As we discussed before, there are many great ways to find links for your website. Squidoo will be today’s focus.

Squidoo is a rapidly-growing site that lets ordinary people build their own pages devoted to unique topics. These pages are called “lenses,” and each user is called a “lensmaster.” This article will teach you how to become a lensmaster, create a lens for your business, and get traffic to your website through Squidoo. Let’s get started!

Sign up

Creating an account at Squidoo is extremely simple. Go to the sign up page and follow the easy directions. Enter some basic info about yourself, and click the “Continue” button.

Note: When entering your personal info, be sure to enter what you want internet users to see. Thus, your “desired username” might be a condensed form of your company name, or the username you use on other public websites. Maintain your brand.

You have now registered. I told you it was simple.

Create a lens

Now you can be a lensmaster. Click the button to “Create a Lens.” There are several steps to the process, so we’ll take them one at a time.

1. Enter your lens’ subject. What you select is up to you, but don’t forget your brand and what you’re actually marketing. If you sell doorknobs, you might enter “Find the best doorknobs at Bob’s Knob Shop.”

2. Now Squidoo wants to know what type of lens you need. The lens is customizable later, so we’ll go with the first choice – “I want to get the word out about…” It provides the basic info you need to get started.

3. This step is crucial for marketing. First, select a title for your lens. Squidoo enters your subject by default. You might leave that or slightly alter it. You’ll want to have your company name in the title and a keyword or two, such as your primary product.

Second, you get to pick the URL for your lens. For Bob’s doorknobs, you’d enter something like “doorknobs-bobs-knob-shop” You cannot enter spaces; only use lowercase letters and hyphens. Be sure you like what you pick, since it’s not changeable.

Third, pick a category for your lens. If your product or service fits in one of the categories like “cars & trucks” or “entertainment,” select that. As a fall back, select “business.”

Fourth, rate your lens. Since this is a business site, you should definitely make it fit the “G” rating. You want as much exposure as possible.

4. Enter keywords for your lens. These help search engines and users find your lens. Make sure they’re good. For Bob’s Knob Shop, the “best keyword” would be “doorknobs.” Go ahead and enter the optional ones. Maybe pick “knobs,” “door knobs,” and “bob.”

After you enter the security code, you’re ready to see the lens. Click “Done!”

Edit the basics

Squidoo now takes you to the “Lensmaster Workshop” for your lens. This is where you can tweak your lens. It’s your lens’ control panel.

There are lots of buttons on this page, but don’t be overwhelmed. I’ll walk you through the basics, and you’ll see it’s not difficult.

This image at right shows the four things we’ll focus on, with little red numbers by each one.

1. Write an introduction. Click on the “edit” button to modify your lens’ introduction. This text will display at the top of the lens. Use it to hook your visitor and show him why he should keep reading. You can also use the editing tool to create a link to your main website or blog. Click “Save” when you’re done.

2. Write your bio. Click the “edit” button by the default bio, and write a bit about yourself. You can also create links in this field, perhaps to your blog’s “about” page or a similar page on your company’s website. While you’re in the bio, upload a photo to help personalize the lens.

3. Add your RSS feed. If you have a blog, this is an easy way to give your lens fresh content. Click on the “edit” button and fill out the fields. The most important one is the actual URL for your RSS feed. Default values for the other fields should work fine, and you can optionally create a catchy title and description for the content.

4. Publish! Squidoo will not make your changes live until you click the “Publish!” button in the upper right. Once you click this, the public can see your modified lens. You can view your lens by using the “View this page” link, directly above “Publish!”

Customize like crazy

Even on your basic lens, Squidoo includes many different “modules” for you to use. You can customize all of these in a similar manner. The “edit” button lets you configure them. Move them up and down on the page with the little orange arrows. Remove a module by clicking the “x”. To add a module, click “Add Modules” at the top of the page.

There are lots of module possibilities. You can add photos from Flickr, plain text, lists, YouTube videos, and much more. Provide fun and interesting content for visitors, but always tie it back to your brand.

The benefits

Squidoo provides a free way to create a fun entry-point for your main website. More internet users are discovering this site everyday, and that means they will be more likely to find you. Squidoo has a good Google PageRank (currently 6), which means that links from this domain are valuable.

You can create a basic Squidoo lens in 10 or 15 minutes. Why not give it a try?

In most of these circumstances, members or volunteers go around to businesses and ask for donations of products that they can giveaway. You can be different. You can approach these organizations and offer to give them one or more of your products as a free promotional giveaway.

Tell these places that the only thing you require is recognition as a sponsor for this event, in both word and print. Ask your chosen organization if they have different levels of sponsorship and try to get the biggest bang for your buck.

Then check with your CPA because you might even be able to write off the full value of your product when it comes time to do your taxes.

Everyone is a winner when you donate!

You can surely succeed without one or more of those, but it get’s more difficult. For example if your product is twice the price of a similar competitors product, you are going to be doing a lot more marketing to justify that price.

Marketing used goods is similar, but uniquely different. When selling a used product the main though in a customer’s mind is, “Will it work like a new product?” and “Is it worth the savings to buy this item used?”

Your first attempt at marketing to these customers will need to include talk about warranties or a guarantee and why this product is as good or better than a new product. Does your company take the product apart and reassemble it to make it like new? Has it been professionally cleaned and is like new?

People are going to ask questions and instead of waiting for them to ask those questions, talk about it before they ask. This way you get to talk about the downsides of used goods when you want to and approach it on your terms!

Selling used goods can make you a lot of money, but without the proper marketing you can lose a lot of money.

In his post he says, “You need to start promoting your blog by leaving comments on other blogs, forming relationships with other bloggers, producing viral-word-of-mouth-spreading content pillars and community cohesion. When all these initiatives combine over time, only then do you gain solid and sustainable traffic.”

This advice is perfect for the blog community at large. To be a successful blogger, and actually have someone read it, you need to become part of the blog world by commenting in other blogs and by allowing others to quickly and easily comment on your blog. Without this blog bonding, your reader base won’t grow and you won’t get many free links from blogs that you don’t ask for.

Ready to grow your blog traffic? Leave a comment!

Darren Rowse at ProBlogger also commented on Yaro’s great post.

One of the most common mistakes in direct mail is to send to the largest amount of prospects instead of sending to smaller amounts of mail to prospects that are highly targetted.

Not everyone will qualify for your loan, not everyone is in the market for a new car. Some people already have a job they are happy with, and don’t want to make a change. These are the people you need to weed out before wasting money sending them your direct mail.

2. Not Understanding Your ROI

ROI is the number one piece of information you need to focus on when sending direct mail. Without knowing your ROI, your direct mail was not good for much. Here are factors you must keep in mind:

a) Your time spent researching direct mail proposals.

b) Cost of graphic design and ad design.

c) Cost of postage if not included.

d) Cost of printing for direct mail piece.

e) Cost to stuff envelopes (if necessary).

f) Time it takes to build direct mail list.

These are things that are not always remembered when figuring ROI. You can’t take your own time for granted, and you will spend time planning for direct mail.

Next time you are in the market to reach a lot of prospects with direct mail, remember these to tips and send that direct mail with a plan for success!

One of the most effective ways to establish yourself as a great blogger in the blogosphere is to write great posts. Unfortunately, nobody will know about your great posts unless you tell them. Tell them with comments on established blogs.

Amy Gahran said, “If you view your blog as part of a public conversation, rather than a mere publication, then an easy way to attract more interest and interaction becomes obvious. I call it ’strategic commenting.’”

It may sound routine, but think about it. Is your blog about you? Can you think of any reason why anyone, other than your mother, would want to read about your vacation to Disneyland? Sure, it is fun to document our thoughts and lives, but who cares?

Amy has some other great tips.

Amy is definitely worth the read if you are looking to increase visitors to your blog on a regular basis.

Here are a couple things that stood out to me.

As a matter of fact, if I get to the point of doing a project proposal, nine times out of ten, I’ll land the gig.

I use a fairly detailed questionnaire to gather information for web projects.

After meeting with your prospect and picking their brain, you’ll want to roll up your sleeves and get the scoop on what the competition’s up to and also get a take on the audience for your project.

Great post Neil!

Creating momentum is like creating a stream of continuous income…don’t worry, I know the last time you heard about “continuous income” was from a MLM scam at 2:00 am on TV.

Why would you need to create momentum with your marketing plan? When your marketing momentum gets strong enough, it pays for itself.

Imagine your marketing as a snowball. The snowball is the amount you have to spend on marketing. The person pushing your snowball is the marketing.

Sometimes while rolling this snowball, snow is going to stick and increase the size of your snowball. Other times, it will get sunny and melt part of your snowball.

If you spend $500 on marketing in two different places (maybe radio and TV), and you earn $600 as a direct result, your snowball has grown by $100.

Now you push your snowball to a newspaper and radio ads. This time you have $600 total to spend or $300 each.

This nets you a total of $1000. You see how this goes, now you spend $500 at two places or $250 at four places.

However, sometimes your $1000 will only return a net of $600. This is your snowball melting.

Using the snowball method works well online and offline.

You need to be able to measure your goals, but once you get that figure out exactly you’ll be off and running, or pushing, your snowball into a mountain or marketing money!

Now, you could release your product the regular way. Ship it to stores, start advertising, sell products.

Or you could try this new approach. Get some “beta testers” that will use your product and report feedback (they also generate buzz). These beta testers should be hand selected with a huge sphere of influence and are well known in the industry you are in.

You could then go to an industry convention and display your product for people to touch and feel. This further creates a desire for your product.

Let these people take video and pictures of your product. Pictures and video further create excitement around your product.

Look how well it has worked for the Samsung Q1. This isn’t actually released yet, but put that into Google and you get almost 1 million results!

Not a very convincing marketing message. For me, many times I want to talk to someone when I call. If I don’t get anyone, I won’t call back…ever.

Sometimes you will have calls from people around the world who are getting to work when you are locking the doors. Sometimes they will be people like me who are too busy during the day to remember to call someone until I get home at 6:00 pm.

No matter what the circumstances are, you need to grab these people with your voicemail marketing message.

Here are a couple sample ideas to use for your voicemail and make people more interested than they were before they called you.

For example, “Thank you for calling XYZ Clothing. We have a new pair of shoes that will revolutionize the shoe industry. These shoes are scheduled to debut January 2007. For more information about these shoes, or any other XYZ clothing product, please leave a message or call between the hours of 8 am and 5 pm.”

For example, “Thank you for calling XYZ Car Parts. Unfortunately we are not able to come to the phone right now, but to show you how sorry we are for not being able to answer the phone, we will give you 10% off your next purchase. Please come by and let us know you got our answering machine and we’ll give you 10% off instantly. Valid one time per customer. You can also leave us a message and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.”

For example, “We are sorry you called XYZ Computer Company. Unfortunately we need sleep sometimes. Since we don’t allow our employees to go home, ever, they sleep in cots behind the store. Obviously they are all asleep and you’ll need to leave a message.“