One of the affiliate marketing blogs that I really enjoy is the Smart Marketing Affiliates Blog by Jason Forthofer. His message today dealt with how to market effectively as an affiliate using Squidoo. Squidoo is a social network created by user experience genius Seth Godin that allows people to build a “lens” or niche mini-site on the topic of their choice. These mini-sites are searchable from Squidoo.com and there are daily “lens of the day” spotlights given to interesting lenses generated by their users.

The really cool thing is that Squidoo allows “lens-masters” to post affiliate links in their lenses. Here are some tips that Jason posted for is readers on how to “Squidoo” for fun and most importantly PROFIT.

• Don’t spam. We all hate it and your visitors will too. Create a lens that is first, informative and engaging. Now, compliment it with a few (did you get that? A FEW) strategic affiliate links. Don’t be a SquidSpammer.
• Be specific. Don’t create a lens on weddings. Their is probably already thousands of those already. You can build hundreds of lenses so create a few that are targeted. My suggestions…create one about twin babies, baby shower cakes or spring weddings.
• A Squidoo lens can get great search engine ranking. A google search for cool laptop bags will find a Squidoo lens in the # 1 spot. So, when creating your lens, do it in a way that optimizes it best for the search engines. Remember to link to your lenses from your website.
• Have fun and be realistic! Creating a successful Squidoo lens isn’t going to allow you to quit your day job. However, creating a few done right can compliment your overall business income nicely. And remember, link back to your website from within your lens.

Jason is an affiliate manager that has programs dealing with babies and weddings (clearly) I took a look for some Christian lenses and here are a few that I found that were cool.

Official C28.com Squidoo

Cool Christian T shirts Squidoo

If you need a hand at getting started, Squidoo has a handy learning center at where else? SquidU.com

Squidoo is all about allowing folks to share their passion and experience with others, without the need for a lot of technical knowledge. If you’d like to get started in affiliate marketing and have some passion to share, check out Squidoo today.

God Bless,

Wade Tonkin

I wanted to thank everyone who has registered for Affiliate Summit West through my sites. I was totally floored by how many referrals I was able to generate from this community.

If you were one of the people who registered for Summit through a link on my site, I would love to buy you a coffee (raised Lutheran, it’s what makes me go) especially if we haven’t met before.

If you are one fo these folks, please drop me an email with your contact information and we’ll get together in Vegas.

God Bless and have a great day!

Wade Tonkin (wade [at] christianaffiliatemarketers.com )

Was just reading through the latest from Practical eCommerce and I wanted to share some of it as it reinforces what I tell clients every day. If you are looking for an easy, cheap (free) way to generate more natural SEO “juice” for your site, you should be blogging, and blogging regularly.

Blogging is a means to share your companies opinions, experience and point of view with your audience, and through comments, your audience can interact. The great bit of it is, if you set up your blog correctly (the articles recommends a few free tools you can add to your blog) the content you post will be well optimized for quick pick up with Google.

Search engines also love fresh content, and blogs, by definition, are constant sources of new content. If written correctly – or more specifically interestingly – blogs can also provide wider link bait and garner links from outside the blogosphere. Search engines, of course, reward for good, inbound links regardless of whether they’re from other blogs.

Also keep in mind that part of the equation is based on links and especially links from relevant sites with good Google PR scores.

As Stephan Spencer underscores “SEO: Blogging Your Way To The Top”, search engines’ ranking algorithms revolve around links, and the blogosphere revolves around interlinking. As a result, adding corporate blogs is a great way to garner links.

As to the question of whether you should host your own blog or use a free service like Blogger, I agree with the opinion put forward in the article. Find a platform that you like (the author and I like WordPress for a number of reasons) and host your blog on your own servers. You will have better control of branding, more options in terms of themes and plugins, and you will be attracting SEO “juice” to your own site.

Who should blog for your company and how often should they update? That is up to you to a large degree. I’d look for someone who has a real talent for expressing the company point of view with some panache. The more engaging your blog content, the more likely you are to connect with your audience and inspire interaction . Depending on the culture at your company, this could mean that posts can be funny, controversial, serious and academic, or a combination of the above.

Go forth and blog - if you need some guidance, please get in touch with me and I will be happy to help.

God Bless,

Wade Tonkin

I was just perusing the Affiliate Summit Blog doing a little light midnight reading when I came across a fun video that Shawn and the Summit team put together to help out folks who may be heading to Affiliate Summit for the first time. I think it’s awesome that they are embracing video to put some good information forward to help take the guesswork out of how to get the most from the conference.

If you are thinking about going to Affiliate Summit, you should sign up ASAP as it’s projected to sell out totally at weeks end. Remember, yuou can save 10% on your registration by clicking here and entering the coupon code “CAMA” when you register.

See you at Summit!

God Bless!

Wade Tonkin

Shawn Collins just addressed one of the sticky questions in our business over on his blog at AffiliateTip.com - He handles the question of what a merchant should do when they are successful with paid search and are launching an affiliate program. Should affiliates be allowed to bid on search terms? Which ones whould they be allowed to bid on if at all? How can you address this issue in your program’s affiliate agreement? What should you do if you catch affiliates violating the policy? It’s all in this video.

How you go about this really depends a lot on what your budget is and how well you have branded your site. The breakdown I generally see is this. Big companies who have been around for years and spent a ton of cash to build a brand generally want affiliates to keep away from their trademarked terms (company name, product names) and keep their bidding on more general terms and long tail terms. Merchants with less legacy and budget invested in Paid Search need the help getting coverage verses their competitors. So in this case, the strategy may be more along the lines of - go ahead and bid on my terms, but don’t run my cost up - let’s keep some of my competitors out of the top 10 listings.

I’ve even seen merchants with no budget or experience in PPC give free reign to affiliates and even suggest the terms to bid on.

The bottom line is that in many cases, the affiliates doing PPC arbitrage may be a lot smarter when it comes to working Paid Search for dollars than the merchant. They are good at knowing what words and terms generate revenue as opposed to just traffic and are great at optimizing their spend accordingly.

Give it some thought and come up with the solution that is right for your business.