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:

• PotPieGirl blog
• PotPieGirl on Twitter
• One Week Marketing squidoo affiliate marketing system

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 something substantial inside your tent/website/blog to keep the audiences there.

When that happens, “people flock. They tell their friends. They engage. They give permission. It works.”

Ah, the essence of social marketing/social traffic generation succinctly summarized in 13 words.

The root of Squidoo (which I see as an embodiment of Seth’s word-of-mouth marketing principles) “we give anyone an easy-to-use platform where you can help people understand your little part of the world. A page where you can include links and content and pointers and a bit of community to help people figure out what’s going on.”

How to get the most out of Squidoo?

Build yourself as an authority, the “go to” gal or guy for your niche subject.

If you are building great pointers to great stuff and profiting by being an expert, by engaging people as they look for something to help them, we need you and will continue to work to help you.”

The nucleus of “social marketing”? It lies in:

“What Squidoo does when it does things well: it gives people meaning. Squidoo is not some sort of amplifier where you can place a paragraph or two of text and maybe a banner and get some juice.

A great Squidoo lens is a hand-built piece of insight into a given topic. You list your offering, perhaps your competitors. You point to pictures or videos that teach people about what you do. Include links to customers who are also giving testimonials.”

Implicit in Seth’s statements is the idea of creation value for your readers, and more broadly, your community.

Destroy that value by scraping keywords devoid of any context, or by overly being sales-focused, without being information-focused and you risk alienating your very customers and relegating yourself into a pitch-fest freak.

In case you’re wondering about the duality/dichotomy which seems present in the marketing world, between white hats and black hats (and sometimes gray hats), Seth spells it out very clearly:

There are only two kinds of marketers:

• Marketers who spend all day trying to do more and give more to their customers.
• And marketers who try to do less and charge for the rest.

How would you achieve victory in this war of opposing marketing paradigms?

Seth’s belief is: use your lenses to be the expert and to give it all away. The more you give away, the better you’ll do.

The bottom line in social marketing for me has been in line with eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s mantra “Do No Evil”.

Seth has more nuggets of social marketing information and you can check out the full text of Howie’s interview at:

–>  Howie Schwartz Interviews Seth Godin

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.

By the way, if you sign up with Squidoo, you become a lensmaster, maintaining a lens.

What’s a Lens?

It’s a single web page with focused content. The lens focuses on content in your niche, sort of a content aggregator if you’d like.

Revenue is generated from adsense revenue which is split according to the model listed above. At the same time, you can add monetization modules from the likes of Amazon and eBay into your lens.

Lenses are also given ranks, with higher ranked lenses expected to generate more traffic.

How’s the ranking system work?

Here’s the official word from Squidoo:

SQUIDOO.COM KEEPS TRACK OF MILLIONS OF LENSES. We host them and know what is on each one. Each lens is scored by our proprietary LensRank algorithm, which ensures that the best lenses get the most traffic.

And, like blogs, like everything in fact, there will probably be an A-list.

How do you get on the A-list?

• Start early.
• Update often.
• Listen to your Web surfers—they can contact you directly from your lens.
• Build an audience.
• Link hither and yon and back again.

Some background on Squidoo:

• It was launched in October 2005.
• It came out of beta testing in March 2006.

Besides role as a social community, Squidoo’s role as a co-op is “to pay as much money as we can to our lensmasters and to charity. And Squidoo’s goal as a community is to have fun along the way, and meet new ideas and the people behind them.”

It’s easy to set up a Squidoo lens and you can probably set one up in 10 minutes.

You have a lens builder, complete with modules which make it easy to:

• Provide links, feeds, abstracts, and lists to users who are trying to make sense of a topic.
• A single lens could point to Flickr photos, Google maps, blogs, eBay auctions, YouTube videos, and other links.

What’s more, Lensmasters are encouraged to promote personal agendas, expertise, causes, products, and opinions.

I’ve heard too that some of the early lenses have high PR and traffic.

It can be another traffic generation source.

Interested? Sign up here: Squidoo Lens Setup

My Lens is located at: http://www.squidoo.com/andrewwee/

Also check out Seth Godin’s free Squidoo ebook “Everyone Is An Expert“