through to a post on Problogger yesterday because the post title included the words “fast traffic” – I’m a sheep for those buzz words too!

Darren in his typically honest and down to earth style gave an answer that I couldn’t resist commenting on because it was exactly what I’d hoped he would say…

The post was an interview the interesting segment of which I thought I’d paste here – keep in mind this guy is probably one of the most highly respected and knowledgeable bloggers around:

4. If you have to bring instant visitors to your blog in the next 30 minutes, what steps will you follow?

If you’re expecting big traffic quickly you’re asking the wrong guy. My strategy has always been to write content that people will want to read now – but also for years to come. Some call this ‘evergreen’ content and it takes time to write. It might not bring traffic quickly but if you write something that is still relevant in a year or more you’ll continue to draw traffic to it.

I’m sorry if that doesn’t answer your question but to be honest there’s a lot of bloggers looking for quick traffic and quick money and a lot of people promising to teach them how to get it – but that’s not my experience of blogging.

Take a long term view, build something that matters and you’ll build a blog that grows in traffic over the long haul.

He even comments on “passive traffic”…

5. Most bloggers like to get passive traffic… What are the one time actions we can do which will keep on bringing traffic without any effort after that?
Once again I’m afraid my answer could disappoint…. I’m not really someone who has found too many actions that will bring traffic (or income) without any effort after you do them.

The only real exception to that is to write brilliant content. When you do this it has the potential to bring traffic to your blog (via search engines) for years to come. This in turn can lead to ongoing income.

Other than that I’ve not really found too much about blogging that is ‘passive’. It’s a lot of work over the long haul.

Great to see someone telling it like it is.

Sure there are ways to get traffic quickly – PPC, even article marketing can deliver. But if you’re looking to build a real business you need to be driving that traffic to something that has some inherent value. If not you’ll soon be replaced, both in the search engines and in your marketplace by someone who is.

Furthermore, it’s another example of something that gets continually promised to us because it’s what we all “want” but really SHOULD we want it? I’m no exception, those buzzwords sucked me in too but again, is fast traffic and fast money what we REALLY want? Not if we want to build real lasting businesses, that’s for sure.

Let me know what you think.

A while back I wrote this post that contained a recommendation to Entrecard.com.

I was getting traffic from that site because it was just after the service launched big and it was getting frequented by marketers mostly.

To be honest, I didn’t think it would last…

I logged in to Entrecard today and I don’t know how they’ve done it, but it’s become an incredible place.

I thought it would keep growing big in the marketing community but never really have a benefit for niche bloggers – boy was I wrong!

I was surprised to find that now, make money online, marketing, and blogging AREN’T the most popular categories (by most popular I mean, containing the most members blogs from which you can potentially get advertising and traffic) – in fact, even the health, entertainment, technology, and even parenting/family categories are stacked full of blogs for you to network with, get links from, get advertising from and get traffic from.

Most of all it’s free. If you’re getting started with a blog in ANY niche, this is worth another look!

I’ve never gotten much into commenting on other blogs for traffic. I’ve messed around with it here and there but it’s very time intensive and for me was never worth the results.

That being said, I just saw this cool little tool mentioned on Michelle Machpherson‘s blog that will give you a big advantage in the blog commenting for traffic game…

Basically you can put blogs from your niche on a notify list and any time those blogs get a new piece of content, you’ll get notified immediately.

As Michelle notes, it’s not like an RSS reader that can take hours and hours to update, it literally tells you as soon as the new post has been made to that blog.

What’s the benefit of this?

If you’re the first person to comment on a popular post, your comment has to be scrolled past by everyone else who reads and intends to comment. This means more traffic for you – and MUCH more traffic than if you are the 15th commenter – pretty cool I reckon.

Of course you don’t want to spam with it and you always want to leave quality comments or no one will visit your link anyway but like I said, this might be a handy tool if you’re looking for a few extra targeted visitors.

I’m telling you about this right as I hear about it so I’ll be testing out starting now as well.

Let me know how you go with it.

Some of you will have heard of this, some not, but I’ve started fiddling with a new method of driving cheap paid traffic to my sites, both niche related and IM focused.

In fact some reading this may even have found this site by the following means…

You’ll all know about the social network Stumbleupon.com.

Basically it’s users install a toolbar in their browsers and when they want information about a certain thing, they select that category and hit this stumble thing, and a random site from the stumbleupon network loads in their browser.

The sites in the stumbleupon network come from other people seeing blog posts and websites and submitting them to stumbleupon – you’ll have seen icons like STUMBLE THIS under blog posts, like here on my blog. As a site owner you can get extra traffic just by encouraging people to ‘stumble’ your site.

ANYWAY, that’s the background but that’s not actually the method I’m talking about today.

There is also a paid advertising system on stumbleupon.com.

The way it works is that you pay a certain fee per impression – not an impression of your AD but an impression of your SITE – you pay for a visit in other words, similar to PPC.

You can pre pay for a certain number of visits, after which your site gets automatically put into the stumbleupon network as though someone had submitted it (so it seems natural, not forced and ‘advertisey’ at all)

So when those users go to your category and hit stumble, stumbleupon makes sure your site comes up as many times as you’ve paid for!

Oh and the best part – it only costs 5c per visitor!! No $10 per click crap like Adwords.

So basically it’s a way to drive traffic to your site for 5c a visitor – if your sales systems are setup well, that should be enough for you to make a good return on anyway…

But it gets SO much better than that.

You pay for these visits right… Then your page loads when the users click their stumble buttons…

Now when the users see a site, if they like it, they can choose to give it a thumbs up.

After that, it’s like digg.com and all the other networks, the more thumbs up it gets, the more people see it. If it gets enough positive ratings, it gets to the front page of certain categories on the stumbleupon and you’re in for MEGA traffic.

Not only that but alot the users on stumbleupon also use other social networks so getting a heap of stumbles can also lead to a lot of diggs, reddits and so on and so forth.

In other words, the amount you pay for visits on stumbleupon has the potential to start a massive viral tidal wave of traffic to your site.

Try doing that with Adwords…

Now if you’re going to do this there are a few things you should do to prepare/be aware of:

1. If you don’t have good content, you needn’t bother – the thing about user driven communities like this is that anything subpar just won’t survive. People clicking that stumble button are used to seeing content that other people have seen and submitted already, ie it’s probably pretty high quality or else it wouldn’t be there. If your site doesn’t have some good content you’ll waste your time.

2. Before you do it, get yourself a stumbleupon button. This is a plugin for wordpress that’s very easy to setup and allows people to stumble your posts after they’ve hit your site. The more stumblers that submit your posts, the more traffic you get and the more chance you have at creating that viral traffic effect.

3. Remember the goal of using this type of advertising is to convert as many of the stumblers as possible into ongoing readers and maybe later buyers if that’s how your site’s setup. You need to have a prominent feed subscription icon, list subscription icon, or features that encourage the stumbler to interract (posting comments if it’s a blog etc). An article with a click here to buy this product won’t cut it.

4. Test it gradually. You can start a campaign and choose to add as much funding as you like. You can also choose your daily balance – how much money per day you want to spend. Start small and watch your site stats closely. How many visitors are you getting (check your traffic stats too), how many opt ins, click throughs, and whatever else you’re trying to achieve. From there you can adjust your advertising as to how it’s working. If you’re converting, pile on the stumbles, if not, drop it back or give it up – test, test, test.

I hope that’s enough for you to both decide whether this might be a profitable source of new traffic for you and if so, make a start with it immediately.

I can tell you that so far it’s been great value for money from my tests but I’m still working on making tweaks to pull in more readers from the traffic, get the users to stumble more to create the viral effect and so on.

Oh and by the way – if this was valuable to you, don’t forget to ‘stumble’ it with the link below

If you’ve been following my blog you’ll know I’ve been experimenting like crazy this last month with new link building methods, new [tag]traffic generation[/tag] methods, and lots of new marketing stuff for my niche sites in general.

It’s been two weeks maximum since some of these tests have begun and looking at my traffic stats today, I thought I’d post three of the sites that have returned positive results and that I’ll be looking more deeply into in the future.

I think this is good because while alot of people talk about the ways you CAN get traffic, I’m posting those here that I’ve actually tested and that ARE sending me traffic, more so than others that have undergone the same tests.

Here goes:

1. Listible.com: This is a web 2.0 site that basically contains lists of resources to which you can submit various pages of content from your site as contributors. For example, there might be a list on Pets, and if your site has any pets content, you can submit that page or post on your blog (much like you’d do at digg.com) to be a part of that pets resource list. Then when people search for pets lists they will have a chance of finding you. The traffic from here is targetted compared to most social network traffic – someone searches for resources on pets and they find your content on pets, pretty good match and you could do alot worse.

2. CSSDrive: Remember I posted the list of CSS Directories that you could submit a site to for traffic? This is the site that’s showing up in my stats as delivering the most traffic – not a great deal but every little bit helps

3. Entrecard.com – This is more from my tests with this blog but so far the results have been great. In fact of all the external sites in my stats that are sending me traffic, Entrecard is in the top 5. Although I suspect it will be MORE effective for ‘make money online’ people, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work just as well with any niche site.

You add your site and you setup campaigns to ‘drop your card’ to the sites of other related websites. Soon your site starts coming up in the entrecard community dashboard so other sites find you, other sites drop their card to you (so you earn credits) and with enough people dropping cards on you and you dropping them on their site, you can earn credits to run ads on their sites (see the entrecard banner on my sidebar – I’m supposed to be running other people’s ads there but haven’t done much of that yet). By doing a little work on it each day, it has the potential to create a small stream of (at least they’re…) targetted visitors.

If you’re not using these bad boys, ask yourself: “Why?”

Greetings Friends,

I hope you’ve had a great week and that your grand schemes for online money making greatness are gradually blossoming to fruition

I’m fresh of the plane from LAX this week and ready to share with you some of the wisdom I’ve picked up from the trip!

Firstly, I was reading a post in a popular forum this week about [tag]article marketing[/tag] which contained some information that I thought I should both respond to and share with you in regards to Article marketing..

If you have niche sites and you’re not using articles to promote your sites, there had better be a good reason for it – but at the same time, there are ways to market with your articles, and ways to REALLY market with your articles!

The guy who made this post brought up the relevant point that alot of people use the majority of their article content (that they either write or have written, ie it takes time!) in submitting it to directories all for the sake of a few measly backlinks…

He went on to say that article directories are popular only because shmucks like us submit all our great unique content to THEM and that if we published the same hundreds of articles on our own sites, WE’D have a great PR and become an authority domain too!

It’s an interesting point and while it’s a matter of contention, it’s a point we should on a certain level remember.

Firstly I want to clarify HOW you should be marketing with your articles.

Let me state clearly that there are a TONNE of ways that articles can be used to get you more traffic (and the above theory is relevant only based on WHICH of those ways you utilize) but here’s one of them that will give you a reason to keep posting to directories in spite of the above thoughts:

1. One of the ways I’ve been able to generate a TONNE of traffic to my niche sites is by isolating lowly competitive keywords related to my niche and writing articles on them to submit to the directories – call it bum marketing if you want – it’s just smart article marketing..

If you write an article on a particular keyword, you’re trying to have that page (the page at the article directory that contains your article) rank in the search engines for that term so that the author bio can be followed to your site.

Now why is it better to submit this article to a directory rather than your site?

If you have a new site and you post up your article on “new celebrity diet secret” the truth is, it has LESS chance of getting a high ranking in the search engines when it’s on your brand NEW, low content domain, than it does if it were at a high authority domain like ezinearticles.com

Simple as that..

In fact ANY article, on ANY keyword, is (generally) likely to bring you more site traffic if you submit it to the big authoratative directory than it is when submitted to your site…

HOWEVER.. (and here comes the big secret)

There has to be some balance!

At the same time as leveraging the authority of the article directory you have to be gradually building towards a point where YOUR site could have the authority!

I mean, if you’re domain was a PR7 and had thousands of pages of content – would you submit to IT, or to ezinearticles.com…

No brainer right?

And the only way to get your site near a PR7 is to make more content on your site too…

More content = more backlinks = more authority = higher rankings.

SO…

Ultimately you need two sets of content – but who wants to DOUBLE their article production?! Writing ONE set of articles continually is enough!

So what do we do…

I was going to make a reply to the thread stating the following but some smart chap beat me to it!

What I’ve been doing to overcome the problem is this:

The article gets completed and I ship it off to ezinearticles.com..

After its done (and this is super tricky) I change the article a bit – keep the same title because I AM still targetting that keyword – swap a few paras – rewrite it slightly (after all it’s MY article) and then BOOM, I post it to my site!

Genius right… Hardly!

But what I have done, is taken advantage of the exposure I’ll get from the article directory, while at the same time growing my site toward becoming an authority too – maybe one day I wont even need ezinearticles.com anymore and to be honest I can’t WAIT until then but … until then, this way gives me the best of both worlds.

Phew that was longwinded.

nyhow, I got plenty more cool stuff to share over the next few weeks so get ready…

Andrew

Hey Guys,

As you know I recently started doing a little experiment in order to test the technique of getting traffic from posting in forums related to your niche.

Here’s a recent but brief email I made to my subscribers about my findings…

=========

Ok so my [tag]forum posting[/tag] experiment has been an interesting one indeed.

I basically stopped after a short period of experimentation because I realised that the plan needed to be seriously revised. This info might be helpful if you’re looking at trying this method for [tag]traffic generation[/tag] yourself.

What I discovered is (not surprisingly really) that experienced posters in popular forums can sniff a person trying to drive traffic to their site from a miiiile away, particularly in non IM forums.

After just a few posts I actually someone reply to one of my posts “I just get a bit suspicious of people with XX (my niche) kind of sites in their forum signature”

Interesting…

While I did generate a few extra opt ins to my email list and a number of half decent relevant links, I stopped and began to revise my plan pretty soon. What I think really has to be done is:

1. You have to outsource the job to a good English speaking, perferrably internet and online forum experienced person. Even while I tested – it’s not just a matter of creating account then posting good content, even that people will see as spam after a while.

You have to maintain a real personality for it to be successful, meaning lots of ‘silly’ posts, lots of ‘yes, I agree etc” posts and more, just to make it so you are a real person trying to build real relationships.

Finally on a more positive note I did see some extra traffic from the experiment and like I mentioned, the opt ins and relevant links. I think where this method would be really powerful is if you are actually interested, knowledgeable or passionate about your niche because then you won’t mind hanging around with like minded people, taking the time to build relationships and make quality posts etc

Andrew