Affiliate Marketing E-Course

Course Content

Lesson 1 - Introduction
Lesson 2 - Campaign Outline
Lesson 3 - Product And Keyword Selection
Lesson 4 - Building a Squidoo Lens With Relevance
Lesson 5 - Promoting Your Squidoo Lens
Lesson 6 - Article Marketing
Lesson 7 - Cashing In With Cheap Traffic
Lesson 8 - Blogging for Dollars
Lesson 9 - Mailing List Windfall
Q&A Video/mp3 #1
Q&A Video/mp3 #2

Lesson 4 - Build A Squidoo Lens With Relevance

Welcome back for another lesson.

In this lesson I'm going to point out the key parts of our landing page Keyword Elite Scam Challenge I made with squidoo. As well I'm going to talk a bit about search engine optimization (SEO) and the very basics you need to consider for your landing page. These basic techniques are required for success not just with squidoo, but with all web content you create regardless of where you create it.

If you've never made a Squidoo lens and are feeling a little intimidated no worries, I also threw together a video that walks you through creating your first Squidoo lens.

First - Some Early Successes

In the last lesson I began a new campaign to illustrate the approach I used to select a product and then proceeded with some keyword research. I decided, after applying some product selection criteria, that I would try to market the product Keyword Elite.

If you recall, my keyword research turned up the keyword "Keyword Elite Scam" with only 400 pages being returned by Google with a quoted search. This is a fairly small number meaning less competition for the keyword which is precisely what we want since we can almost certainly get front page listings in Google in a short period of time.

Well I have some fantastic news. I built the first version of the squidoo lens, Keyword Elite Scam Challenge, and we've had a few successes already

  1. First success came in the form of getting a link to the new squidoo lens onto the 1st page of Google after only 4 minutes of being launched! (more on this in future lesson in social networking for marketers) Here's the screen shot
  2. Second Success was that our lens was ranked #40 in the SEO & Affiliate Marketing category on Squidoo after only 2 days!
  3. Also, within 2 days of the lens launch we had our first sale for $97.08! Checkout the Clickbank screen shot

I'd say we're doing all right so far wouldn't you?

Relevance: The Tie That Binds

Before I get to the commentary on the Keyword Elite Scam Challenge squidoo lens I need to talk about PageRank and Relevance.

There are two primary components that Google uses to determine your position in a search result and they are PageRank and Relevance. For our purposes in this lesson I'm going to focus on relevance only since this is what we need to understand in order to build our squidoo lens with SEO in mind.

Relevance is a measure of how much two pages that are linked together relate to each other. For example, if you're at a candle website and there's a link to a car dealership this would not be considered a relevant link. The car dealership website is out of context and is not considered useful for people looking for candles.

Now it's important to understand that there are two perspectives for relevance; that of the person surfing the site and that of Google determining your search engine position.

Relevance: The Human Perspective

We surf the web looking for information pertaining to our problems. The problem might be trying to find an auto part or maybe just the name of the singer in xyz band, or the best smelling candle. Kind of obvious right? So why do so many websites seem to make our job so difficult?

Largely because people forget who they're developing the pages for and think of only themselves and what they want rather than what a person looking for information wants. Bad dog! Don't do this!

If I'm at the candle site I'm not likely interested in a new car so the car dealership link is a wasted link. It's irrelevant and out of context. As far as web traffic goes, it's like an off-ramp that nobody cares about or notices. So, if by chance, it's your car dealership then you should know that your website is giving me useless informational links and it's not helpful and I probably won't come back.

Also, from the other side of the link, if your web page is not relevant to the link that led me there I'll leave, most likely using the back button rather than a link on your site since I've already lost my trust. If this happens to be your page with affiliate links then you're misleading yourself if you counted me as a potential lead because I wasn't looking for cars. Most likely what happened is someone misled me into clicking a link and I ended up here. I clicked on a link and it turned out not to be relevant to what I wanted or expected to find.

It's important that a web page is relevant to what the person is searching for otherwise what's the point? You're not helping them find the information they're looking for so they're not likely going to buy anything from you.

I know I just droned on about his but it's massively important and something that really holds people back from getting the results they want from their marketing efforts. Do not take this lightly.

So from a practical point of view this means when building backlinks to your page make sure they're coming from a site that is related to your page otherwise the incoming link will provide little value to you.

Relevant traffic is the only traffic that matters. Build quality, relevant content and you're on your way to somthing bigger!

Relevance: The Google Perspective

You may already be aware that Google assigns something called a PageRank to every webpage. This PageRank, along with relevancy, are used together to determine your search engine position for a set of keywords. The larger the PageRank your page has the better you will perform in the search engine. There are other factors, but this is generally the case. A deeper discussion of page rank will be provided in a separate lesson.

For now, the most important thing to understand is that the PageRank of a web page can be passed on through a link to another web page, even if it's on another website. Google takes a page's PageRank and then distributes it among all the links on the page. Each link gets to pass on a certain amount of its PageRank to the pages it links to.

This is the primary reason you want to get as many backlinks (links coming in to your site) as you can from high PageRank websites. Those high PageRank websites that point to you are contributing to your PageRank.

Now you might be thinking that non-relevant backlinks are still good links if they come from a high PageRank web page. While this isn't entirely untrue, it is a fact that most of the value of the backlink is lost because of lack of relevance.

Google uses the relevance of the page the link points to when determining how much PageRank to pass on through the link. If Google thinks the page isn't relevant it will assign little or no PageRank credit for this link and the incoming link is wasted.

So the candle website is not contributing anything meaningful amount of its PageRank to the car dealership.

How Google Determines Relevance

Since computers don't understanding context the way humans do they use sophisticated algorithms based on inference.

Google tries to infer the relevance of the content on your page by trying to determine the main keywords on your page. It determines these keywords by performing a statistical analysis on the words in the page and their locations in the structure of the page.

These keywords are then compared to keywords on the page providing the backlink to see how related they are. Google uses this information when deciding the relevance of your page to the backlink feeding it, and therefore how much PageRank is passed on to you (Google juice).

It's not a perfect system, but if you understand how it works you can work it to your advantage and be head and shoulders above most niche websites.

Here's a basic list of places Google looks when trying to determine the main keywords on your page, which is where you'd like your specifically chosen keywords to be found

  1. The URL of the page
  2. Page title
  3. Header tags <h1> <h2> etc ... On squidoo these are the module titles and subtitles
  4. Links. Google assumes that a link will have meaning by telling you what it links to. It sees the text in the link and considers it as a possible keyword. So if you can work your keyword into the link text do it. No more click here links! And btw, not just the link text, but the actual url too! That's why your squidoo lens url should contain your primary keywords
  5. Bold or italicized text because it show emphasis for the word. Keywords go here
  6. Lastly, keyword density. If your keywords do not appear often enough on the page Google will not think they are very "key" and they won't help you. If the keywords appear too much Google takes it as a form of search engine spam. Ideally you want to have about 3-5 occurrences of your keyword for every 100 words in your page or article (3-5%). There's a nice tool in the Wealthy Affiliate article marketing tutorial that will calculate your keyword density for you. Or you can simply count them if you have the tool or the time

The Squidoo Lens

Enough theory all ready Todd! I hear you. So on to the lens.

If you take a look at the campaign lens at http://www.squidoo.com/KeywordEliteScam you'll see how the keywords appear in the most obvious places for Google to find them when considering relevance.

BTW, the actual content of the lens will change almost certainly since it's pretty tough to nail the content first go around. Usually you'll read over it every day or so for a couple weeks and constantly mold it into something the creates sales. So expect to see this lens continue to change over time.

Here are some additional tips for your Squidoo lens

  1. When in edit mode there is a checkbox below your bio section that says "Why Max?" Good question! Don't do it. What it does is add addition links leading off your page to other ads or content on the site. Sure it might generate a little ad revenue since Squidoo will split the revenue with you, but it pales in comparison to what you'll make marketing your own stuff. Always minimize the number of links that are not for your campaign.
  2. Make sure you have at least 5 modules. This will help you lens rank as well as provide additional opportunities to get your keywords into your lens in the titles tags (<h1> <h2>)
  3. If you add a guest book for feedback make sure you moderate it. The feature is available in edit mode for the module. This way you can approve each comment before it goes public.
  4. You can add up to 40 labels for your lens. These are essentially keywords that will be used by search engines, including the internal Squidoo search. Use them! Add all keywords that you think might come to mind for someone looking for your content. It never hurts to see what other related lenses are using for their keywords!
  5. A fresh lens is a happy lens. It's thought that Squidoo uses lens freshness as part of its ranking calculation. So make a small change every two days or so. This will also be part of you plan to continually improve the content towards the goal of sales. The freshness can be found on the sidebar at the bottom (last updated).
  6. Your lens is publishable as a blog feed. In fact it's modeled after a big blog post. This means you can promote it like a blog to the blog search engines. For now, just realize that the freshness of the lens tells other blogging engines that something has changed so come have a look.
  7. If you have a blog that you control and its related you can add the RSS module which pulls in your blog headlines. It's a great way to keep your lens changing. If they click the link it takes them to your blog not some other random Google news feed. More on the blog integration later in the course.

If you're a visual learner then be sure to check out the First lens Squidoo video that will get you started by walking you through your first lens.

There are a lot of resources out there on Squidoo about how to work with the different modules available so I'm not going to go into them here. Just keep in mind that you want traffic so do take advantage of the different modules to do that. But you don't want to create too many opportunities for the traffic to leave so avoid the kinds of modules that can send traffic on their way with external links. Sometimes you just have to play and see.

What's Next?

Well now that we have a few basic SEO concepts about relevance put into our landing page, Keyword Elite Scam challenge, we're ready to start promoting it.

This is where all those accounts I told you to sign up for in the first couple lessons will come into play. Hopefully you've had some time to get a little familiar with them. If not, no worries you can start today! ;)

This is where things get really interesting because, as you'll see, marketing is like a big social experiment that you can in fact measure.

You'll be to see the effects of your marketing efforts by watching the stats you get regarding your traffic and sales. You'll see that a small change here or there can change the numbers you see literally over night!

For now, if you've built a lens then go ahead and Digg it, Stumble it and add it to you Del.ico.us account to get the ball rolling. Next lesson I'll go into the basic strategy for driving traffic to your landing page with these social sites.


Additional Resources

Wealthy Affiliate members: checkout the following related tutorials in the learning resource section. They will take you deeper into some of the topics I've discussed in this lesson

  1. Squidoo Optimization
  2. Understanding Relevance
  3. Google Relevancy
  4. SEO & How to Slap Back At Google

The SEOBook : Search engine optimization is a big topic and should not be neglected. Like losing weight, it's better to diet AND exercise than just one of them. Similarly, you'll get more bang for your buck if you build good content AND use a little SEO to make sure you're content gets found. The SEOBook is one of the top books in my opinion on SEO. If you're trying to get this whole marketing machine rolling on a budget then make a note and come back for this little gem once the money starts to flow. You'll thank yourself.

First Lens Squidoo video : my squidoo video that will show you how easy it really is to set up your first Squidoo lens. The popularity of Squidoo is due in large part to the simplicity of setting up a lens of your own. Squidoo really does bring web content creation to the masses and this video will porve it! Enjoy. :)

Sincerely,
Todd Ariss

www.LongTailTreasure.com