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!
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Hiya Andrew,
Nice guest post from PotpieGirl, Josh Spaulding metioned her a while, in a group of “ethical trustworthy” Online marketers.
I had only just worked out you can have your feeds in squiddo and also blogger- do you know of any other sites that allow the same?
Thank you, Paul! Josh is a great guy… I was quite honored to have him say that about me.
As for your question… You’re looking for other places to put your RSS feed?
Thanks for reading!
Jennifer
~PotPieGirl
thanks POT PIE GIRL!
great post…that reminds me that I need to be doing stuff with Squidoo again…I bet it has changed and is bigger and badder than ever!
Stuart Stirling
Thank YOU, Stuart!
Yep, Squidoo is free to use, so why not keep it in your bag of internet marketing goodies? Every little bit of exposure helps.
Jennifer
~PotPieGirl
I think the issue with the SERPs reading Squidoo RSS modules is that Squidoo renders the feed using Javascript rather than converting to HTML.
And, speaking of RSS feeds, Andrew, here’s another tip that you might want to pursue and post about. What most people don’t know is that in Wordpres you actually have a gazillion feeds. Almost anything “part” of Wordpress can be rendered with a feed (and, multiple “types” of feeds as well. Here’s a small list:
blog.com/feed
blog.com/feed/rss
blog.com/feed/atom
blog.com/category/feed
blog.com/tag/feed
blog.com/feed?s=search-term
And, the list goes on and on. I did a test the other day on one blog where I submitted a large number of feed variations to a slew of rss directories. The particular blog is an Adsense site that attracts high paying keywords. I did this after I noticed a lot of my traffic to it was coming from blog directories.
Hiya 3Dogs – Thanks for reading!
Know what other feed I use? My comments feed. Many times, what my readers ask in comments is more in line with what others want to know than my post title is.
I put that comment feed on some of my related lenses, and that really helps traffic, too. It’s also a really nice thing to do for those that commented. I use “CommentLuv” in my comment area, so not only do my lens readers see the comment, but they also see a link to a post on THEIR site.
Some blogs come with the comment feed “plugged in”, but I had to do a little messing with my header.php file to make it work. All I did was follow the simple directions I found here (not my site..thank you Andrew for allowing a link).
This is also a very effective idea for some niche blogs, too
Jennifer
~PotPieGirl
Hi Andrew,
Thank you for arranging for such an excellent post by PotpieGirl.
I have experimented with Squidoo a bit to drive some traffic to affiliate marketing sites, but I never considered using for my own blog. It’s an interesting concept, and I’m definitely going to try it out!
JR
Thanks, JR! Glad you found it helpful!
Jennifer
~PotPieGirl
Very nice post Andrew and nice comments Jen. Thank you both. I am not quite sure what you are saying about the RSS feed and setting it up. If an RSS is to be set up to our blogs where and how is the information found for that RSS address to individual blogs. Is it the same as given for Potpiegirl’s blog?
Maybe you could comment on this.
Great information. Thanks,
Justin
Hiya Justin =)
I usually can see a little orange RSS icon in the browser window of any blog (or page that offers an RSS feed). I simply click that, and then copy the new url that loads in the window.
I found this video that helps find the RSS for WordPress sites..hope that helps.
Jennifer
~PotPieGirl
I finally got it!
Most things on this post are not new to me, but nothing beats experience. I finally got one thing riveted into my head from reading this post however.
“I Need Lots of Good Lens in order to get the traffic I want from them”.
I think I have about 8 of them, and was relaxing…shame on me.
Thanks Andrew and PotPieGirl.
Anthony
It takes lots of streams of traffic to create a flood =)
Thanks for reading, Anthony!
Jennifer
~PotPieGirl
Andrew — you are spot on about Jennifer (PotPieGirl). She is all that (and a bag of chips) as we say here in The States. Not sure how that translates for an Aussie in Canada…
Mark
Pass those chips… I’m starving!
Thank you, Mark. I hope you know I think the world of you, too =)
Jennifer
~PotPieGirl
The longer I’ve been working Online . . . the more jaded I’ve gotten. Some “Gurus” I thought were cool . . . I’m just slow I guess, but it finally became clear to me that they were just slick marketers that really didn’t give a damn about the people on their list. I’ve started to “unsubscribe” with a vengence. But there are a few people still like and two people that always leave me impressed: Andrew Hansen & PotPitGirl.. No surprise to see them crossing paths and on the same blog. Andrew and PotPieGirl are great marketers . . . but you somehow always get the feeling that they actually give a damn about us! (And their content rocks!)
Tranque – THANK YOU!
Your words mean a lot to me!
Jennifer
~PotPieGirl
It’s alot of info for a newbie like me. I’ve got a couple of lenses on Squidoo and still working at it. All of this is so exciting it hurts my head! Thanks
It IS a lot to take in, isn’t Dora? Just take it one step at a time!
Jennifer
~PotPieGirl
The best thing about Squidoo is that anyone can write an ebook about making money with Squidoo, and then sell that ebook for $47.
Not exactly what I would consider to be the best thing about Squidoo, Factor X…but thanks for reading anyway.
Jennifer
~PotPieGirl
I’ve been following your One Week Marketing plan and I’ve found that lenses often jump to page 1 of Google after following some of your advice.
In terms of linking to a blog’s RSS feed, I have a question. My blog is about computer related topics in general. My Squidoo lenses are about particular computer products.
The question is that many of the blog entries have nothing to do with the product I am describing in the lenses. Is this an issue?
Hi David
Since RSS feeds are something you add more for the readers benefit, let me ask you this…
If YOU were reading your lens, would YOU be interested in the blog posts?
From the info you’ve given me, it sounds as if your blog will build your credibility as someone who knows what they are talking about in that market AND your blog would appeal to those that see your lenses (both are good things).
The only way to know for sure tho is to test it and see if your blog gets traffic from your lenses. It certainly won’t hurt to try it out
Thanks for reading!
Jennifer
~PotPieGirl
Nice post Andrew. My question is as follows: Will this work the same way for a static website?………Anyone can answer…………..Thanks
Thanks for sharing this very good strategy with us. I appreciate new ideas all the time. I have seen the RSS feed button in Squidoo some time ago, but did not think of using it in this fashion. As you can tell, I have not done much with squidoo yet, but this has encouraged me to get a move on and do some work with it.
Thanks again.