Need Money Blog: How to power up blogs with Squidoo

Whenever I sit down with someone and tell them that I earn money online, they invariably ask "How can you make money online? It seems really hard."

Yep, it is. I built my first website more than ten years ago, but I did not actively start trying to make money online until about six or seven years ago. And I failed big time.

I built websites and covered them with AdSense and Amazon links and wished a thousand people a day would flood my sites, click on all my ad links and buy all my stuff. I dreamed about a big $500 check landing in my mail box each month....

Never happened.

Part of the problem was I had no idea how making money online worked. I did not know about the four "pillars", as I call them, of online success.

1) Money making topic
2) Original content, keyword optimized
3) Revenue generating related products
4) Traffic, traffic, traffic

Once I got my head around those four key pillars, the rest is just work. Then there is my own disposition towards cost. I hate spending money to make money. I don't mean educational material or paying for traffic, but paying for hosting, domains, disk space, etc.

I love making money online on the cheap for little if no money at all.

That is why I love all the free website platforms which are available and powering them up with Squidoo. You have seen and heard about Squidoo by now. If not, here goes.

Squidoo is a place where anyone can create an informational website about any subject they want. These websites are called a "lens". Squidoo is better than most other free websites because it has such a high page rank. Search engines love Squidoo.

The best way to use Squidoo is as a way to get traffic to your blog. But you have to be smart about it.

One mistake I made early on with Squidoo was making one big long lens with lots of information about many different subjects. The end result was a dilluted mess of keywords and no traffic.

The secret to Squidoo is to make individual lenses about a single topic.

For instance, let's say you have found a really great product on Clickbank you know you could sell. You have created a blog and are regularly churning out lots of great original content optimized to encourage buyers to purchase your product.

The next step is to help buyers interested in your product the ability to find your blog.

Create a Squidoo lens based upon the keywords which best describe your product or the problem it solves for the buyer. Keep the lens short and to the point. An opening which contains a link to your blog, a text section about the problem, a link to the sales page for the product, an RSS feed from your blog and a guestbook.

Optimize your lens by including tags on the lens which can further generate traffic to your lens and ultimately to either the product sales page or your blog.

Publish your lens and favorite it, RSS it, bookmark it, etc.

Given time, two things will happen. First, your blog will get traffic from the lens. Second, your lens will make some sales on its own and generate some revenue as well.

Every single one of my blogs has at least one Squidoo lens attached to it; some have multiple lenses to reflect the keywords I am trying to promote.

Remember the four pillars to any blog and remember to use Squidoo to promote your blog for more traffic and hopefully, more money.

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