Harnessing Squidoo Traffic Power to Sell Affiliate Products

If you’ve been online for any length of time, you’ll realize that the only real way to make a sizeable amount of money is to sell a product, it doesn’t have to be one you own yourself, but selling a product is what brings in the money.

With so many new people ‘discovering’ the web everyday, and one of their main reasons for doing it is to make money, it’s understandable that not everyone will have the luxury of having their own, fully formed product, when they first start out. In fact, you may even be at an advantage if you don’t have a product when you first start out.

That may sound like a strange thing to say because if you have your own product you’ll be keeping either all, or a significant portion, of the profits for each sale made. So why can it be a disadvantage?

Well, you’ll start out on the web with a fixed notion of what it is you’re trying to sell without really testing the market. Sure, some things will naturally sell well but not everything will sell as you’d expect. If you have a product from the start you could be trying to create a market around your product, rather than seeing what’s working and then hit that particular market.

So how can you test a market before creating your own profit pulling product?

One of the first things you should do is decide on a subject. Think of something that’s in demand, or possibly gaining interest through media attention, and then go to Clickbank to see what products are available – after all there’s not too much sense in going too far into the planning and developing of your system if you can’t find anything to sell. Once you have the product think of the ways people might be searching for it online i.e. if it’s something health related, would people just type in ‘exercise video’ or would they be more specific and type in ‘Dancing With the Stars - Cardio Dance’?

The more specific you can be the better things will work. If people are searching under a specific title they’re more likely to be looking to buy. Another reason for being that specific is because you’re going to write about that topic, and you want to draw in the people searching on those keywords – and give them a reason to follow your link to buy it.

One way that you can do this, without having to do too much research, is to write a review of the product. It doesn’t have to be some elaborate minute by minute breakdown of the video and what it does, but it should be something that will help the buyer to make up their mind. You’ll want to have a reasonable amount of content on the subject, maybe a bit about the industry, why the products are good, how good this one is, and then a summery. If you’re sending the people to Amazon.com you may even include some of the better reviews people have given it.

The next thing is to get it in front of people as soon as you possibly can. One of the best ways of doing that is to use Squidoo, a Web 2.0 platform, because it can be setup relatively quickly and is free to use. Also the top search engines love Web 2.0 sites, and one of the top Web 2.0 platforms is, of course, Squidoo.

Now that you’ve got your content, thought of a domain name (which should try to use the keywords if possible to maximize the ranking potential) it’s time to pull everything together. You’ll notice that one of the modules in Squidoo is an Amazon.com module – don’t use it – at least not for promoting this. The commercial modules won’t earn you a full commission on any products in them, whereas a direct link, via your affiliate link, to the product itself will earn you the full commission.

If you’ve managed to give a compelling, yet balanced review, people should start to click through your affiliate link to the product. If you’ve written an article that’s sole purpose is talking about the product using keywords that are competitive, and yet not being used by everyone trying to promote it, the search engines will start to get you ranked – usually very quickly due to the technology behind Web 2.0 sites.

If you try out this method on a few niche’s, and a few products within those niche’s, you’ll start to get a feel for what people want and what they’re prepared to pay – then it may be time for you to dust down that product that you already own and get out there promoting it!