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Content Sharing Sites, Squidoo: Ultimate Free Traffic Network, Part 8

David Husnian — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 17:44:59 +0000

In the last post in this series we looked at the one thing you need to get an insane amount of traffic.

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
http://www.Twitter.com/DavidHusnian
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O.Y. Don’t forget to retweet this! Use the button on the page or just Tweet this:
Content Sharing Sites, Squidoo: Ultimate Free Traffic Network, Part 8 at http://dahsu.com/6qeO8Pd (via @DavidHusnian)

This post from: Street Guide to Web Traffic. To read more post like this, head over to Street Guide to Web Traffic

Content Sharing Sites, Squidoo: Ultimate Free Traffic Network, Part 8

The One Thing You Need to Get an Insane Amount of Traffic: Ultimate Free Traffic Network, Part 7

David Husnian — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:41:14 +0000

Last time we started looking at the foundation of an Ultimate Free Traffic Network; this is what will generate the majority of your free traffic.

We saw the main reasons why we want to use content sharing sites.

Things like getting a huge number of quality back links; note the emphasis here is on quality back links (we’re not going to be trying to get lots of worthless back links, that’s just wasted time and money).

And getting higher search engine results positioning — who doesn’t want to rank high in Google, and improved conversion rates; we also looked at how to use the content sharing sites to maximize benefits.

This time we’re going to go more deeply into the various content sharing sites and how to use them properly to produce an astonishingly large amount of traffic.

So what do you think the first thing you need to do to get that traffic is?

Get Content

Well, first you need content; yeah, I know, even I’m rolling my eyes and saying duh

But, this stops so many people. For whatever reason most people freeze up when they think they have to write something.

Don’t do that.

First, most people can write well enough to create the small articles for the traffic network.

You don’t need to write a thesis or a paper like you did in school. You just need to write less than one page on a topic you probably know and like but even if you can’t do that, with the Internet and search engines as research tools you can knock out an article in 10 minutes.

Just decide who your target audience is and find one or two great keywords that audience searches for and then that should help you decide what to write about.

Then sit down and write. Again, is doesn’t have to be a long, just write it.

Here are some resources I use to help me write articles:

Also, Melissa Ingold, someone I’ve worked with on several projects and someone who provides monthly content for some big name Internet Marketers, has a book on how to write articles for profit that you may find useful.

You can also look at my How to Create Absolutely Amazing Articles for some help.

Second, even if you think you can’t do that, or more importantly, you think you shouldn’t be using your precious time to write articles (which I agree with) there are 2 things you can do.

1. Buy prewritten articles that come with rights that let you use them for this purpose, that is, to use as content; Private Label Rights articles are best for this.

There are lots of great resources for PLR articles, here are some that I’ve used or created:

You can also take many PLR report and books and split them up into articles, here are some that I’ve used and created:

One thing, I would suggest you change your PLR articles to make them more unique, they’ll have more impact on your results. I aim for at least 40% different although some people say 30% is sufficient.

2. Hire someone to create articles for you; this could be an individual, a company who acts as a broker for writers or a service.

Here are 2 services I use:

Hiring a good writer can be the best way to go but it is more expensive. For example, last week, I commissioned for 400 articles from my top writer and it’s going to cost me several thousand dollars. You can buy a lot of PLR articles for that kind of money!

The advantage is I can get exactly the article I want and they are unique to me. The disadvantage is obviously that it costs more money and it takes a lot more time.

Either way you choose (actually I hire writers and use PLR) you need content that you can distribute throughout your Ultimate Free Traffic Network. It is the key to blowing off the ceiling that’s been holding you from getting more traffic than you can handle.

Article Marketing

Article marketing, yep, good old fashioned article marketing is still a wonderful way to get you direct and indirect links and, in combination with some of the newer content sharing and social media sites, it is better than ever.

Taking your articles and posting them to article directories, with the proper resource box of course, is a quick and easy way to start getting links and traffic.

If you don’t know much about it, look below for a free gift that will help you start using and profiting from articles.

Now some people say you should take your articles and blast them to hundreds of article directories.

I say don’t.

We’re looking for quality links and there, at most, 10-20 article directories that are of real value. Places like:

Ezine Articles
Article Dashboard
ArticlesBase
Buzzle
Article Alley
Go Articles

These are ones that will make a real difference in your traffic network.

All the article directories are just content sharing sites and the search engines loves content, particularly fresh, quality content.

Article Marketing is a really fantastic method to give the fresh, quality content which pleases the search engines and attract prospects to your Web properties.

One of the best things about an Ultimate Free Traffic Network is that it doesn’t matter what you are selling or if they are your product or something else and using article marketing is a key component.

I’m not going into much about article marketing here you can see Fast and Easy Article Marketing for that; as well as the free gift I mentioned above.

Just get the content and post some of it to article directories. For you Ultimate Free Traffic Network, try to get one article out every day but you can do at least 2 or 3 every week to start.

Be sure to create a good resource box (see Step 7 in How to Create Absolutely Amazing Articles).

Conclusion

As I said last time, publishing content at content sharing sites is the first and best thing you can do to build your Ultimate Free Traffic Network.

To so that the first thing you need (well, after your goals and campaigns as decided) is content. It sounds obvious sure but without content you won’t create any real free traffic network let alone an ultimate one.

You can get that content by either (1) writing it or (2) buying it.

Here are some resources to help you if you write it yourself:

To buy it you can either (1) hire a writer or (2) buy articles (PLR is best).

Here are some resources to help you if you if you are buying content:

After you have your content, one of the major uses for it is to submit it to the article directories. You don’t need to submit it to hundreds but you should submit them to the top 10 or 20 article directories, places like:

Ezine Articles
Article Dashboard
ArticlesBase
Buzzle
Article Alley
Go Articles

Anything more than that won’t help much, if at all. Some people think it can actually hurt you but I haven’t tested it.

Just be sure to create a killer resource box (see Step 7 in How to Create Absolutely Amazing Articles).

If you need to know more about article marketing read my blog post Fast and Easy Article Marketing and download your free gift.

Next time we’ll look at other content sharing sites and how to use them properly. This is all doable and within your grasp, you just need to take action and do it.

So, have you been building your Ultimate Free Traffic Network? Tell me what you’ve done.

Is there anything you don’t understand?

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.

Before I finish I better give you that gift I was promising you. I have a video course on article marketing that was pulled from the new training site I’ll be launching soon.

It seemed appropriate for people who need to learn more about article marketing so I’m giving you an advanced look.

If you want to learn more about how to do article marketing then go to

http://GetYourBonusesNow.com/bonuses/ArticleMarketingCrashCourse; please note, this is meant for beginner level marketers who don’t know much about article marketing.

Talk soon,

O.Y. Don’t forget to retweet this! Use the button on the page or just Tweet this:
The One Thing You Need to Get an Insane Amount of Traffic: Ultimate Free Traffic Network, Part 7 at http://bit.ly/8xkqp (via @DavidHusnian)

This post from: Street Guide to Web Traffic. To read more post like this, head over to Street Guide to Web Traffic

The One Thing You Need to Get an Insane Amount of Traffic: Ultimate Free Traffic Network, Part 7

The Foundation of a Traffic Tidal Wave: Ultimate Free Traffic Network, Part 6

David Husnian — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:43:44 +0000

Last time we finished up our look at blogs as the center of your Ultimate Free Traffic Network.

We’re now going to start talking about the first “ring” around your blogs.

Let’s give a quick look at what the free traffic network looks like.

You’ll notice that around the blog there is a ring of yellow items (they’re not exactly oval but sort of); they have words like Squidoo, Facebook and Twitter in them.

These are all Web properties that will point to your blog; they are called a back links.

This is hugely important to the Ultimate Free Traffic Network and is the foundation of where all the free traffic comes from; it generates, directly or indirectly the majority of the free traffic the network gets.

To start, we’re going to look at the primary way to begin and maintain the flood of traffic you’ll receive in your Ultimate Free Traffic Network.

Yep, the best way, the thing you need to do, if you do nothing else is to use…

Content Sharing Sites

Content sharing sites are where people can post content and have it appear on the Internet, without having a website …

There are some very popular content sharing sites, some of which we’ll go over in depth later. They include:

Squidoo: Squidoo provides a free place, called Squidoo Lenses, where people can share all kinds of information and even earn a little money. You just copy and paste your article into a Lens, do a bit of tweaking and formatting and publish it for all the world to see.
Hub Pages: Hub Pages is another very popular free content sharing site and place for online publishing. You can write on just about any topic, add photos and videos and a lot more; it is strict though about promotion and marketing so you have to do things right.
Ezine Articles: Ezine Articles is a free article directory. That is, it allows people to publish articles for other people to read and use/republish. Re-publishers do have to follow the guidelines of Ezine Articles and the conditions the author adds; these can include that the authors name and contact/Web site details remain with the article.
YouTube: You’ve probably heard of YouTube but if you haven’t it is a site where people who have a video (on almost any subject) can upload it to the Internet.
Scribd: Scribd is a document and file sharing site that also provides syndication. It has the potential to drive serious targeted traffic to you site as well and improve your search engine rankings.

Reasons to Use Content Sharing Sites

When building an Ultimate Free Traffic Network, content sharing sites are critical for 3 reasons:

Because they are well liked by the search engines (many of which are considered authority sites). This all adds up to any content that is published to a major content sharing site will be quickly indexed by the search engines and you’ll achieve a higher search engine result.
They are visited by millions of people so many more people have a chance to see your content and click the links to your Web properties.
Many of the content sharing sites let people republish the content on their own Web sites meaning more links for you and more potential people to click on your links.

This will ultimately lead to more traffic.

Here’s why…

Back Links

A back links, particularly one-way back links, is considered by Google and other search engines to be a “vote” for your page by the Web site that has the link; sort of a “hey, this is a good page to read.”

These “votes” to help determine how good the search engines consider your page is and how high the will show your page in their search results.

You might think that the more votes the better and, in some ways, that is true but some Web sites “votes” are considered more important than other Web sites. These authority sites carry more weight so that a “vote” by them is like a hundred or even a thousands “votes” by regular Web sites.

This is why the content sharing sites (and social media sites to be discussed later) are so important to creating your Ultimate Free Traffic Network.

Search Engine Results Position (SERP)

Search engine results position (SERP) is where your Web properties appear in the search engine results for specific keywords.

So, if one of your keyword phrases is “all inclusive romantic honeymoons”. Your SERP for that keyword is what page and what position on the page your Web properties show up when someone searches for that term.

Of course, the best page is the first page and the best positions are the top few positions of that page and, according to some of the traffic gurus the bottom couple of positions are the second best position.

The better yours SERP the more traffic you’ll get.

All the back links you create on the content sharing sites help push your SERP higher.

Direct Links

Putting all those links on content sharing sites, particularly ones that allow re-publishing, mean you’re going to get additional traffic from people who read your content, either on the site or on the re-publisher’s site.

Improved Conversion Rates

This isn’t really traffic oriented but using content sharing sites bring more targeted traffic and you’ll convert better on your landing pages.

How to Use Content Sharing Sites

To use the content sharing sites you need to have content to share, obvious I know.

You should take your marketing campaigns and goals and find the keywords that best support those goals.

Then create/get content that uses those keywords.

Add your resource box (which contains links to your Web properties), or whatever is applicable, and publish them on the various content sharing sites.

Conclusion

Publishing content at content sharing sites is the first and best thing you can do to build your Ultimate Free Traffic Network.

In this overview, we took a glimpse at some content sharing sites: Squidoo; Hub Pages; Ezine Articles; YouTube; and Scribd.

We saw the main reasons why we want to use content sharing sites:

Get lots of back links
Get higher Search Engine Results Positioning
Get lots of direct links
Improve conversion rates

And we briefly looked at how to use the sites to maximize benefits.

We’ve started to get the basis for an Ultimate Free Traffic Network, so let’s recap where we are so far.

Put your blog as the center of the network and use the content sharing sites as the main superhighways.

Next time we’ll look more deeply into the various content sharing sites and how to use them properly to produce an astonishingly large amount of traffic.

Have you been building your Ultimate Free Traffic Network? I have!

Is there anything you don’t understand?

Do you think I’m crazy or stupid for sharing this (or for attempting it

Please leave me a comment and let me know.

Talk soon,

O.Y. Don’t forget to retweet this! Use the button on the page or Tweet this:
Learn about the Foundation of a Traffic Tidal Wave at http://bit.ly/1lZtUD (via @DavidHusnian)

This post from: Street Guide to Web Traffic. To read more post like this, head over to Street Guide to Web Traffic

The Foundation of a Traffic Tidal Wave: Ultimate Free Traffic Network, Part 6