21st Century Affiliate Marketing

As I’ve written previously on this blog, you can treat your Squidoo lenses as a sort of mini-blog by sending a SquidCast whenever you create a new lens or make significant updates to an existing lens.

The SquidCast is a very limited posting (500 characters maximum) about the lens. This is added to the RSS feed for that lens.

For example, the following URL is the RSS feed for my John Dilbeck lensography lens:

http://www.squidoo.com/xml/syndicate_lens/John-Dilbeck

Each lens has a similar RSS feed.

In order to make use of this, you must remember to send a SquidCast whenever appropriate. Fortunately, we are reminded to do this whenever we publish a lens.

You can treat this RSS feed as you would any other. It can be added to feed readers, syndicated using RSS modules on other lenses or your blog, and it can be syndicated via email, if you want.

I got to thinking about this because I read a post by Linda Martin on her blog: Offer Email Subscriptions to Your SquidCasts

She has created a new lens, Offer Email Subscriptions to Your SquidCasts, that explains the process of offering updates via email for your SquidCasts for all your lenses.

Essentially, her method uses the RSS feed for all a lensmaster’s Squidcasts, provided by thefluffanutta’s SquidUtils.com, and syndicates it using the free services of FeedBurner.com.

Each lensmaster can get an RSS feed through SquidUtils.com that includes the SquidCasts you’ve made for all your lenses, combined. The URL for my feed is:

http://squidutils.com/squidcasts/from/johndilbeck.rss

Feedburner.com provides tools for publicizing your RSS feeds, including syndication via email. It is a free service, and you can syndicate as many RSS or Atom feeds as you want.

Using the method Linda describes on her lens, anyone who subscribes to the email updates will be notified whenever a lensmaster updates any of his or her lenses. This may be a very good way to keep your fans updated if your lenses are about similar topics.

However, if you have a lot of very different types of lenses, it may not be the best approach, necessarily.

Linda provides a caution on her lenses reminding the subscriber that they’ll receive updates on all her lenses, not just the one they’re subscribing from.

On the other hand, you may want to restrict updates to just the lens that’s being read.

You can do this by syndicating just that lens’ RSS feed via Feedburner, instead of the combined SquidCasts feed provided by SquidUtils.

That way, your readers will not be surprised by updates totally unrelated to the lens from which they subscribed.

So, which is better?

Do you want an easy way for your readers to subscribe to your SquidCasts for all your lenses combined?

…or…

Do you want an easy way for your readers to subscribe to just the SquidCasts about the lens they are currently reading?

I think syndicating the SquidCasts for all your lenses may be more useful, unless you have a lens that will be updated frequently. There’s not much point to subscribing to updates to a lens if it is only updated every few months or so, is there?

Fortunately, you can do either - or both - depending upon what you think is best for your readers and the particular lens they are visiting.

Thanks for the reminder, Linda, and for providing clear instructions on providing our fans with another easy way to be informed when we make changes to our lenses.

If you set this up, don’t forget to offer it to your fans on your lensmasters’ page, too.

So, what do you think about this? Is it something you would want to offer to the readers of your Squidoo lenses and to your fans?

Act on your dream!

JD