Did you know you can syndicate your SquidCasts by RSS and email?

December 22, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 6 Comments
Filed under: John Dilbeck, Lenses, RSS Syndication, Squidoo Lenses, email 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

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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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You can extend the reach of your Merchant Circle marketing

October 3, 2007 by John Dilbeck · Comments Off
Filed under: Blogging, Business Networking, Merchant Circle, RSS Syndication 

There are several ways you can promote your business on Merchant Circle: the contents of your basic listing, any items you post to your blog, coupons you create, photos you upload, and the bulletins posted on your directory listing page.

I just learned about Merchant Circle a few days ago and I’ve jumped all over using their system. You can see the profile I’ve created for Dilbeck Marketing on Merchant Circle. I’ve taken the time to use most of the tools and love their system.

(Your business is listed at Merchant Circle, right? If not, you can create a professional looking online listing for your business with our easy to use tools. Free! – MerchantCircle.com.)

There are probably other things you can do at Merchant Circle that I haven’t discovered in the less-than-a-week that I’ve been a member of the site.

What you may, or may not, already know is that every time you blog, create a coupon, upload a photo, or post a newsletter, these things are added to a newsfeed for you, automatically.

At the top-right of your listing, you’ll see “Subscribe to blog and coupon feed” followed by an orange chicklet that says “RSS/XML.” This is a standard news feed that can be syndicated on many services and can be read by anyone using a news feed aggregator or a news reader. Even without sending emails you are broadcasting to the world – potentially.

I’ll write a post later to explain more about making use of this. For now, suffice it to say that you can blog in one place and have it automatically republished in multiple places. This makes it very powerful for getting your news out.

If you don’t know anything about RSS, let me suggest that you read What is RSS?.

One place you may want to syndicate your feed is at Squidoo.com.

To do this, you’ll need to be a member.

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.

Of course, you’re an expert on your business, so join Squidoo and create a lens about it. It’s worth the effort to learn how to build free lenses on Squidoo, and it’s a perfect place to syndicate your Merchant Circle news feed.

For example, I’ve created a Squidoo lens about Merchant Circle and I’ve syndicated (re-published) my news feed and Merchant Circle’s news feed on that lens.

Also, as part of that lens, I’ve created a list where you can add a link to the Merchant Center listing for your business. I will be syndicating that list on some of my other websites, so you’ll get free advertising just by adding your link to the list. If you don’t understand, just comment on this topic and I’ll see what I can do to help you.

Act on your dream!

JD

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