Terry Didcott - Freedom Writers

Archive for the ‘Squidoo’ Category

I‘ve been a little up and down this week what with having to work a couple of days offline to keep my wallet full of beer tokens and to keep the larder well stocked. That meant some blogs and sites got to be updated with their usual regularity and some didn’t!

The first side of my little online empire that suffers when my online time gets limited is Squidoo. Despite having 18 lenses and some of them recently garnished with some Page Rank from Google they are the first casualties to fall. That doesn’t mean they instantly lose their search engine popularity - far from it! But they do lose ground in Squidoo’s own internal ranking system, which is never nice to see when you’ve worked hard on them to get them into fairly high positions only to see them slip sometimes quite drastically for not having been updated for a couple of days.

Never mind. It’s a funny old system that soon rewards some TLC and the lenses shoot straight back up there again.

One strange occurrence to report while I’m on the subject of Squidoo lenses. That is my oldest and most heavily content populated lens, The Honest Way (created as an adjunct to my flagship website) which was given a PR3 only the other day suddenly and for no apparent reason, slipped down to a PR2!

I find it hard to work out, as it has the most one-way links of all my lenses and the most content, yet newer and far less populated lenses kept their PR3. Strange!

Not really a problem, as I never expected any of my lenses to be even given a PR, so every one that did get a PR is a bonus, and those that got PR3 is a real boost. Several of my alternative health lenses fall into that category which pleases me no end, as it’s a subject that is very close to my heart. Also, one of my “make money” lenses also got PR3, so that also make me very happy!

But the best received PR3 of all my lenses was my own Terry Didcott lens! Why it got that, I’ll never know as it’s fairly young, hardly has any back-links and not a huge amount of content either - but it really gives my “Self Branding” exercise a real leg up!

Here’s to your continued success!

Terry Didcott

After that rather damning report on the state of the local water supply, I thought it would be a nice refreshing change to get back to some good old Internet Marketing!

Squidoo, to be precise. That’s because I’ve just created yet another lens to add to my growing family.

This time, I’ve decided to put to good use all the PLR eBooks that I have lying around on my hard drive. They’re just gathering virtual dust so rather than do nothing with them, it makes good horse sense to make a little money out of them.

It’s taking rather more work than I originally envisaged, because they all have to be set up with their own sales pages and PayPal buttons, download pages and all the other odds and sods that go into creating a salable item. And that’s for just one of them.

Anyway, I got to thinking that the best way to promote them for sale would be to put up a bargain basement sales page on Squidoo and lump them all in together. It’s far from ready to sell anything, so I’m going to withhold the link until it’s got a few eBooks ready to sell.

But here’s the plan:

1. Set up the lens first with some text modules and other paraphernalia to make it publishable. Add some eBooks to sell with links to their sales pages.
2. Set up a free hosted blog on the same theme and link to the lens.
3. Set up a pro hosted blog (not another one!) on the same theme and link that to the lens as well.
4. Set up links from my other lenses to the new lens - but a couple per day over a week or so, so the SE’s don’t think it’s manufactured - they like to see new blogs grow slowly and naturally!
5. Write an article (or two) and submit to ezine articles for a high PR back-link to the blogs to get them indexed fast. Then write more articles linking to the lens to get that indexed too.
6. Promote the lens through social bookmarking such as stumbleupon and del.icio.us etc and make it known to the social networking sites.

That should keep me busy for the next few weeks, so let’s see how this little experiment comes off!

Terry Didcott

PS: Alexa today: 939,043

As you’ll probably know already, I have created quite a lot of Squidoo lenses over that past few months.

These one-page mini-websites all have a great promotional benefit to my hosted websites and blogs in that they provide valuable one-way inbound links to them, which is good from the viewpoint of attaining a usable search engine page rank.

But Squidoo lenses have another plus point in that they are in themselves perfect foils for promoting affiliate products to customers who might not have otherwise found my sites and blogs. Sure, I’ve already got some of those lenses kitted out with a nice array of affiliate products - I have several Internet Marketing themed lenses that cater for that side of the market and some alternative lifestyle themed lenses to cater for that side of things.

However, these niches are quite heavily populated already, making them difficult to make money in any decent quantity, so I decided to branch out and try some niches that I’m not that familiar with, but that are also not do heavily promoted by other marketers.

This is where keyword research has come into play in order to find good keywords for niches that don’t have so much competition. My first of these breakaway niche lenses is already alive and on the air:

Designer Bag

I expect to see this lens go charging up the search engine pages quickly once it gets indexed and then to see some affiliate commissions from some sales that it generates. Lets see if it does!

If anyone’s interested to see how this one is put together, feel free to click over there and have a look see!

Terry Didcott

How annoying! All that great news about my self-branded Squidoo lens climbing so high up the ratings ladder as well as my other lenses all doing reasonably well have come to nought.

They’ve all come crashing down again!

My new flagship lens has crashed from #552 to below #3,000 while all the others are below that even. Remember (if you didn’t know) that the lower the number the better the rating.

So what is to be done?

Who knows. By keeping them all updated regularly and continually adding ever more original content should work for them in the long run. Getting visitors to them in the short term and then making regular readers is also the long term road to success with Squidoo lenses.

So I’d better get to it!

Terry Didcott