Do you Squidoo? Do you create free traffic using Squidoo lenses?
Set Godin started the Original Squid almost ten years ago. He created Yoyodyne, and for the first time introduces the idea if permission marketing online.
Yoyodine was acquired by Yahoo, Seth served as VP Direct Marketing for Yahoo for an year and since 2000 Seth Godin dedicated himself as a public speaker, an author and a blogger.
Among others, Set Godin wrote an eBook about traffic in which he introduce a term I like “deserved traffic” which is coming from content. Yes, content is the king. With the technology and software packages we have today is easy to build web pages, but we really need web pages which attract traffic. The eternal question: how do I get more traffic?
Seth Godin’s advice is we need the 3 U’s:
Useful
Updated
Unique
Whatever you create, a lens, a blog, a website, you are responsible for the 3 U’s and this is the long term solution for getting traffic which is the same as having quality content.
Search engines have sophisticated algorithms, they change frequently without any notice to the public at large. Some people invest a lot of time, work, and energy trying to trick the search engines, it is possible to do so, but it isn’t a long term solution.
What happened in July 2006 when Google decided to change the landing page algorithm to rank web sites was a lesson for all of us. It was painful for a lot of people who lost a good Google ranking over the night. Google is on a mission to build a better web, and that action was a huge step in the right direction, a loud cry for quality pages! That was the Google way to clean up the web, to make invisible pages which aren’t useful, nobody update them and have information which aren’t unique in nature. With other words pages without content.
Prior to July 2006 I used PPC (pay per click) to drive traffic, since that day of infamy I begin to explore Social Bookmark which can produce free traffic for me.
My prefferate technique is to create Squidoo lenses in which I have links to my web sites, my eBay auctions, RSS modules, Amazon modules and a lot of interaction with the pubic interested in my topics via plexo modules.
Squidoo is a platform that lets anyone build a web page (called lens) about any topic which interest you, free, and in just a few minutes. It is confusing for the beginning, but you can define a lens as your viewpoint on a topic. Lenses focus attention, drive clicks and even earn royalties. The secret is – your lens must be noticed by the public and if you have good content they will. Why, because:
They are useful
frequently updated and
contains your unique expertize, point of view.
The successful lenses are the ones which follow Seth Godin’s 3 U’s rules.
I heard a lot of comments about how much you have to work on your lenses to continue improve and update them. The answer is yes and no! I hope you don’t expect to improve the visibility of your work doing nothing! If you use proper techniques you can create lenses with dynamic allocation.
Example, you can use:
RSS module which change content at 6 hours
Create a gallery of pictures with Flickr, all the time when you add a new picture in Flickr the change will be propagated in your lens which use that Flickr
Amazon modules
Voting using plexo modules
eBay modules which change when an item is ended or you add a new item
All of those will refresh your content daily and in top of that when you have something new to say, yes, you will update your lens content.
I am very comfortable with Squidoo lenses and the traffic I generate for my personals links I put on them: my web sites, blogs etc. I really love Squidoo lenses, I have a lot of fun doing them, but I am an open mind and I use other sources to drive traffic like Social Bookmark
I use:
techniques.StumbleUpon
YouTube
del.icio.us
Digg
Onlywise and so on.
In a nut shell, it is possible to create traffic without spending money with PPC, the content of your web sites, blogs, lenses, is the most important driving force for traffic, social bookmark is the second important technique you can use to generate free traffic, and always follow the rule of 3 U’s: useful, updated, unique.
