Internet Business Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses

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?

Getting links is a huge key to internet business marketing. We’ve written before that Wikipedia is a good place to look for a link. A link from Wikipedia is great for two main reasons: the link will appear on a page with information about your site, and the domain is incredibly trustworthy. Relevance and importance of linking sites are cornerstones of internet marketing.

Fortunately, getting a link from Wikipedia isn’t that hard. This guide will provide the information you need to make it happen.

Know the rules

Wikipedia is run by people like you and me. Anyone can edit it, but other users can also remove your content. However, once you know the rules, you’ll be ready to go.

For our purposes, there are two important things to remember. First, Wikipedia strictly prohibits advertising. This doesn’t mean that you cannot create an article for your business or organization. Rather, it means that the article must be verifiable and from a neutral point of view.

Second, an organization must be notable to have its own Wikipedia article. This basically means that you’ll need reliable secondary sources to back up whatever you include on your company’s page. Things like newspaper articles, television coverage, and books qualify here. If a source has very shallow coverage, you will need more sources.

Sign up

To create new articles, you’ll need a Wikipedia account. The sign up process is simple. You really just have to pick a username, set a password, etc.

Once you’re signed in, you have lots of preferences you can tinker with. But we’ll just cut to the chase and create your article.

Start a new article

Like all things at Wikipedia, there’s a great help page that you’ll want to peruse. To boil it down, you just create a page, type your info, and save it.

Before you start an article about your organization, it’s important to make sure one doesn’t already exist. You can use the yellow search box at Starting a new page to verify this.

When you search using this form, it will only look for articles with that title. Be sure to look for variations. Assuming an article is not found, you’ll see a link below the search box that allows you to “create this page.” Click that link to create your article.

Edit your article

You should now see a large text box on your screen. This is where you can type your article. Once you’re done typing, click “Save Page” below the box. It’s really that simple.

You’ll want to include formatting in your article, which you can do with the markup buttons above the form. Fortunately, there’s a handy page on editing articles that includes commonly used formatting.

Don’t forget to “Save Changes.” If you don’t, all your hard editing will be lost.

The result

When a person looks for information about your company, they should quickly find the Wikipedia article. It’s a trusted domain, and you’ll have a link from there to the company’s website. This should help with your website’s overall search engine placement as well as generating new traffic to the site.

Now, sit back, relax, and enjoy your hard work.

If you are new to online marketing, one of the quickest and easiest ways to see results is through “Pay Per Click” or PPC.

PPC is buying visitors on an individual basis. You pay for each vistor (or click) that a search engine sends you. For example:

You are selling Widgets. You create an account at Google Adwords and offer to pay $.25 for each visitor that Google sends you. Google then looks at your keywords (buy a widget) and whenever someone searches for “buy a widget” your ad gets shown.

Unlike traditional media, you don’t pay anything unless someone clicks on your link and goes to your website.

There are only a few good PPC engines so start with Google Adwords and if that works, expand until you can’t handle the load any longer!