Affiliate Marketing

The reason I've been building hubpages really slowly is that I've become sidetracked with creating Squidoo lenses for Affiliate Marketing.

Squidoo is great in my opinion. As long as you stay away from the usual hot topics (weight loss, anything advertised on Clickbank), and concentrate on actual physical products that are sold by mainstream brands who have their affiliates listed on Commission Junction, Affiliate Window or Amazon, you generally find that your lens is indexed and gets traffic within a couple of days as long as you are careful to build at least one backlink to it.

I've actually detailed my experiences with the above affiliate networks in a hubpage - Best Affiliate Networks - so I shan't repeat myself here.

But I'd like to talk a little more about why I like Squidoo so much. I have two Squidoo accounts - one for affiliate marketing, and one for building backlinks to my hubs. I've done a lot more work in my affiliate marketing account, having built 20 lenses so far.

Squidoo is way more flexible than Hubpages when it comes to affiliate marketing. For example it's easy to add an affiliate banner to your lens - just use the "Text with Big Picture" module, and drop the html into the text portion.

They are also pretty flexible about the number of links they allow - you can have 9 links to any single domain within your lens, and for certain whitelisted domains, eg amazon.co.uk, you can have as many as you like. This means you can set up a landing page on a single keyword offering several different products related to that keyword, with different prices, using a module for each. I tend to use the standard text module, save the picture of the product to my hard drive and load it onto the module, and then put a blurb next to it explaining the product, with the affiliate link embedded in a text link.

Squidoo lenses are also designed to be seo friendly. It's important to select your keywords carefully for each module title, as these titles appear on the lenses as headers and draw traffic in their own right.

It's early days in September, but so far I've made more from my affiliate lenses on Squidoo than from Adsense on Hubpages - and I have 23 lenses in total but 53 hubs. It's always nice to have more than one source of income and I'd urge everyone to try affiliate marketing.