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
http://www.8-8-8Sale.com
http://www.MusicForInternetMarketers.com
http://www.SecretsOfGoogleAdWords.com
http://www.MadMondaySale.com
http://www.2ForTuesdaySale.com

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Content Sharing Sites, Squidoo: Ultimate Free Traffic Network, Part 8 at http://dahsu.com/6qeO8Pd (via @DavidHusnian)

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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

Web traffic is so important to us Internet Marketers for our online businesses that it is one of my 3 Pillars of Guaranteed Success; without it you will fail and with the enough of the right you have a good chance of succeeding – you still need the other 2 Pillars though.

It is non-optional.

This is the first in a series of posts on what makes up, and how to build, the “ultimate” free traffic network. That is, a traffic network that will bring you maximum traffic and a strong Traffic Pillar.

Follow along and do what’s discussed and you’ll end up with a network that will bring you an astonishing amount of traffic.

There are two types of traffic, commonly called “free traffic” and “paid traffic”.

Of course, everything costs something so using the term “free traffic” isn’t really correct; just think of it as traffic that you get without a direct cash outlay but there may be indirect costs in time and money.

Paid traffic costs you directly and the most common forms of paid traffic are:

• Pay-Per-Click (PPC), like Google AdWords and AdSense, where you have advertisement and every time someone clicks on the ad to go to your site you pay a fee
• Cost-Per-Action (CPA) is where you have advertisements and you pay for each specified action; an action can be purchase, a new subscriber to your list, etc.
• Cost-Per-View (CPV) is where you have advertisements and you pay each time someone views your ad, whether they click or take any action at all.
• Cost-Per-Mille (CPM) is where you have advertisements and you pay a set amount for every thousand views of your ad; it is a subset of CPV.
• Advertisements are text and graphic ads with links to your Web properties, like banner ads, etc., and you pay to have to the ad shown for a specific period of time.

Free traffic doesn’t have direct costs and the most common forms of free traffic are:

• Traffic from search engines, frequently called organic traffic
• Traffic from the Web 2.0/social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, Technorati and Digg
• Traffic from content sharing sites like article directories, Squidoo and Hub Pages
• Traffic from your affiliates and even traffic that comes from e-mail sent to your lists

We’re going to look in depth at all the aspects of how to build a traffic network that floods you with targeted traffic.

The core pieces of an Ultimate Free Traffic Network are:

• Content: Providing a steady stream lots of great content to a wide variety of Web properties
• Links: Creating massive numbers of links from high value Web properties

Sounds like a lot of stuff to do and a lot work

Don’t worry, an ultimate network minimizes the amount of work you have to do to get a tsunami of traffic; it will all be explained.

Your free traffic network will be made up of 2 types of traffic:

1. Direct Traffic: this is traffic that comes directly from a link you created; usually this on one of your Web properties but it could be on a syndicated article or in an RSS feed someone is received on their Web properties
2. Indirect Traffic: this is traffic that doesn’t come directly from a link you created; using this is traffic from a search engine

A huge variety of Web properties will be used, including:

• Blogs: you will create multiple blogs that will be active, that is, it will provide new content at least once a week; the more frequent the better.
• Content Sharing Sites: you will create many articles for posting on content sharing sites like article directories (Ezine Articles, etc.), Squidoo, Hub Pages, etc.
• Social Networking Sites: you will create content for posting on social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, etc.
• Social Bookmarking Sites: you will utilize social bookmarking sites to provide links to all of the content your create and post; these are sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Propellet.
• Micro-blogging Sites: you will make sure that links to the content you create is distributed on micro-blogging sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Plurk, Jaiku and identi.ca.
• Other Sites: Many other sites will be used in your traffic network including blog directories, video sharing sites, aggregators and more

These will all be linked in a defined matrix; look at the figure for a simplistic view of what the network will look like. It is simplistic because many of the sites and connections/links are missing but was purposely kept that way for clarity.

As you can see, using a lot of different Web properties provides an amazing number of links and you see how much of this can be automated and all of it can be outsourced.

Conclusion

Everyone likes free things and free traffic is great to get.

Building an Ultimate Free Traffic Network will provide an incredible amount of targeted buyers to your sites and make a huge different in the success of your online businesses.

Using social media site, content sharing sites and other means you’ll be able to build a powerful tool to explode your business.

Surprisingly, much of it can be automated and all of it can be outsourced so that you can get these benefits on autopilot.

In the next post we’ll start digging deeper into the actual parts of the network.

Please leave a comment and tell me what you think or ask any questions you might have.

Talk soon,

David

The Shameless (Ethical) Marketer
http://www.Twitter.com/DavidHusnian
http://www.8-8-8Sale.com
http://www.MusicForInternetMarketers.com
http://www.SecretsOfGoogleAdWords.com
http://www.MadMondaySale.com
http://www.2ForTuesdaySale.com

.

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

Ultimate Free Traffic Network, Part 1