hub pages – Micro Business Specialist

Squidoo eBook Gets Some Backing

Some time ago I got interested in Squidoo as an inexpensive way to create a web presence. It was relatively easy and free. It wasn’t until later that I learned how valuable a site it could be for generating backlinks to other web properties.

Now knowing something and doing something with that knowledge don’t always follow. At least in my case. It turns out I know how to do a lot of things that frankly I don’t always do. How about you?

I published a Squidoo eBook called Squidoo Basics and get a few sales every now and again, but haven’t actually promoted it in the past. I had a stray sale the other day that reminded me of its nearly orphan status, and I decided to give it a promotional push.

I’ve also been experimenting with Market Samurai a keyword research tool plus more and selected a series of keywords to focus on. The best in my estimation was the phrase Squidoo eBook.

So I went to my one page sales letter and added my new keywords, title and descriptions as I teach others to get the page itself set up properly for the search engines.

I then started writing. First a I did an article on my Home Staging Business Tips blog on Squidoo, making sure to create a Squidoo eBook anchor text backlink to my sales page.

I then took the guts of that article and posted it on Active Rain, which is a real estate authority blog site that many homestagers also use. I again used the same anchor text.

From there I went on to create a quick Blogger blog who’s one post is on Squidoo and yes with the same anchor text. Then on to Hub Pages, and then Knol, and now back here to Micro Business Specialist. You can fully expect to see a link in the coming paragraphs.

I intend to follow this up with a series of articles that I will post to the article directories. With any luck the combination eventually gain me a first page listing on Google.

Anyone who searches Google for the phrase Squidoo ebook should be a pretty good prospect for an eBook Called Squidoo Basics, don’t you think?

Now, I’ve heard varying theories on how best to do this, so I am open for your comments. But my goal here was to create a circle of backlinks from a variety of high ranking web sites and some less so to start driving my single page sales page higher in the Google Search engines.

In the past, I have advocated linking first from one source to another and then to another to flow the accumulated Google Juice to one spot. In what I did today, I did not link from one to another, but just to the sales page.

While I like to pretend I know everything, I’d be interested in readers comments on this. I can always go back to each of these and create some cross links. I do know that I do not want to have links going from a to b and b to c and c back to a. That creates a circle and apparently negates the value of the back links. Same with a to b and b to a.

The topic of Squidoo is certainly large enough that I could easily go to any of these sites and add more content which will give me ample time to promote my Squidoo eBook. I am also likely to go back to Squidoo and create some additional lens on the topic, rather than add to the existing one. That way I will have another backlink, rather than just a backlink from a longer Squidoo Lens.

If you are new to Squidoo I invite you to click on my link and join Squidoo for FREE!

[tags]Squidoo, squidoo ebook, backlinks, seo, search engine optimization, hub pages, knol, market samurai,[/tags]

Practically Perfect Products To Promote

A week or two ago, I wrote a blog post I called a Provocative Suggestion in which I promoted a new system called Affiliate Silver Bullet. In addition to my blog post, I have been emailing people who have opted in to one or another of my auto responder lists. Actually, I have the message queued up as one of my follow-up messages.

Today I got a message from one of my readers who wondered if it would be effective for new people who don’t have a large list to mail to. A fair question.

And my answer was that it certainly is easier to promote things when you have a large list, but that you can’t let that get in the way of identifying a product or series of products to promote while you are building that list.

One of the benefits of the Affiliate Silver Bullet is that they have already chosen quality products for you to promote. That’s a bit more important than you might realize at first. The product they have included are proven winners, with quality you can be proud to present to your list, and with sales material that actually converts.

But what do you do, if you don’t already have a sizable list? You start building one.

The primary advantage of Affiliate Silver Bullet that makes it so much more desirable than its predecessor “Clickbank Pirate” is that you can send people to your own auto-responder list.

I have a separate list in my Aweber account for each of the five Affiliate Silver Bullets I have set up so far.

That means you can build your list by promoting the products in Affiliate Silver Bullet. Each bullet has a freebie associated with it that you can promote on safe lists, or by any other means. When people opt in for the freebie they join your list.

Once they are on your list, you need to send them emails. Writing quality follow-up emails is a skill in it’s own right. This is also handled by Affiliate Silver Bullet. With each bullet you get a series of professionally written emails that will drip on your new list members until they buy, automatically.

Combined that means you have a selection of quality products, a series of valuable giveaways to offer to prospective members to get them to opt into your list and a series of professional emails to follow-up with them. All of which you can set up each week in just a few minutes.

Your job is then to concentrate on how you will drive traffic to the free offers. Now granted if you already have a large list, it will only take a few emails to promote the individual offers. So yes, someone with a large list will have an initial advantage.

But for those without a large list, you now have all the back end pieces you need to allow you to focus on learning how to and then driving traffic to the free offers.

It does take traffic to be successful. There are many ways to drive traffic. Article marketing is just one that I use. I am writing articles relevant to each of the Affiliate Silver Bullet products. Not about the products, and not pitching them but about the topic. If the silver bullet is on bloging, I write an article about blogging and put one of the two links in my resource box to the freebie for that Silver Bullet product.

These articles will be referring prospects within days of being accepted by the directories and will send traffic for months and years to come.

I’ve also set up some simple blogger blogs, often using the same content as my articles with links to the freebie. Here I’ve found that the Blogger SEO Annihilator script I got from the first month of Jeff Dedrick’s Automated Traffic was a great value. It helps get them optimized for search engine results.

I’ve then built on them with Squidoo lens and Hub pages to send high authority back links to the blogger posts. I get some traffic from the Squidoo lens and hub pages, but more importantly raise the blogger posts to the top of the search engines for my keyword terms.

This combination is just the start, but a powerful start, to driving a ton of free traffic to these Affiliate Silver Bullet products. Add to that any safe list, traffic exchange or other traffic you can generate and you have a system that will send you traffic and ultimately revenues for years to come.

Don’t expect miraculous overnight riches with this approach. But by concentrating on building the traffic generation aspect and linking it together using multiple tools, you can develop a cash machine that send you clickbank checks on a weekly basis.

The bottom line from my point of view is this. You need a quality product to promote, with sales materials that sell. You need a freebie to get people to opt into your list, you need quality follow-up email messages to get the whole thing to convert into dollars for you. You could do it all yourself, or you could let Affiliate Silver Bullet do it for you. If you let Affiliate Silver Bullet solve your product, freebie and follow-up needs, you can focus your attention on the key skill you need to learn to be successful online and that is traffic generation.

That’s why I think Affiliate Silver Bullet is an appropriate starting place for may new and intermediate level affiliate marketers.

[tags]affiliate silver bullet, aweber, squidoo, hub pages, clickbank, [/tags]

Beyond Squidoo: Get Support from HubPages

Get More Link Juice Via Hub Pages

In my last posting, I spent some time describing Squidoo.com and how useful it can be as a source of quality backlinks to your site.

Squidoo offers you the opportunity to create your own backlinks that you can custom design. By that I am referring to your ability to use anchor text that uses precisely the keyword phrase you want to rank for, and the ability to direct that link to a specific page on your web site.

Since Squidoo is free to use, there is no reason why you can’t create multiple Lens, and add additional links to your site. From a search engine optimization standpoint it makes sense to have multiple short Lens rather than one long comprehensive one. So if a home stager wants to create a lens on staging a bedroom and another on staging a living room and a third on outdoor landscaping you now have three sources from which you can send links back to your web site. Within each lens you want to include a couple anchor text links to various pages on your site.

The power of Squidoo comes from it’s internal grouping system. Once you have created your lens, you want to join your lens to every relevant group you can. If you are a potter, you will want to sign up your lens with all the various pottery groups, as well as art and crafts groups and any others that make sense.

The search engines see Squidoo as a large web site with many different topics. Normally this would be negative as it’s not focused and many lens are not specifically relevant. However since your lens is connected and linked to internally via your group memberships and also by Squidoo’s own internal tagging system you are seen as part of all the groups you are associated with. The strength of your individual link is a product of all these relevant association within Squidoo. To learn more about the internal linking and groups within Squidoo get a copy of Squidoo Basics.

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A similar venue like Squidoo is the Hub Pages site. Go the www.hubpages.com. Set up an account there, and jump right in. The set up is different but similar to Squidoo. You will need to create a title of 120 characters or less, which becomes part of your url. Just as with Squidoo, you want it to consist of the keywords you want your own web site to rank for. So if you are following my advice on using geographical keywords you may want to name your site, CincinattiDryCleaning if you are a dry cleaner in Cincinatti.

Just like Squidoo, you want to create anchor texts in your hub pages. You can use much of the same material in your hub pages that you did on your Squidoo pages, but you want to rework it into a different format so it is distinctly different than the way it appears on Squidoo or anywhere else. Make it unique.

Now while you will be including links to various pages on your web site, you also want to create some links from your Hub pages to your Squidoo pages. That’s why we talked about Squidoo first.

Remember last week when we talked about “link juice.” Hub pages have a little less link juice than Squidoo. But they are still a highly ranked site, just not quite a big. Your link from Hub pages pours link juice into your Squidoo lens. This link juice accumulates there and is passed via your Squidoo lens to where it links, ie. your web site.

It is important that you maintain the one way nature of this linking. As we also discussed last week, if you reciprocate links the link juice cancels each other out. So for my purposes, I always link from my Hub Pages to my Squidoo pages and never the reverse. Since I have many different niches this rule keeps me out of trouble.

Which one you use to link to the other is less important, than that you make sure to keep the one way relationship alive. And please remember that means you cannot link from your web site to your Hub pages as this would create a circle and negate the benefit of all the links.

Next time I will begin to discuss why article marketing is so powerful.

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Two additional tidbits. I have had a lot of projects building up lately thus the delay in getting this post out. I am still doing my analysis of peoples web sites. But am now restricting myself to just four a week. These are very useful to people and I want to maintain my hands on service to as many people as I can. To get details go to http://cli.gs/7gH1Zr

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In addition to maintaining your web site and getting it set up for search engines, the most powerful thing you can do for yourself is to blog from your own wordpress blog. WordPress blogs are easy to use and free, but can be very bewildering because there are so many options in terms of themes, plug ins, widgets and settings. I have learned a lot about blogging from Mike Paetzold who is a master blogger. He just released a new “How to” eBook and video series Tuesday night and is offering $20 off until sometime Saturday. It’s called Word Press Made Easy and is a “must have” in my opinion. He walks you through all the plug ins and settings he uses on his plethora of blog sites. If you are going to blog, and you should, it is a good idea to copy a master blogger, until you learn enough on your own to make specific variations. With his help you can have your blog up and running and or re-tuned in about an hour. Well worth it, I promise you. http://cli.gs/mv5Whd