This time we’re going to expand on that and look at how to take it to the next level and see how to use powerful content sharing sites to build the main structure of an Ultimate Free Traffic Network.

The number of very high quality back links and how quickly you can improve your search engine results positioning is amazing and this is the real secret to the strength of the traffic network.

There are a large number of content sharing sites, including the article directories we looked at last time, but there are some that are head and shoulders above the others, ones that you must include in your Free Traffic Network.

There is only one place to start is when adding your first content sharing site after you’ve established your article marketing process.

Squidoo

While Squidoo is one of the many innovative Web 2.0 sites you can use to get some extra traffic to your Web properties, it stands above most others by its quality and by the authority that the search engines give it.

If you don’t know what Squidoo is, it’s a site that lets you easily create special Web pages called a lens; while similar to blogs, usually these focus on a specific subject, and a great thing is you don’t need any expertise to create a “lens” on Squidoo.

As a content-sharing site Squidoo was created as a way for people to share their knowledge, opinions and expertise.

The key is understanding how creating Squidoo lenses can help you.

Benefits to Creating Squidoo Lenses

Creating lenses has a number of benefits particularly in regards to building traffic.

1. Market to Niche Audiences

A primary benefit of creating Squidoo lenses is it is a great way to promote yourself and your products and services to your niche marketplace.

This generates traffic directly to your lenses and indirectly to your other Web properties.

2. Focusing on Your Niche

Creating a proper marketing Squidoo lens really forces you narrow down your focus when creating content.

A common problem people have is that they try to be broad in their writing or they have keywords but don’t focus the article on them.

The entire process of creating a lens can help organize your thoughts and keep you focused on the single topic being written about.

This focus improves your traffic results for your niche and keywords.

3. Get Google’s Love

Squidoo has “juice”, that is, their pages will rank high more easily than pages on regular sites; of course, that is only true if you have words on your lens.

When you do searches you’ll see that Squidoo lenses usually appear ahead of other social bookmarking and content sharing sites.

So , when creating a lens you would target specific keywords that are related to your niches and products. When you make your lenses you add your keywords (tags) throughout to help the search engines and to bring in more traffic.

4. Testing Keywords

By choosing and putting keywords into your Squidoo lenses you can actually test your keyword phrases to see how popular they are and how music web traffic you can get.

Just create your lenses and then look at your statistics to see how it does.

With Squidoo you can see which of your lenses is the most popular. This can be eye-opening when it comes to discovering searchable and popular topics.

Analyzing your results and making modifications as necessary will show you which keywords the ones that are bringing you the most traffic.

5. Ideas for More Lenses

The sheer process of creating a Squidoo lens will cause you to come up with new ideas for additional lenses; I usually get at least one new idea and frequently several.

Of course, those additional lenses bring more traffic and bring more ideas!

6. Creating Quality Back Links

Because of the keyword focus on specific topics and the authority of Squidoo when you link your lenses to your other Web properties they get very high quality back links which gives them more power and more traffic.

As a nice side benefit , Squidoo gives you greater exposure and helps establish you as an expert.

How to Create Squidoo Lenses

To create a new lens you log into your account and click the link to make a new lens.

Then, to make the lens, you put together the various Squidoo modules onto one complete whole.

Each section of your article is put in a text module, with an appropriate heading, then add any other modules, that are appropriate, to your lens and publish it.

There a number of module types you can use, some you particularly want to consider are:

• Amazon: allows adding related Amazon products
• Del.icio.us: this module will automatically display your Delicious’ed links on your lens.
• eBay: this lists your auctions based on your tags or list specific eBay items you want to show on your lens.
• Featured Lenses: this module allows you to display the introduction modules of up to five lenses per module, creating a sort of a “lensography” of your (or other) lenses.
• Introduction: this is where you introduce your article/lens (required)
• Link Lists: this allows you to easily add lists of links
• YouTube: this allows you to add related YouTube videos to your lenses
• Poll: this allows you to add a poll to your lens
• RSS: this allows you to add your RSS feeds to your lenses (highly recommended)
• Text: this is where you place the text of your article (required)
• Text List: this lets you easily add lists to your lenses
• Plexos: this is available for various other modules like a Amazon, Flickr, text links and YouTube and  allows your readers to vote on your which items in the module they like best

Squidoo Terminilogy

Squidoo has some of its own language and terms you should know:

• Dashboard: this is the place where you can adjust your settings and check your statistics
• Lens: a Web page created on Squidoo (by a Lensmaster)
• Lensmaster: a person who creates lenses is a lensmaster.
• Lensrank: the numerical position your lens has when compared to all other published lenses.  Similar to a popularity rating, your Lensrank can change on a daily basis and it based on a wide variety of factors.
• Module: components that you can add to your lenses to give them unique features and content.
• Publish: when you’ve finished a lens you need to publish it so Squidoo will index it and make it available on the Internet
• Squid: a member of Squidoo
• Squidcast: a message that you can be send to your fans
• WiP: stands for Work in Progress, and means a lens that is still being worked on but has not been published or indexed by Squidoo.

Google’s “Squidoo Slap

There has been some concern about the importance of Squidoo because of the “Squidoo Slap” Google did to Squidoo Lenses.

Basically Google sent a message to Squidoo by “punishing” them and their lenses with bad (or no) rankings, even for many lenses that had high ones.

Like all “slaps” this was Google’s way of saying “we want good and relevant content and since some of your lenses are spam and porn and just sales pitches we’re penalizing you until you clean your act up.”

Seth Godin, the creator of Squidoo, is one of the world’s best marketers and Squidoo quickly and effectively made some rule changes that are very positive changes for themselves and for you as a marketer; and it made Google happy.

These changes benefit you because now you aren’t competing with the more unethical or unsavory people and your lenses will get the power of Squidoo while those people don’t get that advantage.

Also, Google may give even more power to this new and improved Squidoo giving you even better rankings for your lenses.

You can find out more about the changes, like the limited to the number of links and topics that you can’t create lenses about, by reading the messages on Squidoo or doing a Google search.

Conclusion

If you’re an Internet Marketer or have an online business and you aren’t using Squidoo, you need to start because you don’t realize what you’re traffic missing out on.

Squidoo is the number one Web 2.0 content sharing site in many ways including number one in driving traffic to your Web properties.

There are lots of benefits to creating Squidoo lenses to drive traffic, they include:

• Market to Niche Audiences
• Focusing on Your Niche
• Get Google’s Love
• Testing Keywords
• Ideas for More Lenses
• Creating Quality Back Links

Next time we’ll look at other content sharing sites and how to use them properly.

How has your ultimate traffic network coming?

Just remember, it’s all in the doing!

Please leave me a comment about what you’ve been doing or what you think about this series.

Talk soon,

David

The Shameless (Ethical) Marketer
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Content Sharing Sites, Squidoo: Ultimate Free Traffic Network, Part 8