Online promotion: directories, blogs, forums?

To be a successful lensmaster you have to create various skill sets for yourself. One is, obviously, to create great lenses.

The other skill is somewhat illusive: how do you get traffic to those bundles of joy?

One way is to call attention to your lenses on squidoo itself. That’s what the forums are for. And squidtop. It helps if you become popular and squidcast well.

That’s the easy way.

The intermediately hard way is to get links from squidoo directories and hope they will bring your lenses traffic (through google). After all: links = google traffic doesn’t it? Well, think again.

Google just removed their advice to get links in directories from the google guidelines. The implication is that links from directories aren’t worth as much as they used to be. I have personally not submitted any lenses to directories recently – and that doesn’t seem to have had any impact on my lens traffic. Though of course one never knows.

The fact is: there are only so many hours in a day. An hour spent submitting lenses to a directory which doesn’t even accept the lenses within a month or so – is an hour lost. I could have spent that hour writing a useful blogpost (like this), or commenting on niche blogs, or writing in forums.

Which brings me to the hardest part of online promotion: being the kind of person people follow around the web.

Or, to put it more generally: be active in the forums relating to your niche. Write content people just have to read or participate in.

I recently had the pleasure of seeing just how powerful traffic is in getting lenses top squidoo ranking.

I made a lens about a topic which is nicher than niche: there was a proposal to change the voting structure in the worldwide, but small, religious organisation I’m active in. As you can see: it has three 5 star ratings. But a squidoo rating of less than 2000.

Yet I did not promote this in the usual way on squidoo.
I did not link to it from the usual places on my website.
None of my other lenses link to it.
It is not even listed in the proper (and low competition) category: religion and spirituality. I left it in news. Where it is ranked a whopping 23.

I wanted this lens to be purely for the members of the Theosophical Society who cared about their rights to vote for the next TS president.

I did e-mail a large amount of people about this. I let them know the issue and that the time to go activist was right now.
I posted the link on THE forum for theosophical mavericks and blogged about it at two or three places.

This lens got massively popular. 52 visitors the first day. Around 20 visitors for five days after. Now still at 5 or 6 visitors a day.

No search engine traffic at all (as would be expected given how little links I put up pointing towards it).
The main referrers are online e-mail programs. Not only had I e-mailed this link to my network, which isn’t small in this niche. People mailed it to each other as well. And not only did they vote, they keep coming back to see how the vote is turning out.

The result? The current squidoo rating is 1023. In other words: firmly in top tier. Unfortunately it doesn’t stand to make me significant money, because the average over september is 21061 and the traffic (and therefor squidoo rating) is likely to taper down over October: because WE WON.

This is the main thing. The proposal this lens is about is off the table. It will not even go for the vote. I’m left with the question of what to do with this lens and how to use the link-equity it created.

From a lens building and SEO perspective this is a classic case of link bait. Create compelling content. Let the people whom it concerns know about it and find out that suddenly links aren’t hard to get at all. Though of course it is another issue whether those links will stay up.

The main point I want to make in this post is the following: decide for yourself where you want to put your energy. Do you want to chase low value directory links or do you want to be part of a community in a way that will automatically create links for you – because people care?

In practice of course it is not a either/or proposition. If you are just starting out: do get your lenses those directory links. Do submit to those social bookmarking sites aimed at squidoo lenses. Do make sure the people within squidoo know who you are.

But at some point the effect of that is going to taper off. The 40th lens that gets a link from the same directory your other lenses got a link off of, is not going to get as much traffic out of that as the first did (if the first got any traffic out if it at all).

Directory links are only the basics. Those links are easy to get, but they also don’t mean too much. The hard to get links: those are the links you really want. Only making and promoting great content is going to get you those links.

What does work for the promotion part of that? Create a themed blog. Make sure IT gets promoted (which means in part getting links from blog directories – but as before, don’t stop there). Be active on stumbleupon and twitter (and that doesn’t mean posting your squidoo updates there and leaving it at that).

Making money online is not going to be an easy ride. It’s a weird uphill battle in which each step ads to the next. Don’t think submitting your lenses to squidoo directories is going to give you that traffic. The stakes are up and likely to go up in future even more.

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