Squidoo Update
A while back everyone in the Internet Marketing World was saying how great Squidoo is for getting traffic to your pages.
I made a handful of Squidoo Lenses (pages), each of which has an article, rss feed, and a few other bits and pieces. They basically exist to catch any SEO terms, and then the visitor will hopefully click through to my site…
Well, it's kind of worked. There's been a small trickle of traffic, which can be counted on one hand on a daily basis (across all 5 of my Squidoo Lenses).
So, it's traffic, but not great traffic. I have no doubt that if I put more effort into promotion of these Lenses, I would get more traffic to them and consequently more throughput to my "real" sites.
But why bother?
Why not just concentrate on promoting my "real" sites directly…seems common sense that everyone should be promoting their own stuff, and not someone elses.
I admit to being nowhere near an expert in Squidoo, and I know that lots of others are having much better success than I have had.
Page Rank
Of my 5 Squidoo pages, 3 are "grey bar", 1 has PR1. Another has PR2. Which is somewhat interesting, but useless to me as I cannot directly monetise my own content in my own way - as the pages are owned by Squidoo, not me.
Just a bit of a meandering post today. I'm undecided if using Squidoo has any real benefit. Perhaps you have more success?
Comment by DayJobNuker — August 18, 2007 @ 3:30 pm
I get very consistent traffic from one of my lens but not much from the others. I wish I knew why so I could make some changes to the ones doing poorly.
Comment by Paul — August 18, 2007 @ 4:56 pm
I have had some good success with preselling my products on squidoo, especially products that are not in the IM world.
Since squidoo do not have the nofollow tag it is also a useful place for links.
Paul
Comment by 2k a day — August 18, 2007 @ 7:49 pm
I was doing terrific on Squidoo getting hundreds of visitors and making affiliate sales on my money site till someone complained (the lens right under mine in rankings?) and all my lenses got deleted as "spam". I complained that they weren't spammy plus I had lenses linking right to my white hat sites that had been there almost a year! Nope, my account deleted and lenses gone. Along with all adsense money I had earned off those lenses!
Comment by Kimberly Dawn Wells — August 19, 2007 @ 3:52 pm
One reason to create sites that point to your site, instead of putting all your promotion resources just into that end site, is that you can create inbound links, TONS more opportunities for someone to find you, and the more times someone sees your brand name, the more name recognition you can build.
Just promoting your end site is like standing in front of your store and yelling, "Come here!" Using Squidoo and other methods is like having your name on fliers that circulate the city. You get the benefit of your name out in more places, and the benefit of having more people link to you. It's a win-win co-op all around!
Comment by Chance — August 21, 2007 @ 3:25 am
I find the only real benefit of sites like Squidoo is the fact that they are considered "non commercial." There have been a few times when someone was looking exactly for a solution I was offering, but the forum prohibited commercial posts. I don't want to appear to be a spammer (probably my marketing downfall, I actually have a moral compass about such things), so I made a Hubpages page that was loaded with information on a topic I know a lot about and linked that instead.
I posted a link to my "informational" Hubpages page that also had my commercial links mixed in. I think its important to note though that this was not a spam page- it was relevant to the given topic, had lots of free information, and listed my service as an available commercial option.
Comment by Gary — August 21, 2007 @ 11:02 am
Thanks for the comments all!