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

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)

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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

Are there other ways, sure. And you should use them but ultimately you need to play Google’s game.

How do you play?

While not earth shattering, there is still one thing that Google prizes highly, being GREAT for its customers; that is, they strongly believe if they are exceeding their customers expectations then their customers will continue to come back and they will continue to get more.

Standard business practice really but they embrace it with a vengeance and it obviously is working.

Now the question becomes, what does Google, and the other search engines but particularly Google, think help them exceed those expectation.

That, too, is one primary thing; make sure that when someone is searching they are finding what they want; that is, give the customers what they are asking for

Again, a simple strategy and one that all business should follow (if they want to be successful at least

That brings up another question: how does Google decide if something – your Web site, sales page, blog, etc. – is something they want to promote to their customers.

Promote you say?

Well, think about it, isn’t that what the search engine results are, Google “promoting” various Web sites; the higher you are in the results the more they are promoting.

And isn’t that why you want to be high in the results because you want Google to be promoting you more than your competitors.

There are 2 proven things that Google has shown and continues to show that they value highly:

Content, or rather great content, and incoming links from “valuable” Web sites. Valuable meaning ones that Google believes provides great content, particularly “authority sites”.

Again, not revolutionary information.

This is what Google has wanted for years and looks to be what they will want for years to come. Their definitions of great content and valuable incoming links may alter but the principles remain.

Great Content

What makes great content would be a complete blog post or three in itself and so I won’t focus on that here but here is a good general guideline…

Google defines great content as content that provides good value to their customers, it must be very informational – remember Google wants to make sure they are giving their customer what they want or more than what they want so the better the information the better Google likes it and the better Google likes the person who provided the content – that’s you!

Incoming Links

What Google wants for links now isn’t what they wanted in the past. For the last couple of years they have been putting a lot more weight on social media networking and content sharing sites.

These are sites like Facebook, YouTube and Squidoo.

They have dedicated computers that constantly, 24/7, index those sites for new content.

The content sharing sites Google likes are exactly what you need to help you because they let you provide both things that Google loves, great content and valuable links.

Since you can publish content on these sites and their links are so valuable this provides you with more “Google Love”

Ultimately there are 2 primary ways you can get targeted traffic from these sites:

1. The most obvious way is you’ll get better position in Google’s search results
2. Your great content will entice a certain percentage of people to click on links you have put in your content to your Web sites.

Powerhouse Sites – Use These!

Out of all the possible content sharing sites I have 3 absolute favorite sites that like to use: Squidoo, Hub Pages and EzineArticles.

Sure I use some of the other ones sometimes but I’ve found those 3 to be so much better in getting the results I want that 90-95% of my great content goes to those sites.

Yet again, this isn’t an “amazing secret” being released, as lots of people like and use those sites, hopefully you already do, but it is worth emphasizing them and making sure you are using them to get the best impact on your business.

Squidoo

Squidoo was created by famous marketing genius Seth Godin – read some of his books if you haven’t – and to publish content on Squidoo you create a Lens.

While Squidoo has other tools and even a revenue sharing plan, we’re interested in the content creation here.

With Squidoo it seems like the longer the Lens the better, that is, the more content in each Lens the better Google likes it. I try to have at least 750 words for each Lens but most are much longer.

Take a twofold strategy when creating Lenses.

First, create lots of Lens over time, one a day is my goal.

Second, periodically update previous Lens’ so that they have “fresh content”, this keeps those Lens important in the eyes of Google.

Don’t put too many other modules (like eBay, Amazon, etc.) into your Lens. It distracts from your content and do you really want people to go away from your Lens to somewhere else for a few cents, unless it is your Web site.

I’ve also recently found that having graphic images on a Lens is helpful, so try to include them whenever possible; even just a simple chart or picture helps.

One thing though that isn’t a question though is the importance of tagging your Lenses with good keywords.

Make sure you tag each of your Lenses with relevant and good keywords (use the keyword research you did before writing to guide you here).

The final, and most important, thing to remember to do though is to make sure the Lens has great, informative content and it is all on the same topic. Don’t talk about your primary topic and then throw in one or two other unrelated topics; create new Lens if those other topics are so good.

Finally, (didn’t I say the last one was the final thing) make sure you have links for your Web site and a way that they can contact.

For those who want a quick introduction to creating a Lens, I found this YouTube video:

Hub Pages

Hub Pages is another content sharing site that Google loves and it has some great tools to help you create great content.

I’ve found that, like Squidoo, the more content on a Hub the better and I go for at least 1,500 words for my Hub Pages.

There also looks to be a “reward” for having graphics and video on your Hubs so be sure to include them.

Good Hub Pages are built similarly to good Squidoo Lens but Hub Pages are much stricter in what you can and cannot do so it may take you a while to resolve a flagged Hub.

Remember to create new Hub Pages and modify existing ones to help keep them fresh.

Basically, don’t do these things and you shouldn’t have many problems:

1. Have great informational content, this isn’t MySpace where you put lots of personal stuff. Have personality, but don’t create a Hub for just your personal likes and dislikes, for example
2. Do NOT have a lot of links, particularly promotional links and links to the same sites. More than 2 links to the same domain will get you immediately flagged
3. Have good tags, not only does this help you but you won’t get flagged
4. Don’t plagiarize or have duplicate content on your Hub. This will get you flagged and certainly lower your HubScore
5. Having a commercial Hub without setting your ad level to High

Follow those rules and you’ll have few problems with creating Hub Pages; I recommend doing one per day.

Ezine Articles

EzineArticles started as an article directory and, of course, it still is.

Today though, Google has bestowed upon I such authority that it has become a powerful content sharing site although it still looks and acts like an article directory.

This is where the real value to you is.

Creating an article is easy but you need to follow certain rules to make sure your article gets published:

1. It must be original content, they’ve very specific (picky!) about only having one copy of an article on their site so if you have PLR articles you’ll need to rewrite them (always a good thing anyway)
2. Like Hub Pages, they must provide good information not just be promotional
3. They must use good English, both spelling and grammar. They aren’t as strict as your old English teacher but they want it to be well written; after all, it does reflect upon them and the quality of their articles is why Google likes them so much
4. Don’t put too many links in, particularly links to your Web sites

Things you should do are:

1. Have a keyword rich title (you should do that for Squidoo and Hub Pages also)
2. Make your article about 500 words. Unlike Squidoo and Hub Pages don’t make them too long; no more than 750 or 1,000 words
3. a great resource box where you have links to your applicable Web site
4. Like all online marketing content, it should have lots of related keyword to maximize your search engine results. Of course, don’t put to many
5. Tag the article with your keywords

Create at least one per day and submit it to Ezine articles.

Conclusion

Use the 2 ways, great content and valuable back links, to achieve a higher search engine results position.

The best ways I’ve found have been to use Squidoo, Hub Pages and EzineArticles and try to create new content on each of them every day.

You should begin a consistent and systematic approach to creating great content to submitted to the content sharing sites.

As part of that content be sure and include graphics and video.

If you do that you’ll find that your SERP improves from all the incoming links to your Web properties and the great content you’ve created.

The more you do this, the faster your rankings will improve and the more targeted traffic you’ll get.

Leave a comment and tell me what you think and I’d love to hear how you are using social media to improve your rankings.

Talk soon,

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

O.Y. If you want a good tool to help you with your SEO, I use SEO Elite and if you need to have some high quality content written for you, I use Need An Article and ArticleZ; they do a good job although they aren’t as swift as I would like – you know, I want great articles written instantly

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

2 Proven Ways to SERP Victory

You know it but you don’t do it or you do it “now and then” or “here and there”.

Then you rationalize it by how you “don’t have time to do everything” or “you need to stay focused”.

You “know” that’s right because all the gurus say so.

I can’t argue the importance on not trying to be and do everything or the importance of being focused on the critical path to your goal but…

I say it is B.S. to apply that logic to your social media efforts.

You can, with relatively little effort, be on more social media sites than you even knew existed.

Here’s how…
Social media has so fully embraced RSS that it’s hard to tell where the separating line is.

You’re saying “RSS, big deal!” “RSS, sure I use that.” or “RSS, what’s that” and to that I say, that it is one of the keys to social media domination and if that isn’t a big deal then I hope you are one of my competitors

And if you are using it and not dominating you definitely need to read on.

If you don’t know what RSS is, you’ve at least seen RSS icons all over the place, they look like various adaptations of this orange thing…

All you really need to know about what RSS is it how it can help you.

Just think of RSS as a sort of universal language that computers can use to talk. In particular, and this is how you can use it to dominate, it is a language that computers can use to automatically deliver Web content.

Read that again, “automatically deliver Web content“.

That is the key to your social media domination.

Think about it, if you just made one Twitter post (even from your phone), that post could, within minutes, be on blogs, Squidoo, Faceboock and hundreds or thousands of other places.

And not even just your blogs and other Web properties but on other people’s also, because if they subscribed to your RSS feeds it will be on their sites and on the sites of people who subscribed to their RSS feeds and on and on.

The 30 seconds you spend putting up one single Tweet could mean it is all over the Internet in just a short people of time. Talk about being everywhere!!!

Now, of course, if all you do are Tweets then you’ll be everywhere but probably not for long and it won’t do you any good.

But I hope you begin to see the power of RSS and how you can use it to dominate your niche in the social media sites.

And think of the reach you’ll get.

Not everyone may go to your blog or be on Twitter or be on Facebook or wherever.

But the vast majority of people will be on at least one of those places and as your name starts dominating the things they are interested in, at the places they hang out, don’t you think they’ll want to check you out and, if you’re doing a good job, follow you or become your friend or become part of your personal network.

You bet they will and these will be people who will be predisposed to listening to you and trusting you and buying from you; they are the best sorts of targeted traffic.

How to Get Started

Just follow these 7 steps and you’ll be on your way:

Step 1: Create Accounts

The hard part is the setup. Unless you use tools to create the accounts for you, you do have to go to each of the sites and create an account.

It’s not hard but it is boring and tedious but fortunately you only have to do it once, at least once per persona, and the benefits you reap could be amazing.

Step 2: Find a Publisher

Find a service that will do all the RSS work for you; some good ones are Ping.fm and hellotxt.

You could go around to all your social media sites and do the subscriptions to your other sites manually but why not “outsource” that to the services, it’s free.

And you will have to do that for those places that the services don’t support but the services do something like 40-50 places so you’ve got a good start.

Step 3: Enable Your Accounts

Be sure to set it up so that your accounts can be updated by texting or e-mail. This will let you update your accounts via e-mail or texting, freeing you from having to log into an account or even being at your computer.

An example of this, so you understand what I mean, is in Twitter when you go to “Settings” there is a “Devices” tab that you can use to enter your cell phone number so you can just text an update and let your machine loose to spread the word.

Step 4: Handling Responses

The easiest way to handle responses is to use an RSS reader to get the responses all in one place (again, you don’t want to be logging into all these accounts all the time).

Most of the accounts will send out RSS so just use an RSS reader, I use Google Reader, and make it easy on yourself.

For those accounts that don’t send out an RSS feed, after you send them a strongly worded message about why they should send out a feed, look at http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/, it should help you.

Step 5: Make Your Posts

Now that everything is set up and ready you can use your “social media domination machine” by making post to just one place and having it spread throughout the Web.

Start by making a post once every day or so but be consistent.

Step 6: Monitor and Adjust

See what the responses you get are and post more or less frequently based upon your situation and how the responses go; if you get lots of responses post more, not many post less.

Periodically you’ll need to monitor and adjust, particularly at the beginning when you’re just building a following.

Step 7: Blast Out the Good Stuff

Now just get some quick articles for the blogs, various media sites, and articles directories.

How do you get the articles? Here are some ways:

1. Write them, this isn’t as hard as it seems and if you have any writing ability and know how to use Google you can create one in about 10 minutes. Personally, I use Answer Analyst to help me but it isn’t necessary just faster.

2. You can have them written, good real native English writers are available for as little as $5 an article. You might also try the local high school or community college you can get some good stuff done by students; the disadvantage is that you won’t be the highest priority to them so you can’t always rely on getting the articles when you need them.

3. You can buy PLR articles and rewrite them enough to make them yours. Here’s where you can get 111,107 articles to get you started; oh yeah, John’s only charging $1, yes one dollar, for all 111,107.

Just put the articles up and let your social media domination machine go to work!
Conclusion
There you have it, a simple way to spend a little time and get big returns, all by using the simple technology of RSS.

Leave a comment and tell me what you think and I’d love to hear all about the social media domination machine you’ve set up in your niche.

Talk soon,

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

O.Y. If you want to know more about getting Web Traffic or want Web Traffic products you can sell just go to 8-8-8 Sale’s Getting Traffic site; use the coupon code SGTWTSpecial to get 27% off — just for readers of Street Guide to Web Traffic.

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

Build Your Social Media Domination Machine With Only 15 Minutes a Day