The best things in life are free, aren’t they? As a totally free way to promote your Ebay auctions and store, Squidoo offers a unique solution. Not only that, but you can earn commissions on any purchases you’ve referred using their Ebay affiliate module. As a seller, that means you could potentially earn twice on the same item.
Getting traffic to your Ebay store isn’t easy. It’s hard to get an Ebay store high in the SERPs by Google. Squidoo can help to alleviate some of that traffic pain.
Relying on Google for all of your outside traffic isn’t a good game plan. Google is fickle, and drops sites from their index all the time without any real reasons why. What does this mean for you? It means you shouldn’t rely on Google.
To get around using Google, it means you’ll need to have other traffic sources for your Ebay store (besides Ebay itself). Not just ONE other place should be used to promote your store, but many websites. Squidoo can and should be one of those sites.
What Squidoo can do for you is create a real place to showcase your best items, your items in one specific niche, your best sellers, your archive of past items sold, or to highlight one really high profile auction.
So what is Squidoo? It’s not a blog, but a site full of static standalone pages on any one particular topic. There are hundreds of thousands of users on the website who earn from Adsense, Chitika, CafePress, Amazon, and Ebay ad revenue. While some of the ads you aren’t in control of, you are in entire control of the Ebay ads that run on the page, and they can be quite effective at driving traffic to your listings.
The first thing to do to get started on Squidoo is sign up. Next, you’ll want fill out your bio, upload a picture, and think of the topic for your first “lens,” or page. What should you write about? Think like a searcher or buyer. What wording would you use to get to where you want to be? If you’re looking for reviews on a specific product, you might search “Amazon Kindle reviews.” If your looking for sizing information on womens shoes, you’d probably search “how to size womens shoes.” If you’re searching for a certain collectible doll, you’d probably search for the brand name + doll, maybe even prefaced with the word “buy” or suffixed with “reviews.”
Squidoo is a well respected website that has millions of visitors per month. The site even drives traffic from within to its own pages. This means whatever content you create — assuming it’s useful — will be indexed by Google.
7 Things You Should Know Before Creating Your First Squidoo Lens
- You don’t need to know HTML to write a Squidoo lens, but you should know some of the basics. This lens on Squidoo gives a nice overview of the basic HTML allowed on Squidoo. Basically, you should know how to create a link, use bold tags, and display an image. For those that have no interest in learning HTML, Squidoo has modules for photos and links.
- Writing a Squidoo lens takes time. It’s not a 15 minute thing to create a good lens that’s going to get Squidoo traffic. A good lens will have plenty of photos, links, and useful content. The title should also be true to the content.
- Your best performing lenses in terms of Ebay traffic will probably be product oriented. Try “best of” lists and niche pages that collect many of the items you sell into one useful, all-in-one shopping page.
- Lenses work best when published in groups. This way, you can link them all together and see even better Google traffic. Make a plan to create a small number of lenses (say five), all linked together, all containing several Ebay modules. Don’t forget to link to your Ebay store as well, and not just use the Ebay module.
- Size does matter when it comes to the length of the lens. Longer blog posts, web pages, and Squidoo lenses overall rank better in search engines than shorter ones. Divide your content up over many modules, and have the goal of each Squidoo lens being at least 1500 words. A good minimum number of modules is ten.
- The Ebay module “description” cannot be seen by search engines. Don’t include much of your text in the description field of this module.
- You’ll earn for every sale generated through the Ebay module, even if it wasn’t your own product.
