Is Squidoo a part of your marketing mix?

December 17, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 34 Comments
Filed under: CafePress, Communities, Lenses, Marketing, Poll, Sitesell and Site Build It, Squidoo Lenses, Squidoo Marketing 

I am a huge fan of Squidoo and use it as a major part of my marketing mix.

I recommend Squidoo for a number of reasons. The lenses are easy to build and you can always go back and modify them whenever you want. It’s free to use. They even pay you to use their free service – how’s that for a deal!

Why do they call it a lens?

Squidoo calls it a lens, actually one page on their site, because you can focus the page on a particular topic. Not every lensmaster does this, but the more successful ones tightly focus a lens on just one subject. If you want to cover multiple subjects, you can always create new lenses, and Squidoo offers several ways to help you cross-promote your related lenses.

Are you a Squidoo lensmaster?

I am happy to be a squidoo lensmaster and I currently have about 70 lenses. I had more, but had to delete almost 50 of them when one of the companies I was promoting changed direction. It’s time to start creating new lenses about the topics in which I’m interested.

Here’s my profile page: John Dilbeck, Squidoo Lensmaster.

If you examine this page, you’ll see that in addition to listing all my lenses, I can customize the page to link to other sites, including this blog, my Cafepress store, my Lulu store (which needs lots of work next year), my profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, and more.

If you’re reading this, I invite you to follow me on Twitter and become my friend on Facebook.

I think you can see at a glance that your Squidoo lensmaster page is a good way to link to other sites that are important to you.

If you get serious about Squidoo, you may want to create your own lensography to list your lenses in whatever way you want to present them. Here’s my main lensography (you can have more than one): Who is John Dilbeck?

Now, remember that you don’t have to build a lensography about yourself, although it is recommended to keep track of all your lenses and to present them however you want. You can build multiple lensographies.

Let’s say that you are promoting a particular product or service and you want to have multiple lenses, each of which discusses a major feature or benefit. You can create a lens about the main topic and then link to each of the sub-lenses. Even though each page is totally separate on Squidoo, you can present them organized logically and all together. That gives you a lot of flexibility.

Do you have a blog?

If so, you need to create a lens about it.

Why? Because you can tell people about your blog, syndicate your RSS feed, and get the benefit of Squidoo’s high rankings in the search engines.

For instance, I have a lens for this 21st Century Affiliate Marketing blog.

Do you have a CafePress shop?

How would you like to promote not only your store and the products within it, but also be able to promote other products sold on Cafepress – and earn some money doing it?

CafePress has an affiliate program on Commission Junction, and it pays a nice commission when you sell other people’s products. However, just by building a Squidoo lens, you can promote products without having to join at CJ.

But, you’ll make more money if you sell your own products from your lenses.

I have a CafePress shop at Shirts-Mugs-Hats.com and sell products just about every day.

I created a lens, John Dilbeck’s Shirts, Mugs, and Hats, where I link to the store and some of my best-selling items. There’s also a section where you can add a link to your Cafepress store, and I show random products from searches farther down the lens. I earn money on every sale, and you can do the same thing. It just takes a little time and creativity.

I even created a lens mainly designed to help you promote your CafePress shop. Several dozen shop owners have taken advantage of this, but few have gone back after adding their shops and voted them up higher in the list. Always remember to reload the page after adding something to a Plexo list so you can vote for it.

Come and Promote Your CafePress Store.

By the way, did you know that you can open a CafePress shop for free? Once you’re serious about it, you may want to upgrade to a pro shop. I did, and it’s basically free for me since my first couple of sales every month pays the fee and the rest of my sales are all profit. Not a bad deal.

Learn how to get started at CafePress and Make Your Own T-Shirts.

Promote Your Favorite Products and Services at Squidoo

As you may already be aware, one of the services I enjoy promoting the most is Site Build It! I’m both a satisfied customer and a very happy affiliate.

I have several lenses where I promote Site Build It!.

One of my most popular lenses is Site Build It, a revolution in website design, hosting, and promotion and I invite you to visit the lens, if you’re interested.

I think one reason this lens is popular is because I help other fellow SBIers promote their sites and lenses there. If you are an SBIer and have a website powered by Site Build It!, you are welcome to submit your site to the appropriate module on that lens. If you have lenses about SBI, there is a place you can add it, too.

You’ll note that I even welcome affiliate lenses from competing 5 Pillar affiliates.

As I have time, and as more services are announced at SBI, I’ll be adding more lenses discussing the benefits of those services.

Hint: I can’t tell you any more right now, but Sitesell will be announcing an exciting new educational service in about three weeks. Stay tuned for more information. I was on a conference call about it, just this afternoon, and I think there will be people who will want to take advantage of this new service. That’s all I can say, right now.

Squidoo offers much more

There are many modules that can be added to lenses to help you promote what you’re doing and help people find what you’ve written.

They offer a Twitter module where you can show your latest tweets.

Lijit.com has a special module so people can search your content via their search engine. When you add it to a lens, you can specify which lenses to include in the search results.

By going directly to Lijit.com, you can get code to add their search to your blogs and sites, too. You can see it in action in the right column of this blog.

Want to sell products from Amazon? There are modules designed to make it easy to do just that.

It would take a lot of blog posts to cover all that Squidoo offers to help you accomplish what you want, so I’m going to stop here.

How do you become a lensmaster

It’s easy to start building lenses on Squidoo. Build your own Squidoo lens and tell the world. It’s free, and you may even earn some money from it. Do it now, while you are thinking about it.

Remember, you can start simply and then expand your lens(es) whenever you want. I edited three of my lenses and republished them while I was writing this. It’s pretty easy once you learn how to do it.

Learn more from other Squidoo marketers

I would like to invite you to join us on the Squidoo Marketers community.

Come and learn from people who are using Squidoo in their marketing mix. Share what you know. Tell us about your lenses. Promote your CafePress shops.

It’s a friendly little community, and I’m looking forward to you joining us and participating there.

What’s your opinion?

So, what’s your opinion of using Squidoo as part of your marketing mix? I’m very interested in hearing your thoughts, opinions, and comments about your experiences with, or lack thereof, using Squidoo.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Are you chasing your tail?

December 12, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 18 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Marketing, Poll, Success and Failure 

Introduction: The purpose of this post is to get all of us thinking about what we’re doing to build our businesses and what we’re doing that is just a complete waste of time. Caution, this post rambles even more than most of the other things I write. I want to solicit your opinions and hear about your experiences. I’ll ask more questions than I’ll answer. I hope you’ll think seriously about the questions I raise and join the conversation.

Now, on to the questions of the day…

If you look back on the last year – assuming you’ve been building your online business that long – have you been making progress or just chasing your tail?

You know what I mean.

We all love to watch a kitten or puppy chase its tail and run in circles until it falls over. It’s entertaining. It’s amusing. To us.

To the kitten or puppy, it’s frustrating.

If they don’t catch their tail, they get tired and quit. If they do catch it, they learn not to bite so hard the next time.

You’ve seen this and laughed. If not, do a search on YouTube. I’m sure you’ll find many hours of interesting pet videos that illustrate the point I’m making.

In fact, the very act of searching on YouTube and watching these videos is a good example of chasing your own tail. After spending minutes, or hours, doing this, what do you have to show for your time and effort? Not much.

The same principle applies to building your home business.

Are you making progress, or are you simply chasing your tail?

Are you running off, hither and yon, looking for the secret to Internet marketing success? How many websites have you visited? How many newsletters have you subscribed to? How many gurus have you followed? How many ebooks have you bought and downloaded? How many of those ebooks have you read? How many affiliate marketing programs have you joined? How many social networks have you joined? How often do you tweet on Twitter? How many friends are you trying to keep up with? How much email have you read?

Or, are you spending your time developing and promoting your marketing business?

If you’ve done your basic homework, you probably already know all you need to know to begin building your online business. There are no secrets. Much of what you need to know is available to you for free. For example, read Ken Evoy’s free ebooks, the Affiliate Masters Course or his best selling Make Your Site Sell!, which is now free to download.

But, if you don’t plan to study those books – or whatever guides you prefer – and put into action what you learn, what’s the point? If you don’t learn and act on what you learn, you’ll never build a business, no matter how busy you are.

Are you building your business or are you simply chasing your tail?

If you intend to earn a living from marketing, don’t you think it is time to learn how to build a marketing system that will work for you? A system that will help you focus on what works best and do more of it?

There are so many distractions and so many things are promoted as the best way to become successful with your online business, but most of them don’t work for most of us.

How do we stop chasing our tail and focus on what works best when we don’t yet know what works best for us?

It is especially frustrating when what works well for me may not work well for you, and vice versa.

Still, there have to be some basic marketing fundamentals that will apply to all of us, don’t you think?

Which is better? (A) Posting free classified ads on a dozen sites or (B) building your own focused marketing blog or website?

Which is better? (A) making 100 Squidoo lenses on assorted topics or (B) making 100 Squidoo lenses on different topics related to your marketing niche?

Which is better? (A) promoting a hundred different products and services or (B) promoting the top ten products for your particular niche?

Which is better? (A) talking about everything you think about or (B) focusing on your particular niche and branding yourself so others will think of you when that topic comes to mind?

Which is better? (A) promoting hither and yon hoping for one-time sales or (B) building a marketing funnel (or funnels) for your business and each of the products and services you recommend to your readers?

Which is better? (A) spending hours a day clicking on a traffic exchange or (B) spending a few days creating a new marketing funnel for a particular product, including writing a benefits-laden report about the product, creating an autoresponder series for it, writing a page about it on your website, blogging about it, creating a Squidoo lens about it, tweeting about it, and promoting everywhere that is appropriate, with the goal to get your readers to join your list and download the report you wrote.

I’m asking these questions just to get you to think about this. There are no right or wrong answers. Well, maybe some choices are more right than others, especially if you’re serious about building your online affiliate marketing business.

What do you want to accomplish at the end of the day, week, month, or next year? Do you want lots of visitors to your sites? Do you want good ratings on your lenses? Do you want lots of comments on your blog posts? Do you want lots of people to subscribe to your list(s) and download your report(s)? Do you want larger commission checks every month? What do you want to accomplish with the time, effort, and money you invest into your business?

Are you just chasing your own tail?

I’ve done a lot of that and I’m starting to realize how much time I’ve wasted, and time is much more valuable than money.

What do you want to earn as payment for the effort you put into your marketing efforts? Enough for a movie and dinner? Maybe make a car payment? Pay your rent or mortgage every month? Earn enough to quit your job? Build a business that enables you to thrive and not just survive? What is your time and effort worth?

I hope this post sparks a good conversation. What are we doing that gets us nowhere and how can we substitute better methods to build our businesses?

I know which way I’ll be going in 2009. Have you thought about what you are going to do?

What do you think will work best – for you – in 2009 as you work hard to define your niche, target your best customers, promote the best products and services they need, and increase your revenue?

I’m all ears.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Click Here to Order – Stories of the World’s Most Successful Internet Marketing Entrepreneurs by Joel Comm

September 16, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 3 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Amazon, Books, Marketing, Self-Publishing, Sitesell and Site Build It, Success and Failure 

Last month, Joel Comm’s newest book, Click Here to Order – Stories of the World’s Most Successful Internet Marketing Entrepreneurs, was released and currently ranks #2230 in sales out of all books sold by Amazon.com.

This is not a step-by-step how-to book for new Internet marketers. If that’s what you are looking for, you should probably look elsewhere.

Click Here To Order tells the stories of some of the earliest Internet marketing entrepreneurs who succeeded beyond their dreams. You may know some of their names, already.

In fact, if affiliate marketing is part of your business revenue model, you may even promote products that some of the people in this book created.

From the product description:

While the general public is familiar with the larger Internet companies such as Yahoo!, Google, eBay and Amazon, very few are aware that small business is thriving online like never before, especially in the realm of information products. Click Here creates an entertaining and instructive narrative that provides an in-depth look at the unintentionally underground movement known as Infoproduct marketing, and the people who have profited and succeeded in the industry.

This edition of Click Here to Order is a 300-page paperback book. The list price is $17.95 and, as you probably know, is offered at a significant discount by Amazon.com.

Marketing on the Internet can be a very lonely business since we spend lots of hours in front of our keyboards and sometimes lose sight of what we want to accomplish because we get so bogged down in the details of what we’re doing.

Sometimes, it’s good to get away from the details and learn about the pioneers in this business. Who are they? What did they do? How did they do it? Why did they become so successful?

You’ll find some of these answers in Joel’s new book.

If you are interested in the history of the Internet marketing pioneers, and you want to learn more about how some of the best copywriters made their first dollars with online marketing, you’ll probably enjoy this book.

This is just one of the books about Internet marketing that I recommend in my Amazon.com bookstore.

Do you want to learn about Infoproducts and how to create them?

You can download, for free, Monique Harris and Ken Evoy’s excellent ebook, Make Your Knowledge Sell!.

While it won’t do the work for you, you’ll learn how to create an infoproduct of your own.

They provide great information about picking good ideas, writing to persuade, packaging your infoproduct, marketing it, and making sales.

Make Your Knowledge Sell! sold thousands of copies over the last few years, and now you can get it free. What are you waiting for?

Who knows, maybe you’ll be one of the people who’ll be featured in some future book about successful Internet marketers!

Read Click Here to Order for background knowledge of the business and how it has developed. Get inspired to do more by reading about the people who blazed the trails some of us are following.

Study Make Your Knowledge Sell! to learn many of the details and skills you’ll have to master to create your own infoproducts.

You can get started by learning affiliate marketing before you create your own products

Perhaps you’re not yet ready to create and sell your own infoproduct or service.

One of the best ways to get started in online marketing is to become an affiliate for a company with top-selling, high-quality products and services and then earn commissions by recommending them.

That’s my preferred business model, as you can tell from the name of this site.

I highly recommend Ken Evoy’s Affiliate Masters Course, and you can download a free copy here from my site.

Even if you choose to create your own products and sell them, you’ll want to know more about affiliate marketing. After all, you may create a great product and want to have affiliates helping you sell it.

Act on your dream!

JD

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This is a good time to think about promotional products and marketing your business

September 8, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 6 Comments
Filed under: Advertising and Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Promote Yourself, Promotional Products, Squidoo Lenses 

If you own or manage a company, now is a good time to think about using advertising specialty products to promote your business.

Always remember, if you don’t use promotional products to market your business and the products and services you offer, you’re giving your competitors a free pass. Some of them are definitely promoting their companies with products featuring their name, address, phone number, website, special offers, and possibly their company logo.

My mechanic doesn’t have business cards, but he does have ball-point pens with all his contact information. The car towing business a couple of miles away gives out small calendars that are just the right size for keeping in your car.

What are you doing to thank your customers for their business and to remind them on an on-going basis that you are still in business and would be happy to serve them in the future?

Seasonal marketing opportunities

In the USA, Thanksgiving is a good time to show your customers that you are thankful for them and their business.

Most companies send out corporate gifts, cards, calendars, and other advertising specialty items in December, just before Christmas. If you thank your customers in November, just before Thanksgiving, then you may get more of their attention because you’ll be competing with fewer other businesses.

Some of us think Thanksgiving is a better time to thank your customers than Christmas and it avoids all the other issues and stressful days that many people experience in December.

Christmas gifts are a traditional time to show your appreciation, too. Gifts of food, candy, cookies, cheese, etc., are popular.

Giving gift baskets to your best clients and customers is a tradition that seems to be growing in some markets. They are appreciated when those clients have holiday parties of their own, and everyone loves a snack during the holidays.

This is also the time that many companies give products with their logos to individual customers to thank them for past business.

New Years Day is also the start of a new business year. Calendars are great for reminding your customers about you.

Most companies don’t wait until January to give out calendars, however. Most start distributing them in November. September is a good time to place your order for calendars, because many companies offer discounts on calendar purchases in early September.

Put your company logo and contact information right into the hands of people who have already purchased from you or who fit the same profile as your best customers.

While promotional products are popular year-round, they are especially popular in the last four months of the year.

Now is the time to think about your marketing plan and how you want to thank current customers and how you will prospect for future customers in the coming year.

There are many places where you can purchase promotional products and some have affiliate programs that pay well.

I have a Squidoo lens, Promotional Products, with links to VistaPrint and Branders. You can purchase by clicking on the links on that lens.

VistaPrint

VistaPrint started out by offering inexpensive full-color business cards, but they have expanded their services considerably over the last couple of years.

Summer Clearance - Save up to 90%

Today, as I write this, VistaPrint is running their end of summer clearance special and you can save substantially on items you can use to promote your business.

If you do nothing else, you should take advantage of their free offers.

Branders

Branders is more of a traditional promotional products company and you can get your company logo and/or other contact information on thousands of popular products.

Branders.com

If you have an affiliate marketing business, you can apply as an affiliate at their websites. VistaPrint uses Commission Junction to manage their affiliate program. Branders manages their own affiliate program.

Promote Yourself

Every company needs to promote itself. There’s no doubt about that.

At the very least, you need to hand out business cards to all your prospects and customers. I’ve bought thousands of business cards from VistaPrint and I hand them out like they’re free. Actually, they can be free. Click the VistaPrint graphic link, above, to find out how you can get free advertising products from them.

What are you doing to promote your business?

Act on your dream!

JD

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Writing and Self-Publishing section added to bookstore

August 24, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 4 Comments
Filed under: Act On Your Dream!, Affiliate Marketing, Books, Lulu, Marketing, Promote Yourself, Self-Publishing, Writing 

Ever since I read Make Your Knowledge Sell! several years ago, I’ve known that I wanted to write a series of reports and ebooks with several goals in mind…

  • To share the knowledge I’ve learned over years of researching affiliate marketing and from the daily practice of it
  • To enhance my reputation as being someone with integrity who offers good advice about online marketing
  • To provide information that will help you avoid the pitfalls I’ve traversed and to make more money with affiliate marketing
  • To do more of something I enjoy doing: writing

About a thousand years ago, Nicki Fink and I wrote a textbook we used for teaching our students how to use Macintosh computers and several of the more popular applications that were in use at the time.

Knowing nothing about writing a book, we just did it.

Our first couple of editions were printed on a laser printer and we did all the collation and comb-binding ourselves.

When we finally approached a publisher, we had a pretty good book that was helping our students learn how to use Macs by completing a series of projects.

I submitted the entire book to Addison Wesley and instead of getting a rejection notice, as everyone had advised me to expect, we got an offer from Addison Wesley and Benjamin Cummings.

Addison Wesley wanted to get it into print quickly and Benjamin Cummings wanted a complete rewrite along with reviews by several colleges and academies before publishing it.

We made the mistake of going with Benjamin Cummings and added about another year to the project in addition to having several disagreements with the editor about the direction we wanted to go with the book.

Eventually the book was published and we received a few thousand dollars in advance royalties.

I was happy to have a published book that was helping some people learn how to use their Macs better, but the entire experience was less than satisfactory. I swore that the next book I wrote would be self-published.

Now, in the 21st century, a lot of things have changed. Books and reports can be released as ebooks and offered in downloadable PDF format. Tools and applications for doing this are becoming more popular and affordable.

Additionally, if you take the time to format that PDF ebook correctly, you can have it printed and sold at places like Lulu.com, CafePress.com, and many other print-on-demand publishers.

(I’ve started a Lulu.com storefront where I’ll be promoting reports, ebooks, and books in the coming months, as I have time to research and write them. Currently, there is one free downloadable copy of my Act On Your Dream! newsletter.)

Since writing and self-publishing have moved up higher on my to-do list, I researched these topics on Amazon.com this evening. As a result, I’ve added a new section to my Amazon store for Writing and Self-Publishing Books.

I have an older copy of Dan Poynter’s Self-Publishing Manual and I’m looking forward to buying and reading his latest edition.

Most people who dream of being a writer don’t know that writing is only one part of the job. Perhaps more important than writing a good book is promoting and publicizing it. If nobody knows about it, you won’t sell very many copies!

I added a few books about writing non-fiction, but most of the books in the new section are about promoting, publicizing, and networking. After all, if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably interested in affiliate marketing and other topics related to online marketing, so I’m sure you will find books of interest in this new section of my bookstore.

I’m always interested in your comments and recommendations. If you know of an excellent book about writing, self-publishing, or promoting books, I hope you’ll share with us.

Act on your dream!

JD

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New marketing books added to my bookstore

August 24, 2008 by John Dilbeck · Comments Off
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Books, Marketing 

As you may know, I’ve been an Amazon.com affiliate since shortly after they introduced the program way back in the 20th century.

One of the main ways I promote books and other products from Amazon these days is through my John Dilbeck’s Amazon Store.

Today, I added about a dozen books to the Blogging and Internet Marketing Books section of the store. You can see this section by clicking on the link under the Browse By Category menu in the right column of the store.

How do I select new books for the store?

I only add specific books to the store if…

  • I have read them and would recommend them highly, even if I weren’t paid to do it
  • The book has been recommended to me by someone I have come to trust and I plan to purchase it, read it, and put into action what it recommends
  • The majority of ratings for the book on Amazon are either 5 or 4 stars.

I spend quite a bit of time looking at new books, but the great majority of them will never make it into my bookstore. As I’ve said elsewhere, “if it’s not good enough for me, it’s not good enough for you.”

I try to put the best books on page one of my bookstore, but there is only enough room for nine books, so some really good books slide to page two and subsequent pages. I added several books to page one, today.

You’ll also find newly-added books on the last page of the main section.

My philosophy on buying business books is this…

If I can earn back at least twice what I paid for the book in additional revenues, then it was well worth the money and time reading it. If I can earn back twice the price I paid, then, with more work, I can earn back several or many times the cost of the book, by putting into practice what I learned from it and by adding it to my bookstore so you can buy it, too.

I looked at about 40 books today and added a little over a dozen new books to the store.

I’m looking forward to reading them as soon as I can make the time.

Come on in and browse

I hope you’ll consider the books I recommend in my bookstore.

Act on you dream!

JD

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Is Squidoo another blogging platform?

August 18, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 4 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Marketing, RSS Syndication, Social Networking, Squidoo Lenses, Squidoo Marketing, Twitter 

Aussie Sire asked a question on one of my twitter update posts and suggested that I rewrite my reply as a blog post. I think that’s a great idea.

He said:

Hi John, I had a look at your Squidoo page and I must say it is very impressive. I have heard of Squidoo and lenses and such but never really looked into them. It seems like another blogging platform but I assume there is a difference?

Hi Sire, thanks for the kind words about my Squidoo page for this blog:

21st Century Affiliate Marketing

Squidoo is not a blogging platform, but it works well with blogs. I try to build a Squidoo lens for each of my blogs for one specific reason: I can syndicate the RSS feed on the lens and Google likes Squidoo lenses. That means that some people may find my blog indirectly via the lens I create on Squidoo.

Squidoo is more of a simple webpage builder and they call each page a lens because the object is to focus on a single topic per page.

You may understand Squidoo a bit more if you read my lens at:

Marketing With Squidoo

That lens syndicates the feed from this blog, my social networking community for Squidoo lensmasters who enjoy marketing, and my blog specifically about marketing with Squidoo.

It also links to other lenses that have information about marketing using Squidoo.

You can build as many (or as few) lenses as you want and it’s always free. In fact, if you build lenses that attract visitors and get clicks, you can earn money from your lenses. Some very few people earn over $1,000 per month; a few dozen lensmasters earn around $100 per month; and most of us earn less than that. Your earnings come from sharing with Squidoo the commissions from Adsense and Glam ads on your lens.

I get a welcome deposit from Squidoo into my PayPal account every month.

Since you already have several blogs, perhaps you could start by building a lens about the main topic of one of your blogs.

You can get started here:

Join Squidoo and start building your own lenses.

But, I earn much more than the payment I get directly from Squidoo, because I promote affiliate links on my lenses and don’t have to share the proceeds from those commissions with Squidoo.

I also promote my CafePress shop on a few of my lenses and link back to some of my websites on other lenses.

So, I use Squidoo both as a traffic generator and as another profit center. It’s also great at cross-promoting lenses, blogs, forums, websites, social networking sites, and other web presences that share common themes and topics.

If you have a blog and you’d like Google to pay more attention, you may want to build a lens about the blog’s main topic and syndicate your RSS feed on the lens. You can also recommend books and other products from Amazon.com.

You can even recommend products from CafePress without having to join their affiliate program, but you’ll be sharing the commissions with Squidoo. It’s worth it because the CafePress module makes it so easy to promote the products you like on CafePress. There are thousands of shopkeepers selling their designs on CafePress and you can select from millions of product/design combinations.

Once a lens is built, it doesn’t take a lot of work to keep it current, and your blog’s feed is automatically updated on the lens on a schedule you can choose, i.e. every hour, every six hours, etc.

Another thing you can do to build interactivity into your lens is to add a guestbook, set up polls, start a duel (conversation/argument), and there are other modules that are of interest, too.

There are a lot of things you can do with Squidoo easily that are more difficult on a blog. I think the two of them work very well together.

Again, you can learn more, if you’re still interested at:

Marketing With Squidoo

I hope that helps you get the idea of what you can do with Squidoo.

One other lens you may want to visit is my lensography, where I write about my lenses, link to some of my blogs, show my Twitter tweets, and more:

Who is John Dilbeck?

If you have any other questions, I’d be happy to do my best to answer them or refer you to another site with the answers.

I almost forgot. There is a social networking aspect to Squidoo where you can meet other highly-motivated lensmasters and help cross-promote each others’ sites, lenses, and blogs.

For example every time you add a quality comment to another lensmaster’s lens, you’ll get a link back to your lensmaster page.

Then there is the ability for a visitor to your site to join your fan club. Whenever you post a SquidCast about your lens, people in your fan club and anyone who has marked that lens as their favorite will see the SquidCast on their favorites page at Squidoo.

You can even get a chicklet to show how many fans you have and it links to your lensmaster page:

A lens is like a blog in one respect. Each time you publish your lens (after the initial build or whenever it is updated), you can send what is called a SquidCast, but which is really a posting that is added to the lens’ RSS feed. Then you can ping that update to spread the word among the large RSS aggregators.

Of course, the SquidCast is also shown on the favorites page of your fans and the people who favorited that lens. It is also promoted on the Squidcast Twitter feed.

So, there are a lot of reasons to include Squidoo as an integral part of your marketing mix, even if you are a blogger or webmaster, already.

And, don’t forget, you don’t have to join Squidoo because you want to make money. You can build your lenses on the topics of your choice, so tell your stories, publish your poems, or show photos of your kids and pets.

Are you an expert on something? Build your own Squidoo lens and tell the world. It’s free, and you may even earn some money from it.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Do you have a blog at SquidTop.com?

August 5, 2008 by John Dilbeck · Comments Off
Filed under: Blogging, Marketing, Promote Yourself, Squidoo Lenses, Squidoo Marketing, WordPress 

Earlier this morning, I learned about SquidTop.com.

According to the SquidTop lens, Squidtop – Blogs for Squidoo Lensmasters, “Squidtop is a blog platform built on the WordPress system that allows squidoo lensmasters to create their own blogs to promote themselves, their projects, and their lenses.”

Well, that sounds just like me. I love promoting myself, my projects, and my lenses, so I immediately signed up for a new blog there: Marketing with Squidoo.

Since it is so new, there isn’t much there yet, but there will be as time allows and inspiration motivates.

Marketing with Squidoo will be concerned with marketing with Squidoo lenses, specifically. There may be a little overlap now and then with this blog.

I’ll be promoting my Squidoo lenses and our Squidoo Marketing Community on the new blog.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Are you in the Triiibe?

August 2, 2008 by John Dilbeck · Comments Off
Filed under: Business Networking, Marketing, Social Networking 

Seth Godin, marketing genius, online entrepreneur, and founder of Squidoo.com, has opened a new social networking site, and membership is by invitation only, at this point.

He has now opened it for another round of participants.

You can get the information on his blog in this post: Are you in the tribe?

He has an interesting way to qualify new members and to keep out the tire-kickers.

I followed the steps a couple of days ago and was invited to join the Triiibe. (Yes, that’s three “i”s in the name. He has an interesting explanation, in that it takes at least three people to become a group, and that the domain he wanted was already taken.)

The Triiibe is hosted on Ning.com, a site that I really like and which hosts my Squidoo Marketing community. (If you use Squidoo as part of your marketing mix, you’re invited to join us there.)

When I made it into Triiibe, I found almost 1,000 other people interested in the same topics I am, which include leadership, tribe building, marketing, and so forth.

I’m trying to catch up on some of the conversations and I’ve met some interesting new people and was happy to see some of my friends there, too.

Seth is on to something here, and if you’re interested, don’t let pre-purchasing his next book stop you from joining the Triiibe.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Should you tweet your blog?

July 22, 2008 by John Dilbeck · Comments Off
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Squidoo Lenses, Twitter 

I’ve been thinking a lot about Twitter.com lately. The better I fine tune the people I’m following, the more useful information and interactions that I get from my friends on Twitter.

I followed quite a few people, and now I’m pruning the ones that don’t really match my interests.

I’ve been trying to tweet more often, but I don’t really want to say anything unless I think it may be useful for the people who follow me.

When Squidoo added a feature that lets us tweet when we update a lens, I started using that as judiciously as I could. I certainly don’t tweet every time I update a lens. I do try to tweet the release of a new lens, however.

Then, I learned about Tweet My Blog, a new plug-in and widget recently released by John Merrick and Soren Jordansen.

I downloaded and installed it on this blog and everything was smooth and easy to do.

So, I’m testing it here, but haven’t decided if it should earn a permanent home, yet.

In order to get more feedback and opinions, I created a new Should you tweet your blog? lens on Squidoo.

If you are interested in tweeting about new blog posts, I hope you’ll take a few minutes and visit the lens. I would appreciate any feedback you’d care to make.

Act on your dream!

JD

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