By Josip Barbaric

Promoting your business site with Squidoo is one of the most effective affiliate marketing methods, right beside article marketing and blogging. It has become one of the most popular online marketing trends for a good reason.

Squidoo is an online community of lensmasters. Lensmasters are Squidoo members that create content on Squidoo via Squidoo lenses, one-page information sites that serve to inform people of a certain topic or subject and to point the way, providing links to products, sites or giving product reviews.

Squidoo has many different aspects, such as member interaction via commenting on lenses, joining relevant groups or rating other members lenses. Promotion of affiliate products and sites has been made very easy by Squidoo. In fact, unlike most sites online, they welcome affiliate marketers.

One of the best things about Squidoo is that the content created on it ranks extremely well in the search engines. It is highly optimized and many lenses to this day have made it to the first page of Google and other search engines with virtually no effort beyond making the lens and publishing it. This is probably the most important part of Squidoo.

Squidoo lenses give you the ability to rank very high in the search engines for your selected keywords, while giving you the ability to get high quality backlinks to your site, give your site or blog big exposure. Also, you can make affiliate sales directly from Squidoo by providing people info on a certain subject and then directing them to selected products from stores such as Amazon and Ebay.

There are some things that you need to remember when using Squidoo to promote your personal website, affiliate page or squeeze page where you capture subscribers to your newsletter.

1. You must create quality content. Period. That means info that people can actually use.

2. If you have your own website, be sure to link to it from your Squidoo lenses and use an anchor text with the targeted keywords that you want your site to compete on in the search engines. This can give a great boost to your site’s search engine rankings.

3. Use social bookmarking to get the word out about your lens. This will give you more backlinks and more readers. And more sales.

4. Update your lenses at least one per week if you want to make a long term profit from them. There are two reasons for this. First, updating your lens frequently will make it rank higher on Squidoo, which gives you credibility as an expert on the given subject. Second, you can track the click through rate and tweak the content to be more appealing.

5. Post comments on other people’s lenses, but make them constructive. Also, be sure to compliment them on a great lens. This will give you more traffic to your own lenses.

6. When you become a lensmaster, every lens that you make will look like this: Squidoo.com/nameofyourlens. Be sure to choose the name of your lens carefully, as well as the title of your lens. It must be something that gives the visitors a clear view at the lens’ content.

Squidoo is a powerful asset for everyone who wants to make money online. Use it to get the word out about your site and to build your credibility, to create more presence in the search engines and to make sales. And then more sales.

Josip Barbaric is a successful Squidoo lensmaster and a top affiliate for many different programs. His Affiliate Training Guide shows newbies how to make money with various marketing methods. If you want to learn more, visit the Affiliate Marketing