Since I’m planning on joining the Squidoo challenge going on at the Warrior’s forum, I thought I should probably do some research and start gathering ideas for the lense I will be creating. During this research I came across a PDF created by Brad Callen on the subject of choosing keywords for Affiliate programs. This is a very interesting read and I suggest everyone check it out. I was able to obtain the PDF and I can now offer it to my readers, so grab your free copy. There is some great information on how to perform better at Affiliate Marketing, but there are also some other gems on how to find the right keywords as well as methods to help to drive traffic. The traffic driving techniques are great whether you are building Affiliate type sites or Adsense sites. No matter what type of site you build you need traffic to make it a sucess. Grab your free copy now.

[tags]Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate programs[/tags]

Squidoo is a social marketing web 2.0 website that allows you to create blog type websites on the fly. This is a pretty cool concept. While they are similar to blogs, they are not really blogs, but more like mini-sites built around a topic. You build these mini-sites, called a lens from the Squidoo interface. You can even earn money on your lens, but that is negligible amount and the real power of a lens is to help you drive traffic to your other sites.

Since each lens is targeted around a specific keyword and each lens is already hosted on a site with a lot of traffic Google tends to rank these mini-sites very high. Interest is growing around this concept and I’m sure you will see more of these types of sites as time goes along. I put one together a while back to complement this blog, but have not promoted it. Check  out my No NonSense Internet Marketing Lense( I need the traffic)  Tiffany Dow has even put together a competition of Warriors to see who can build the best lens around Affiliate Marketing  and then see which warrior can get their lens ranked the highest after 30 days. The contest starts tomorrow and I’m going to get in on this. I doubt I will win since I have not touched this very much. I consider it a learning experience for me and I will be posting on this blog about my experiences with creating and getting Lenses to rank. You can read the rules if you want to try and get involved.

I have created some in the past, but only a couple and I never really even did any promotion of the lens. I was considering it a good method to get backlinks to my other sites and I still consider it a great resource for that, but I have not been utilizing the full power of this platform at all. This really came on to me yesterday during the Google Page Rank update and form a WSO I received from Justin Brooke’s Justin has some interesting methods for utilizing Squidoo in affiliate marketing and I expect that book to help me in this contest. (I’m not sure if it’s still available, but you may want ot go over to the WSO section on check it out. It’s cheap and full of useful information I think the title is “How to Cheat at Bum Marketing”.) Of course don’t think I’m saying I’m going to win. I doubt I’ll even make the top ten, but it’s going to be fun and educational. Who knows I may open up another stream of income as a result of this exercise. I will expect each of you reading my blog to at least go over and vote for my lense once the contest starts so if you have not subscribed to my blog. Go ahead and do that now so you can help me out and not make me look like a total failure as a LensMaster.

[tags]squidoo, web 2.0, affiliate marketing, internet marketing, seo, bum marketing[/tags]