Beliefs - An Idea and a Lens

WOW! It's another one of those fast-moving weeks and I'm amazed to see that it's Thursday already!

Even with a plan I find I'm frequently de-railed. The benefit of having the system though is that I can take a deep breath and climb right back on where I fell off. I'm loving that in bigger ways than I imagined!!!

So... the idea I was playing around with was BELIEFS. As you can imagine that's a pretty b r o a d topic... nine times out of ten when I mentioned it to people their immediate question was some variation of, "What kind of belief?!?" I simply had to narrow it down!

Now... to be fair, I must explain that I have a motive for wanting to work with beliefs right now as I have been working in partnership for the past month or so revising a most brilliant course called BeliefBusters. It's a course providing a series of processes that have an amazing ability to help you break through disempowering beliefs you may not even realize you hold... resulting in personal transformation like nothing I've ever experienced before.


You may have guessed that I am passionate about personal growth and development and it's clear to me that we all have adopted some beliefs that simply do not serve us and until we uncover and release those... we are stuck at the level of our beliefs.

So, I was left with the question... how do I select a keyword that expresses all that?

Perhaps I should declare here - "Do what I say... not what I do". LOL I simply decided to go with a very long tail keyword... Belief Busters for Personal Transformation
(my motto - when in doubt, tell it like it is ;-))

So that's the lens I built today... I decided to focus on creating a lens filled with a variety of resources that support breaking through limiting beliefs. I decided to keep it a bit broad on purpose as I intend to create a few lenses on specific resources like this that I will 'hook' together.

It's late and I'm too tired to do any bookmarking. Since Squidoo hasn't even indexed my lens yet it's undoubtedly better for me to wait until tomorrow anyway!

I'll keep you posted about this experiment...
--Mary K

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-:¦:- ((¸¸.·´* Light

EXPECT MIRACLES!

A MAP ~ Affiliate Marketing Action Plan ~ Part 2

If you've been following along you now have a great idea and a Squidoo lens. If you aren't why not?

Today we are going work on the second half of this system. This is the part that drives traffic to your lens.

We're going to drive traffic in a couple ways.

We are going to use social networking and social bookmarking to get high quality backlinks which will increase your rankings in the search engine as well as drive traffic from the communities themselves.

The second way we are going to drive traffic is by article marketing. This will also provide you will quality backlinks and direct traffic.

Social bookmarking. This is a great way to let people know about your lens. There are some must use social bookmarking sites.

StumbleUpon ~ this site has the ability to drive a LOT of traffic to your site. In fact, I recently had two different incidents of over 600 visitors in a day from StumbleUpon. You will have to sign up for an account with stumbleupon, and then download the toolbar. It will not drive traffic every time you stumble your lens, but it will be another great backlink, and a good possibility of getting some traffic.

Digg ~ depending on your topic. If you are doing anything about making money don't bother with digg. When you do your digg bookmark make sure you write a description that sounds more like a newspaper story.

There are a million social bookmarking sites available, and more being created every day. Getting your bookmarks can be time consuming, but it is a necessity.

A couple suggestions and then I'll give you some ideas on how to make it a little quicker.

Take a few minutes when you sign up for your account to add a little description and a picture. I suggest using the same picture for all your social networking pages. People will begin to associate your picture with you and feel they know you no matter what community they are in.

Now making quick work of bookmarking.

You can use social marker ~ which once you have an account at each of the bookmarking sites will fill in all the information for your lens. All you have to do is put in the captcha and click submit.

If you want to do even more bookmarking than social marker I have put together a free report to help you set up a system for quick and easy social bookmarking

Bookmarking is pretty self explanantory ~ but important to build quality backlinks and drive traffic.

Article Marketing is the next piece of the traffic puzzle.

I suggest you come up with at least two keywords for each of your lenses that you can write articles on. I suggest you write a couple articles for each keyword. They will be used for a couple of different purposes.

The first article will be written for google. You will write this article using your keywords in the title and within the article and then submit it to ezinearticles.com. If you've chosen good keywords with not so much competition you should easily be able to get to page one or two of google with your article. (this should give you two of the top 10 links in google 1 to your lens and one to your article with a link to your lens)

The second article on the same topic is going to be used for backlinks. You will want to submit th is article to all the article directories you can find. I had you write a second article so you don't get dinged for duplicate content and not show up on google. This is just for the links, so no need to worry about the duplicate content.

Again, submitting to article directories is VERY time consuming. You can cut down on some of the time by using Article Submitter. Once you've created an account at each of the directories article submitter will fill in all the info about your article in each of the directories. All you will have to do is choose a category and click submit. This will make your submissions process much quicker.

You can/should do this process for each of your keywords for each of your lenses. I get asked how many articles do I have to write for each lens. Here's the answer ~ as many as you need.

Sorry ~ what I mean is you have to keep doing this until you start to see the level of traffic that you want/need for that lens to start making you the money you want. So if you aren't on page one of google yet, submit to some more article directories and write another article or two to submit to ezinearticles.

It probably won't take as much as you think.

In fact, yesterday I created a lens on Easter Crafts for Kids, I have not gotten around to writing articles on it yet, I just bookmarked it and it's already on google and getting traffic. Now it's just a little traffic, so once I get some articles written and submitted, I imagine it will create a stronger stream of traffic.

The last step in this system and it's an optional step is to set up a blog.

This blog is designed to give you more quality backlinks. You want to think of a blog topic that will be able to encompass all your lenses.

For example ~ I set up a "how to blog". My only purpose for this blog was just to get more backlinks to all my lenses. I am however, quickly falling in love with this little green blog. It allows me to do all the things my other blogs don't let me do. I get to post quick, one small paragraph posts and then link to my lens. I also get to add nice pictures which I don't do on most of my other blogs.

So instead of it just being a backlink creator I'm actually starting to drive traffic to the blog itself. Doing this will lead people back to my lenses and hopefully to the merchant pages where they will be moved to buy the product. :)

You can even make a post and link to your ezinearticles. It is all about making a huge web of links all interconnected, and giving people a ton of different ways and opportunities to find your site.

That's it the basics of this system.

Get an idea ==> Build a Lens ==> Bookmark for backlinks and traffic ==> Articles for backlinks and traffic ==> Blog for backlinks and traffic

Pretty simple, but I know even though we've laid it all out there for you actually doing it and following through will be tough.

Just try it. Follow this plan 1 time and see what happens. If you notice an increase in traffic to your lens and an increase in your commissions DO IT AGAIN. If you don't I'd still suggest doing it again. Not every lens will be a huge hit. You may have to build a few lenses before you hit the big one.

If after building 10 lenses following this plan you are still seeing nothing ~ then move on to another system and try it out.

If this just wasn't quite clear enough, step by step enough for you, keep an eye out for my new ebook A MAP ~ A Step By Step Affiliate Marketing Action Plan. It should be ready soon.

However ~ if you have not followed each and every piece of this puzzle I don't want to hear "it just doesn't work" because it DOES work, you just have to work it.

I look forward to discussing the next system next week. See ya then. Get started today on this though. You can easily get a few lenses done before Monday.

Jackie Lee :)

Creating an Affiliate Marketing Action Plan ~ A MAP

A MAP is what most people are missing in internet and affiliate marketing. It doesn't matter how much information you have, if you can not put it into a concrete and easy to follow system and have a plan to follow it's useless.

I'm really excited about this month. It's really just dawning on me how important it is to have a system and an action plan. We are going to work on four different marketing strategy systems and hopefully provide you with a MAP (marketing action plan) for each.

Mary K mentioned our first system will be

Idea ==> Squidoo Lens ==> Bookmark ==> Article ==> Blog

This is the system I currently use the most and love the most. In fact I am in the process of writing and in depth ebook that will provide the reader with A MAP(affiliate marketing action plan) for this system. So if you enjoy this week's system please stay tuned for the release of my ebook.

Today I'm going to discuss the first two aspects of this system, finding an idea and setting up a Squidoo lens.

Coming up with an idea is a crucial piece of the internet marketing puzzle. It can be as complicated or as easy as you want to make it. There are two schools of thought on idea generation. One side says "do what you love" the other says "choose something that's hot". I think there's great value in doing BOTH. When you are looking for an idea choose something that interests you, but check and make sure people are searching on your keywords and other people are paying for advertising on that keyword as well.

That sounds really complicated but it is NOT. Believe me, this was the part that took me forever to get, and I was really just making it too complicated.

I generally get a lot of my ideas from Amazon. It's a huge marketplace. They've already divided everything into categories, and I'm sure if it's at Amazon, someone is buying it. So go ahead and go to amazon. Click the big orange button on the left and check out all the categories, open up the categories that interest you until you find something fairly concrete you can discuss.

This will be considered your "broad keyword". This will probably NOT get you into the top 2 pages of google because there's too much competition. Let's just go see how much competition there is. Let's say I found a bunch of information on Wedding Planning at amazon. I find planning a wedding pretty interesting so I'm going to choose that as my broad keyword.

Let's go to google now. Go ahead and put your broad keyword in the search box. You are going to take note of a couple things when the search results come back.

• how many sites are returned in your search results
• how many google ads are on the side of the page

If the number of results comes back over 10,000 (and I'm sure it will) you will need to refine your keyword. (this is the process of finding a great long tailed keyword). You are going to take note of the google ads because this will show you if there are people paying money for this keyword. You can bet if there's people paying, there's people buying.

OK ~ so the next step ~ since you have over 10,000 results in your search is to refine your search term or keyword.

Use the Best Keyword Tool (which is free). Put your broad keyword in the search box. When the results come back you want to look through them and pay most attention to the last column of numbers.

You want to find keywords that have under 1000 in that last column. Don't worry about the order of the words, if you can move them around and make an intelligent phrase write it down.

Keep in mind while you are looking for results that you are going to monetize a squidoo lens for this phrase ~ so think about if you can monetize the phrase through amazon (are there books, movies anything for sale on the topic?) Are there other affiliate options you will have for the topic? For example one of the keyword phrases for wedding planning was maui wedding planning. If I was doing a lens on planning a maui wedding I would want to see if there was an affiliate program where I could get paid for referring people to particular flights, hotels, activities etc.

Make sure to think outside of the box ~ there's an affiliate program for just about everything you can think of.

Take the long keyword phrase with less than 1000 in the last column and go back to google. Now you are going to put this phrase in search box in quotes and see what comes up. So for the maui example I put in "plan a maui wedding" It came up with 2,230 results and there are a more than 10 ads on the page. This will be a very good phrase to build a lens around.

That's really all there is to it. It doesn't have to be difficult.

The next step is to build your squidoo lens. We have discussed building Squidoo lenses quite thoroughly during the Squidoo Challenge. You can go back and read the month of January on this blog if you need a refresher on Squidoo.

I do want to make a few points about Squidoo I've learned since we did that experiment.

• Use your keyword phrase in your url. You can break it up with dashes or if it's taken you can add a number at the end (google won't care)
  
• Use your broad keyword AND keyword phrase AND other related keywords in your lens title and introduction module title (it says keep it short, but you can make it long)
• Use your broad keyword and your keyword phrase throughout your lens
• Name your pictures with your keyword phrase (this will help people find your lens through image searches)
• If you use link modules make sure you use your keyword phrase, and other related keywords in your anchor text
• If you use the poll module use keywords as your answers and hotlink them to a product
• Go ahead and bold/italicize your keywords a couple times throughout your lens
  

The more google is able to understand and SEE what your lens is about the more likely it will be to choose your lens to spotlight on page 1. Make sure google knows exactly what your lens is about by using your keywords when you can without making your lens look or sound crazy.

I'd also like to recommend some modules for you to use when creating your squidoo lens. This is the format I use and it serves a few purposes. It allows me to be focused and use my keywords often. It also allows me to break up the text, and add some interesting points or emphasize the important points. It also allows for interactivity within your lens ~ which is what the community of Squidoo is all about right?

Here's my system for quickly creating quality, interesting Squidoo lens.

• Amazon Spotlight
• text/write
• poll module
  
• amazon spotlight
• text/write
• talk bubble or post it note
• amazon spotlight
• text/write
• guestbook

That should get you going ~ remember you want to provide quality information, but if you make your lens too long you will lose readers before the end.

There you have it the first 2 steps in your MAP. I'll be back on Thursday to run through the last steps of this system.

Remember ~ no matter how much information you have it doesn't amount to money unless you DO something with it. Go DO IT!

Jackie Lee :)

Testing SYSTEMS - 1, 2, 3, 4

A most happy and welcome March to you!!!

It's time to wrap up our 30 Day BLOGGING Experiment and introduce our next Experiment.

I have to confess that while I love blogging and know it as an important element of marketing online, I feel the information shared here over the past month has been a bit scattered and disorganized. A good clue that some change is needed on my part. In fact, it served to inspire the direction Jackie and I are going to take for the next month of our 30 Day Marketing Experiment.

We are going to experiment with different "systems". This certainly won't be all inclusive... though we will aim to present a different system over each of the next four weeks.

A 'system', as defined in my Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary is:

1: a regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole

In other words... you can have a group of items, or activities and with a sense of how they relate to one another, how they can build on one another... you have a system that results in a unified whole. Without the sense of how they relate to and build on or enhance one another you simply have a group of activities... or a group of tools... not doing you a whole lot of good.

One important thing to keep in mind is that there will be systems that 'work' for you... and systems that invariably fail to help you produce the results you seek. Don't make too much of any particular system. Just keep experimenting until you find the system that works for you!

A system that works for you would:

• fit your budget
• fit your schedule
• feel quite effortless
• inspire new ideas/thoughts
• bring in cash
  

The system we're going to cover this week looks something like this:

Idea ==> Lens ==> Bookmark ==> Article and take it further in a blog

We'll reiterate some of what we've talked about previously with a focus on the FLOW. I've frequently found that it's not until re-visiting information after pondering it a bit and experimenting with it to gather more information... that I experience those 'lightbulb' moments that allow me to suddenly see how it all flows together.

So... this month Jackie and I will experiment with a variety of systems in order to discover which ones work most powerfully for each of us. Feel free to share what comes up for you... voicing pro's and con's of various systems is a great way to get clear about what serves YOU best!

For now... I'm off to refine my IDEA -- I'll share that with you in a day or two.

until then... stay present to the moment ;-)

--Mary K

¸..· ´¨¨)) -:¦:-
¸.·´ .·´¨¨))
((¸¸.·´ ..·´ -:¦:-
-:¦:- ((¸¸.·´* Light

EXPECT MIRACLES!