This week on the Friday Podcast, I invited PotPieGirl to talking about generating traffic using free methods.
I’d seen her twitter exchanges with Miles Baker and found that she’s pretty proficient in building sites on Squidoo (the social networking site founded by marketer and author Seth Godin) and generate affiliate marketing income from her efforts.
During the course of our discussion, I found out:
- How she got started in affiliate marketing
- Her strategy for traffic generation and how she got involved in social media marketing
- How she balances her time with a spouse and kids to take care of too
- How 2007’s “Squidoo Slap” (where Google placed less prominence on Squidoo lenses) has affected her business
- Tips for resources to build your internet marketing skills
- How to market effectively using Squidoo lenses
Check out the podcast below:
Links below:
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’d have seen news reports that marketing guru Seth Godin‘s Squidoo social networking site has been Google slapped in recent weeks. My friend, black hat marketer Howie Schwartz, interviewed Seth and in the process elicited a number of nuggets for social marketers from the Internet Marketing community.
In recent weeks, there’s been news coverage from the likes of TechCrunch that some Squidoo pages have seen as much as a 75% drop in traffic, due to lower rankings in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
With a Google PageRank 6 and Alexa 493 traffic ranking, Squidoo is among the Internet’s most popular sites. [You can see my earlier: Squidoo review]
The reason? A number of marketers have been using Squidoo lenses as a parasite host for hosting pages for spam marketing purposes. [The Squidoo team lists their anti-spam measures]
With the drop in Google’s SERP positions, a number of marketers have since moved their pages over to Hub Pages (PR6, Alexa 3,220)
But does adopting a “nomadic” approach of shifting to another authority site solve the puzzle of generating a continual stream of traffic?
It seems more like a “slash and burn” forest clearing measure. You forage in an area, turn it into a wasteland, shift to the next plot – slash the trees, burn it to the ground – and move on.
Sure, there are a lot of “forests” on the Internet, but if we were to take the “Live Earth” idea of a sustainable, long-term and long-tail approach to Internet Marketing, wouldn’t it be better to master the dynamics of social networking and build a brand AND a business from there?
Howie’s interview with Seth provided a number of insights. If you’ve read Seth’s works like Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, the Idea Virus and All Marketers are Liars, the interview will reasonate with you and you’ll see the principles put into action.
 Master Marketer Seth Godin
If you’re not familiar with Permission Marketing, Seth provides a good illustration of the evolution of marketing from disruptive to a permission-based model:
“Marketing has become a consensual process. In other words, you can’t yell at people (on TV, on the radio, on the web) and hope that you can earn enough to yell more. As a result, the most successful marketers are the ones who have a product that people are eager to use and talk about (think iPhone). This is great news for people who have useful information to sell, because human beings are drawn to insight and knowledge and things that help them succeed.
Like Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds had mentioned at Affiliate Summit East, building a site optimized for humans, rather than search engines will bring you the biggest returns.
You may detect a bias towards “content development” and “content sites” in recent posts, but that’s only because “content IS king”.
As Seth skillfully illustrates:
Like the booth at the carnival that has a great barker outside bringing people in, but not much in the tent, at least as far as I can tell.
So SERP rankings can bring you so far, but you’d need (more…)
If you’ve been online for any amount of time, chances are you’ve heard of Squidoo in passing or even been to their site.
Although it’s easy to pass off Squidoo as just another platform for traffic generation and revenue generation. (which I did for the longest time).
Upon closer look, the brainchild of marketer Seth Godin aims to achieve social good by focus the community’s efforts towards raising funds for charity.
According to the Wikipedia entry on Squidoo:
Squidoo splits its revenue with its “co-op” of lensmasters. 5% goes straight to charity, first. Then 50% goes to the lensmasters. 45% goes to Squidoo. The site is estimating that nearly half of all the lensmasters on the site are donating their royalties to any of 45 featured charities, ranging from NPR and The American Heart Association to smaller organizations like Chimp Haven and Planet Gumbo.
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