Image via CrunchBase

Squidoo is a great place to publish content and get backlinks to your money pages.  I first started publishing on Squidoo in about 2007.  I put up a few Squidoo lenses (what a web page is called on Squidoo) here and there over the next couple years, but never really dedicated myself to any serious focus.

Fast forward about 4 years, and I had about 20 lenses with only about half a dozen that were good enough to be visible to the public.  Yes, your lens has to qualify to be made visible.

The thing about Squidoo is that you can’t just slap a couple paragraphs of garbage text on there with a link to your money site, and expect anything to happen.

So, how do you get your lens to be made public and to remain public?

• Use multiple modules
• Use a variety of module types
• Post unique textual content
• Avoid using copyrighted pictures that you don’t have permission to use
• Update your content regularly

Early on, I wasn’t too savvy in all of this and I had a tough time getting many of my lenses to rank very well, so I went other directions and tried to find other ways for how to make extra money on the internet.  Occasionally, I would slip back in and throw up a lens, but really didn’t stick with it long enough to learn the right way to do it.

It wasn’t until I purchased a training course by Erica Stone called Squidoo Niche Blasters, and began to put it into practice, that I finally learned how to make extra money selling Amazon products on Squidoo.

What she teaches in this course really works.  For the first time, I was able to put together Squidoo lenses that immediately rose to the top of all my lenses and stayed at a level that keeps them visible for the public.

The step by step detail for building these Squidoo lenses that are built for the purpose of selling physical products through Amazon are clear and complete.  Anyone from the newest internet marketing “wanabee’s” to the experienced web publisher can get some benefit from this course.  If you want to participate, but don’t have time, use the instructions to hire out the work.  A virtual assistant can put the Squidoo Niche Blasters together for you.

One question I always have when I’m looking at an internet marketing training course on how to make extra money – one that rarely gets answered objectively – is this,  ”Does following the directions in this training bring results?”

Image by Joe Shlabotnik via Flickr

I can truthfully say, the answer is “Yes!”  Yes, I’m’ seeing results.  Yes, I’m making some money.  Yes, I’m going to keep building Squidoo Niche Blasters.  No, I’m not ready to retire from my day job.  No, this isn’t a get rich quick plan.  Yes, it takes lots of Squidoo lenses ranking well before much money starts coming in.

I can also add, that whenever I’ve had questions and have contacted Erica for help with various parts of the training, she has always responded quickly and her responses have always been very meaty and helpful.  I’ve also subscribed to her email list and have found her emails to be very informative and useful.  Only very occasionally is there a blatant sales promotion in her email.  This is one email subscription that I look forward to receiving, and have a folder where I save them to refer back to .

I highly recommend the Squidoo Niche Blaster course for anyone who wishes to learn how to make extra money online.

Related articles

• Making Money With Squidoo (lostballinhighweeds.com)
• Is Wizzley the Next Squidoo? (digitalbrandmarketing.com)
• Effective Steps To Help Your Squidoo Lens in The Search Engines (leccoworkshop.com)
• Unique Ideas To Help Promote and Rank Your Squidoo Lens (leccoworkshop.com)

This is really a shame.  As a subscriber to Jeff Johnson’s videos, I’ve followed him very closely.  It’s been really refreshing to be able to listen to videos that bring 100% pure content – good marketing instruction – and lots of it packed into his 10 minute videos.

I like to take  brisk walks periodically throughout the day to get a little exercise.  Typically, I will tune into YouTube with my Android phone, plug my headphones into my ears, and learn something new about internet marketing.  At least 50% of the time, you would find me listening to Jeff Johnson.  In my opinion, he’s one of the best instructors on YouTube.

The worst thing about this is that they still allow thousands – or maybe millions – of crappy spam videos to contaminate their servers.  Dang it!  They shut down the wrong channel.  It’s so hard to find good content out there.  Now, there’s less good content.

You’ve seen what they allow!  You know, the Ezine Articles being read by some digitized robotic voice while the paragraph being read fades in and out.  Or, they skip the robot voice stuff and just scroll the article in front of you while elevator music plays in the background.  C’mon guys, I know how to read.  If I wanted an article, I would have searched for it.  When I search YouTube I want more.

Well, now I’ve got to get back to work trying to find something worthwhile on YouTube, since they canned one of the best they had.  If anyone has some suggestions for some great internet marketing education videos, please leave them in the comments at the end of this post.

If you want to sell to your prospect online, something you will need to do is to engage with them.  Most people will attempt to do this with simply the use of a website and the copy that is on the site.

This can work fine but if you are going down this road you are leaving out a big opportunity to connect more with your buyer and create more sales. With the use of audio on your website you can change all this and connect more with your buyer. There are a number of reasons for this.

Sounds that we hear are very powerful and can enter into the subjects mind and control what they do. If you doubt this just look at Paul Mc Kenna or any famous hypnotist and watch how they can control people by simply talking to them. When you talk to your customers you influence their buying decision more as you will be talking to their sub conscious mind.

People are fundamentally always looking for the easy, less painful option in life and if they can sit back and watch a sales page that has audio they will do this instead of reading through a long sales letter. The combination of audio and text works best as this will give them something to listen to and to read before they make a buying decision.

The trouble though with learning something new is that it can take time and effort and your schedule is probably pretty full up if you are involved in internet marketing. If you hire out the job to someone else it can also cost you big time, which you don’t want to do before you have sold any product.

Luckily though there is a solution where you can get the best of both worlds and get top class audio integrated into your site without programming skills and without spending a fortune by following some simple cut and paste steps.  It really is that easy!

Click Here To Learn  How To Use the POWER of Audio Now…

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Don’t get me wrong.  Study time should be part of every work schedule. It’s an important part of your success, but it needs to be kept in perspective.

Your studies and research bring you very little value until you implement what you have learned. At some point in your business world, you have to spend some time producing results.  I don”t know of any situation in the marketing world where someone has achieved any financial success as a professional student.

Information Overload

I love to learn new things.  I’ve always been the one who is constantly searching for greener pastures or the better mousetrap.  I’m never satisfied with what I already know.  There is always “a better way” that I believe will bring me faster results.

That’s the trap that people fall into that leads to information overload.  You begin to collect reports, ebooks, articles, and videos that explain all sorts of marketing techniques.  It gets to a point where you don’t even know where to start.

I continued to purchase more material to study long after I felt like I knew plenty enough to pull together a successful online marketing business.

That serves your business no useful purpose.  It’s time to narrow your focus and put some of the knowledge into action.

The 80/20 Rule

A good ratio, in my opinion, is to use the 80-20 rule. Spend 80 percent of your time acting on what you learned in the other 20 percent of your time.

Schedule your study time into your week.  Don’t ever allow yourself to think that you know everything and don’t need to learn any more.  That just won’t happen.  The world changes to fast.

Just remember to keep the study time in perspective.

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I have been soooo distracted by all the bright shiny lights. I think I’ll blame it on my adult ADD?

The good news is that I’ve identified the source of my distraction, and it won’t be so difficult to minimize it.  Think about it a minute. If you are a recovering alcoholic, what would be the worst place to hang out? A Bar, maybe?

If you are an internet marketer who easily loses focus and keeps buying up all the lastest and greatest fad marketing systems, what’s the worst place to hang out? Your email inbox!

Now, there are two lessons here:

First – Get an autoresponder and build a list. People watch their inbox and they will buy.

Second, if you’re in a similar situation that I’m in, you gotta protect yourself.

Here’s the plan.

Decide on a marketing system that’s good for you and stick with it.

There aren’t that many options.

1. Create or purchase a product that you can sell.
2. Sell someone else’s product and earn a commission (affiliate).
3. Sell advertising space.

Quit trying to make it so complicated.  That’s all there is.  Those three.  That’s it.  Pick one and go with it.  that’s your business.

Yes, you can do all three, but if distraction is your problem, make it easy on yourself and work with one.

Once you know what your business is, there are only a couple things to do.  You can get traffic to your website, or you can convert that website traffic to cash.  Basically, everything you do in your business falls in one of those two categories.

As the manager of your business, you need to drive the activity of your business and quit letting every Tom, Dick, and Harry of the internet marketing world con you into believing that you need to change directions and buy their new biggest deal.

If you want to start using video to drive traffic to your website, then do some research and find out what you need so that you can create videos and use them to drive traffic to your website.  Don’t just go out and buy some video marketing program cause Guru X says that he stumbled across the system and made $87,368.24 in 10 minutes and wants to share his little know secret with the world.

Well, guess what?  You subscribed to Guru X’s autoresponder and he’s going to pump sales letters into your inbox every day.  Yes, they are fun to read.  Yes, you bought something from Guru X once before and felt like it was worth every penny.  Does that mean you need the next great deal he’s selling?  Absolutely not!  Get off his list.

That’s what I’m doing right now.

Mike Filsame…..unsubscribe

Alex Goad…..unsubscribe

Marlon Sanders…..unsubscribe

Justin Blake…..unsubscribe

Mark Roth…..unsubscribe

Jeremy Shoemaker…..unsubscribe

Keith Wellman…..unsubscribe

Mark Joyner…..unsubscribe

Does this mean I don’t like these guys?  Heck No!  Most of them are great guys.  I’ve learned something from every one of them.  That’s why I subscribed to their list in the first place.

The problem is that in every case, their autoresponders have been bringing me distractions and it’s time for me to focus on my business.  I know what my business needs more than anything else, and you know what your business needs.  Primarily, action.

Brad Callen…..unsubscribe

Matt Bacak…..unsubscribe

Willie Crawford…..unsu…..wait!  I can’t unsubscribe, cause there’s no unsubscribe link in his email.

Brian Johnson…..unsubscribe

John Chow…..unsubscribe

Wow! I have more time, already.  I’m feelin’ it.  Time to go market to the people on my autoresponder list.

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It is very simple to use, though impersonal and very limited in what you can do.

It has to be worth a little traffic and links to your site, though. If you want to get a quick video up but have trouble doing video. This seems to be a good option.

Check it out.

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The wrong way is to jump on Twitter or facebook and try to get your friends to go to a sales page or a capture page.

The right way to do social media – Twitter and Facebook, specifically – is to have a conversation and try to socialize with your friends.

Social Oomph is a powerful Twitter and Facebook activity automation tool that could easily be horribly abused if done the wrong way. Don’t do it. Follow the suggestions in this video and you Social Oomph will be a huge enhancement to your social networking activities.

The Right Way to Use Social Oomph

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I’ve recently purchased and began testing the Auto Blogging Software by Nick Carty.  As you can see by the banners and links on this site, I’m quite impressed.  As anyone who knows me can attest, I don’t endorse just any ol’ product.

Auto Blogging Review

This software has a purpose.  If you consider yourself to be an “authority” blogger in your chosen niche, and your business is publishing high quality content on a site where you have developed a strong relationship with your readers who have high expectations of your work, this software is not for you.

If you are an entrepreneur who seeks out multiple niches that target a variety of consumer needs, and your research to has assured that you have found profitable market with plenty of traffic and limited competition, and you want to quickly rank in the search engines to take advantage of the traffic, then this software just might be something that you ought to consider.

In the short few days that I’ve owned the software, I have already ranked on the search engines for very decent keyword phrases without doing anything but blasting 2-3 articles per day to the blog.  The articles come from other blogs or from article directories and are keyword rich for SEO.  That’s all I’ve done and I’ve gone from unknown to page one in about 2 days.

This isn’t without some effort, though.  I make it a point to “clean” the articles up a little, as the content spinning method that the software uses is not perfect (no spinning is perfect).  Also, it takes a fair amount of time to set up the blog with appropriate plugins and to post adsense or other ads that you use to monetize your site.

My problem is generally just getting the content on the blog, and this software does that for you.  It works with both WordPress and with Blogger, whichever you prefer.

Watch the quick video below while a Blogger blog is set up in 3 minutes and content added with the software.  It really is as quick and easy as the video portrays.

Automate Your Blogging – Get Traffic – Make Money

Be sure to follow this link to the Auto Blogging Software site to get more information about this amazing piece of software.

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Are you planning to get involved in affiliate marketing? The best way to succeed is to create a buyers list that will respond to your promotional emails at a whim.

There is a right way and there is wrong way to build a high quality, hyper-responsive buyers list. There are some rules to follow when building your autoresponder list.  The first rule is to recognize that more is not necessarily better. Finding more buyers takes time and money. If those buyers have no interest in what you are selling and if they aren’t ready to pull out their checkbooks on your recommendations, then that big ol’ list you’ve built won’t do you a whole lot of good. You spend a lot of time and money to put it together, but your return is minimal at best.

It’s true when many marketing gurus tell us the money is in the list. Many of them believe that bigger really is better. But it isn’t. Make a note of how much time it could take to create one of those mega-lists vs. compiling a smaller list of high quality, hyper-responsive buyers. It might even take about the same amount of time to create your list, right? However, the return on your big list may only run about 1%, while your high quality list might convert at 10% or more.

There are lots of places to get information about building a big list.  It’s not always easy to find someone who can teach you the correct way to build a high quality list. You must find a marketing expert who has learned through experience and can teach you how to build a high quality buyers list that will increase your income. That’s the type of program that’s explained in this free report.

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The Profit Miracle system is so easy to use and it utilizes free traffic so the affiliate does not have to spend any more money out of pocket to do the marketing campaigns involved with affiliate marketing.  The Profit Miracle system is set up so that an affiliate can be up and running  in two easy steps.  The third step is watching their profit margin grow day after day as their income rolls in from their niches.

Many affiliates get frustrated because they create article after article and submit them to all the directories but still come up short in Google.  The Profit Miracle system teaches them how to move their articles to the top of the searches and skyrocket their conversion rate.

Many affiliates don’tt have the writing skills to create great sales copy and SEO articles.  But that’s what it takes to drive this free traffic to the offers that they are promoting.  That leads many marketers to significant frustration.

The Profit Miracle system can automatically create this copy based on the articles and techniques that have worked in those niches in the past.  In this way, Profit Miracle takes this burden off of the affiliates forever.

Profit Miracle is the perfect method for people who are anxious to become involved in affiliate marketing but they just don’t have enough technical skills or they don’t have enough business experience.  This system was created as a no-fail method for anyone to use so they could see residual income month after month after glorious month.

Affiliates simply choose a niche that they want to be involved in, and then they push the start button on the system so that it does what is needed for that affiliate to experience success in their chosen niche.  Then it’s time to sit back and let the money flow!  Get going today!

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