Running PPC to Squidoo: Yay or Nay?

Pros and cons of sending paid traffic to Squidoo

Hello ladies and gents, my name’s Chris Kellum and I’ll be your tour guide today. I recently approached Jennifer about finding a cool way to be able to give something to her readers, and she gave me the honor of doing a guest post about a topic she’s been getting a lot of messages about – Oh, and she’s going to let me give away a free gift to you all as well, but more on that later.

And being a proper guest, I tried to make the beginning of my post as similar to her style as possible so that you’d all feel right at home – short title, and then a subtitle . . . Hey, I tried. 🙂

Should You Use PPC To Get Traffic To A Squidoo Lens?

As I previously mentioned, Jennifer’s been getting a lot of messages lately about people wanting to know about using PPC (pay-per-click) advertising to push traffic to Squidoo lenses. Apparently my failing-my-way-into-success on AdWords makes me qualified to speak about this.

All kidding aside though, I find PPC to be the scariest, greyist (no, that’s not a word, but stick with me) area of internet marketing when it comes to trying to find real, solid information – so hopefully I’ll be able to clear up some things for you all, (or “y’all” – gotta remember whose blog I’m on!) and maybe turn on a few light bulbs, as well.

I know Jennifer’s a big fan of Squidoo, and why not? No buying domain names, no hosting, you don’t have to be technically inclined . . . Oh, and they rank pretty dang well in Google, so I think that’s a pretty good benefit. In fact, when it comes to getting started making money online, you really couldn’t ask for more of a perfect storm of benefits!

Using Squidoo As A PPC Landing Page

Unfortunately, I see Squidoo lenses doing a bit more harm than good when it comes to PPC. In the interest of fairness however, I’ll give you the full picture. On the plus side, using a lens as a PPC landing page does take care of one of the hairier aspects of AdWords – Quality Score. With 1.58 million pages indexed in Google, Squidoo certainly meets Google’s standard of not being on the “thin” side (single, or few, pages).

Also, Squidoo does a pretty good job with thematic relevance. On any given lens, they try to match up and supply links to other lenses on the same, or similar, topics. Having this interlinking of related pages is something that Google definitely likes to see on their advertisers’ landing pages.

The way I see it, the way Squidoo is set up lends itself to taking care of some of the things that make Google happy – a lot of pages of content, defined themes . . . but these can also work against you when it comes to funneling your traffic (and not only making your money back on the traffic you’re buying, but turning a profit on it).

Squidoo vs Your Own Site For a PPC Landing Page

Because of all of these other links on your Squidoo lenses, beckoning your visitors to other places besides that beautiful affiliate link of yours, you tend to lose some of your traffic to other Squidoo pages, or to Adsense ads. It’s sort of the price you pay when you’re getting free traffic, but when it comes to paying the almighty dollar for your exposure, you need to make the most of every single visitor.

When you’re sending visitors to a page you “own” (your domain name, on your hosting), you control all the exits (which is hopefully more or less just AN exit to the merchant page!). Also, in order to take advantage of more advanced tracking and testing, you’re going to need to have access to the source code of your landing pages, which is something that Squidoo does not give you.

To look at it another way, when you’re getting natural (search engine) traffic, if you’re not fully optimized (weak copy, bad merchant choice, etc.) or if your target keyword phrase doesn’t convert as well as you’d hoped it would, it’s no fun – but it’s not taking money OUT of your pocket like paid traffic is.

But on the other hand, when you send that paid traffic to a landing page that you have complete control over, you can split test headlines, images, copy, video, different merchants, and even track individual keyword performance. PPC lets you really laser target your marketing efforts and know exactly what’s working, which not only leads to profitable PPC campaigns, but it gives you real, actionable data that you can plug back into your Squidoo lenses and do that much better with your natural traffic.

Look at it this way – if you’re at the point in your online ventures that you’re willing and able to pay for traffic, then you can certainly invest $7-8 in a domain name and $5-10 a month for hosting. Makes sense, right?

If you take action with Jennifer’s techniques and make sales, then at that point you can phase your way into PPC and build your business organically, letting your profits pay for your advertising and overhead (domain names and hosting). As things mature and you begin to move into new markets, you can spearhead your marketing efforts with a PPC campaign and take advantage of that laser targeting and split testing ability, then take what you’ve learned and apply it to Squidoo lenses in that market.

Learning PPC? Perfecting PPC? Get This Free Guide

Now, getting back to that giveaway thing . . .

I wanted to do something special for you all, and it actually happens to tie right into this blog post. Rather than taking pages (and pages) here, trying to fill you up with ways to work your PPC campaigns and make them profitable, I’m going to do you one better and give you all a PPC guide that I wrote – Yes, it currently sells out on the open market, but I want to give it to each and every one of you, and to help you reach success with PPC advertising.

Some of the topics covered include (free) keyword tracking (you absolutely NEED to be doing this if you want to turn a profit on PPC), search query tracking (what people are *actually* typing in when doing a search, not just what “bid keyword” their search fell under), using the almost unknown “embedded match” in order to own your competition on broad match terms, and several techniques to overcome that pesky Quality Score issue. 🙂

These are some of the best-kept secrets in affiliate marketing, so I hope you’ll take advantage of my offer and make these tools and techniques your own.

I do want to say thanks again to Jennifer – it’s been an honor and a pleasure, and I hope this clears up the “PPC to Squidoo” issue for you all, and I hope you take me up on my offer and learn the ways of the PPC force. 🙂

You can get your free copy of my PPC Success Guide right here.

Chris Kellum

InternetMarketerMindset.com

From Jennifer:

Chris, Thank you SO much for this great guest post! Folks, if you are trying to learn, or are trying to improve on, PPC (Pay PerClick/AdWords) traffic, PLEASE take advantage of this very generous offer from Chris.

His PPC Success Guide is available for sale ($27), but PotPieGirl.com readers can get it now for FREE!

Click here to find the special offer for PotPieGirl.com readers…and get your free copy today.

Have a great day!!!