Marketing with Squidoo

For the last several months, I’ve been busy promoting some brick and mortar businesses in my adopted hometown of Murphy, NC.

These businesses are owned by people who live in our community and own and operate their businesses — a task that takes most of their time and energy.

I have come to believe it is very important to support these local businesses and to keep money flowing in our own community instead of sending it off to the home offices of big, multinational corporations.

So, I spent months  planning my new Murphy Gold site.

I already have a couple of lenses for Murphy, NC and I added links to my Murphy Gold site and syndicated the RSS feed on them: Murphy NC 28906 and Murphy NC.

Then I created a new Squidoo lens for Murphy Gold to help drive early traffic to the site, before I add enough traffic-building pages there and the search engines start sending the bulk of the visitors.

For years, I’ve been promoting local businesses, but this is different. Now, I’m promoting just a few businesses and only if they pay me up-front. There are some rules, however, and I won’t promote a business unless the owner is commited to supporting the community and doing his or her best to provide quality service to their customers. Eventually, it will require at least two recommendations from existing Murphy Gold business owners before I’ll even consider adding a new business to the site.

This project is based on a concept of joint venture co-marketing, where each business provides special offers and the other business owners promote the businesses they recommended and others they enjoy working with. Since there is only one business accepted per category, that should lessen the feeling of competition and increase cooperation.

As each business is added, I build a new Squidoo lens as well as one or more pages on the Murphy Gold site.

By doing this, I can build traffic to the new site in just a few days, and the new business pages will be indexed and  searchable through Google and other search engines in less than a month.

It has been an exciting project to plan and launch, but it hasn’t gone without its share of obstacles and setbacks. By concentrating on each, in turn,  they can be overcome.

I’ve been planning this  since January 2009 and started implementing the site on July 8, 2009. I’m very pleased with the progress that has been made on the site and lenses in just five weeks.

Act on your  dream!

JD

Do you want to get started in social networking, but don’t have the time or expertise needed to do it yourself? Now, you don’t have to. You can have your lenses built and promoted and then transferred to you, all in a couple of weeks or so.

Tiffany Dow and Lewis Smile – experts on Squidoo – are now at your service.

Learn more by reading Two Squidoo Titans unite to build your lenses for you on my 21st Century Affiliate Marketing blog.

Act on your dream!

JD

After years of earning some nice commission checks from about a dozen companies, I’m ready to move my marketing efforts to a new level, and that involves building mailing lists for each of the products I like and recommend.

Instead of having a one-time opportunity to make a sale, I intend to attract people who are interested in the products I promote and persuade them to trade their valuable contact information in exchange for good information about how to put the product to profitable use.

The goal, of course, is to build relationships with new prospects, provide quality information about the product and how they can use it, and to convert a percentage of those prospects into customers – hopefully happy customers.

This takes a lot of work, but email marketing has been proven time and again to be the best way to educate your readers and help some of them make the decision to purchase.

Now, I want this to be top-quality all the way, so I’m only using Aweber to manage my lists and will only send emails to people who have opted-in to the list and confirmed the decision.

I was looking for a simple way to add a subscribe form to a Squidoo lens, but neither the javascript nor the HTML form method provided by Aweber works in a lens.

After scratching my head, I’m testing a sign-up form on my Private Success Team lens.

This isn’t the optimum way to do this, but I have an image of the subscribe form on the lens. When you click the image, it opens a new window (or tab) with one of my splash pages that has a live subscribe form. Eventually, if this works, I’ll open a link to a page with a subscribe form and more information about the product, but the splash page is convenient, for now.

I was thinking that it would be great if Squidoo and Aweber could work together to build a module that makes it easy for us to add a subscribe form to our lens.

Perhaps there is already a way to do this that I don’t know about. If so, I’d really appreciate a link to it.

So, what do you think? Does what I’m currently doing look like a viable option, for now?

Do you know who to contact at Squidoo to suggest such a module?

I look forward to your feedback and opinions.

Act on your dream!

JD

My Marketing With Squidoo lens has been sadly neglected for far too long.

This morning, I updated the information in the lens and added two new Plexo link lists. The first links to other Squidoo lenses that offer helpful tips and techniques for lensmasters to improve their marketing efforts using Squidoo lenses. The second links to blogs and websites with similar information.

If you know of outstanding lenses with this type of information, please add them to the list. We’re just getting started with this.

If you know of outstanding blogs or websites with information to help our fellow lensmasters do better with their Squidoo marketing efforts, I hope you’ll add links to the second list, just above the comments.

Don’t forget to vote for your favorites.

Act on your dream!

JD

The first thing I want to do is thank Loyalis and ZachG for creating SquidTop and giving me and my fellow lensmasters another place to promote ourselves, our projects, and our Squidoo lenses.

My main interest in building lenses at Squidoo is to further my marketing business and this new blog is a great place to talk about them and tell you more about why I created specific lenses.

You can see a list of all my lenses and something about me at my lensography: John Dilbeck.

If you have a good sense of humor, you may enjoy reading my unauthorized autobiography.

Welcome to my newest blog and I hope you’ll find something here that interests you.