I have talked about this a little bit already on this blog. Hopefully, you have at least signed up for the free version of Squidoo Secrets. If you have been following this blog, you should have already signed up for a Squidoo account and a Hub pages account. You will need them for this. Here are the basics of the strategy:
- find a product that you would like to promote that hasn't launched yet
- claim your real estate on Squidoo and Hub pages (the ideal lens or hub has the product name in the url…"www.squidoo.com/product-name" or "hubpages.com/hub/product-name")
- use the techniques in Squidoo Secrets to make your lens irresistible to the search engines (most of the techniques will work for your Hub page too)
- ping your lens and hub page at pingomatic, ping goat, and other pinging services
- submit a story, (a review of the product works good), about your lens to Digg, Propeller, Reddit, and any other social news sites you can think of. ( I use Web 2.0 Submitter, but you can use Social Marker as well )
- bookmark your lens everywhere: Technorati, Delicious, Only wire, you name it
- make your review into an article, with links to your Squidoo lens and Hub page, and use this free article submitter to distribute it to over 300 article directories (not all at once, 5-10 directories a day looks more natural)
- if you have a blog, make a couple of posts with links to your Squidoo lens and your Hub page.
If you do the first 5 steps a couple days before the launch and then follow up immediately with the rest, you will have at least 2 listings on the first page of Google results when the product launches. The sooner you get your sites up, the better chance you will have. The search term you will be ranking for is the product name itself.
I have found that usually the first Squidoo lens built about the topic will be the one that Google displays. This will change over time and the lens with the best content and optimization will win out. If some one beats you to the punch at the start, make sure you build a lot of back links to your lens and Hub page via the social bookmarking sites and by making blog comments.
Also, once the product launches, make sure you go back and update your lens and Hub page. I would make it a habit to add and/or modify your content on a weekly basis. This will give you the best results, especially in the beginning. After all, the search engines love fresh content.
Filed under Social Bookmarking, Web 2.0 by 
I ran across this awesome social bookmarking tool the other day and just had to share it with everybody. I have promoted a tool on this blog, called Web 2.0 Submitter. Web 2.0 Submitter lets you semi automate the submission process to 10 different social bookmarking sites. It is a great time saver in what can be a lengthy, drawn out process.
Well this new tool I ran across submits to 47 different social bookmarking sites.
It's called "Social Marker". OK, it doesn't automate the process as much as Web 2.0 Submitter but it will shave some time off the submission process. The big difference is that it is free. My recommendation is to use them both together. You can use the Social Marker to do the bookmarking sites that Web 2.0 Submitter doesn't cover. You will be able to create a ton of powerful, high page rank back links to your sites in know time.
Filed under Internet Marketing Tools, JT Recommends, SEO, Social Bookmarking, Web 2.0 by
I hope you signed up for your Twitter account. Make sure you have set up your profile and put the website you want to drive traffic to in the "More info URL" box. Once you have completed your profile, you want to start folowing people.
There are 2 ways to do this. You can click on the "public timeline" link at the top of the page but I recommend using the search box where it says "People" in the right hand column. Type in a keyword to find people with similar interests. Once the results come up click on the "follow" button to start getting notices on your home page when ever that person makes a "tweet".
By the way, a "tweet" is what you do when you post a statement. We are going to be discussing a lot of different Web 2.0 sites and most of them have there own termanology that you will need to familiarize yourself with. I would make it a practice to make at least one tweet a day if not more. Don't be spammy about it. If you post a link every time you make a tweet, then you won't get as many followers.
You have to use the service in the spirit that was intended and slip in the occassional plug for your website. Make tweets like "Taking the family to the beach this afternoon" or "Watching the football game and having a few cold ones." Then later that day, "I'm just made a new post to my blog at http://yourdomain.com". Just don't over do it.
That is going to be the case with most of these social websites. You want your backlinks to look as natural as possible. I will discuss each one as we go because some sites are much more tolerant than others.
When you signed up for Twitter, you probably noticed that you can use Twiiter with IM and SMS. You can also go to http://m.twitter.com with your smart mobile phone. There are a couple of Word Press plugins that I know of. One lists your tweets in the side bar and the other one gives you full functional acces to your Twitter account from your blog and will automatically create a tweet whenever you make a blog post. If you post on a regular basis, you can accumulate quite a few PR 8 backlinks 
. Just don't forget to mix it up by making daily tweets without links. You can also use the @ symbol in a tweet to target a specific Twitter user. This will also give you "social" credibility and help you be one of the crowd.
There are other ways to monetize Twitter, aside from building backlinks and creating traffic to your websites. Websites like Twitter love it when people create applications that are designed to specifically work with their websites. Use your imagination along with a programmer and come up with something that ties Twitter into another Web 2.0 site like MySpace, YouTube, or maybe Ebay and you can see the potential.
There are already a bunch of widgets and what not that have been created. I also discovered more plug ins. The list is too extensive to put here so here are the links. Click here for the Top 10 Plugins and click her for the Twitter Wiki.
You will see that there are tons of different applications and more are being created all the time as Twitter becomes more popular. I recently read that so many people are joining , the technical team can't upgrade the servers fast enough to handle the load.
Filed under Blogs, SEO, Social Bookmarking, Twitter, Web 2.0 by
Here is a general definition of Web 2.0 that I pulled off of a Google search.
"Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an "architecture of participation," and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences."
The general theme here is "user participation". It's all about what the people want and giving them more control of the content that they see. Web 2.0 encompasses sites like MySpace, You Tube, all of the social news and bookmarking sites, blogs, and a slew of other user content based and tag driven internet entities.
One big happy social networking family that can be used by the average internet marketer to drive tons of traffic to your website and sky rocket your search engine rankings to the first page of Google. I am only going to concentrate on Google because they account for the majority of all searches made on the internet.
Before we start on this little journey to Google's front page, here are some tasks to perform:
- sign up for an account at Squidoo
- sign up for an account at Only Wire and all the social bookmarking sites inside
- sign up for an account at Hub Pages
- sign up for an account at You Tube
- decide on what you are going to promote (your own website or blog, affiliate website, etc…)
These are the basic programs that you will need to start driving traffic to your website, blog, or affiliate page. There are many more that we will use but this is enough for now. You will find that only wire requires you to sign up for 22 different social bookmarking sites. That should keep you busy for a while.
I also want to give you fair warning. This is going to require a bit of effort on your part. I recommend that you just pick one website to promote at the beginning and then add more once you get the hang of it. I will introduce you to some tools that can save you a lot of time as we go. It's a lot of work but you will be amazed at the results you get.
Until tomorrow…
Filed under General, Hub Pages, Social Bookmarking, Squidoo, Web 2.0 by
