Squidoo is a very useful tool when it comes to augmenting the promotional methods bloggers have at their disposal. In order to make money, blogs need lots of one-way inbound links from other sites in order to qualify for a good page rank from Google.

One excellent way of boosting the number of those one-way inbound links for free is to set up your own Squidoo lenses in the same niche as your blog. Ok, it takes a lot of imagination and plenty of writing to populate those lenses. That’s to make them into solid content rich sites in their own right so that the search engines don’t smell a rat with links coming from a host of lenses that are, for want of a better word, rather spartan.

But that’s not all you get with a Squidoo lens.

The lens itself becomes a promotional portal for your own or affiliate products and services. The more lenses you can create and populate with original content, the better exposure your products will get. Of course you have to some work in driving traffic to your lenses as well as your blog. But that traffic to your lenses will naturally come across the links to your blog and create more self-generating traffic to your blog!

This creates a powerful self-perpetuating promotion machine that can only benefit your online business and your blog’s ability to make money for you. Which, at the end of the day, is what you want!

Terry Didcott
MAKE MONEY

I’m seriously having second thoughts about BlogRush right now.

Why?

Well, when the hype was happening and every blogger and his brother wanted to get on board, it seemed like a good way to spread the word around about your blog and boost your visitor numbers and increase your traffic.

Great idea except I’m seeing big flaws in its strategy.

It’s fine for big name and popular blogs - they have a big readership already which means lots of their readers will install the widget by clicking on their tab - meaning even greater exposure out through the matrix. On the other hand, small blogs with mediocre readerships have only a limited ability to promote the widget so would be lucky to even get a few clicks on that tab - if any and so their exposure in the matrix will be a lot lower if almost non-existent.

So what’s happening here?

Well, the big blogs are getting even more exposure and backlinks from all the small blogs and all the small blogs are getting shafted with few if any backlinks and very low or virtually no exposure. Not a good balance - in theory. In practice I have a feeling it’s no better than the theory I just wrote about.

So what’s to be done?

I for one have not seen one iota of traffic increase or links coming back to any of my blogs with the widget installed. What does that tell me? That it’s a pile of poo and akin to a glorified traffic exchange that only the ones with the most views will win the online race.

So I feel it’s time to stop feeding the big blogs from my small blogs (sorta like the scenario where the little fish get eaten by bigger fish, who in turn get eaten by even bigger fish. I’m removing the widgets from all my blogs today and using the space to make money with some affiliate links instead.

Power to the little fish!!!

Terry Didcott
MAKE MONEY

I’ve teamed up with Monika Mundell of The Writer’s Manifesto in a JV to create a web2.0 social networking blog. It will feature lots of great articles by both of us, but more importantly will allow you, the blogger to post your own blog-sized articles on there as well!

We decided to do this together as we felt it would be too much for one person to handle, as once it gets moving (and that will be pretty soon) there will be an avalanche of bloggers queuing up make themselves heard!

Why?

Because each time you post, you get greater exposure for your original work, your name (and your blog) gets better known in professional circles, more highly targeted traffic will be driven back to your blog and most importantly, you’ll get a free one-way back-link to boost your page rank.

So get yourself known a bit better and raise the profile of your work by going over to the new site at:

Blogging Web 2.0

Sign-up for free and start posting!

Terry Didcott
MAKE MONEY