Your Website Profit

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When marketing a website online, free publishing platforms are one of the most effective free options available to you. There are many options, but here I will outline the uses of Blogger and Squidoo in particular. The same arguments and techniques can easily be used on other platforms with only minor modification.

Blogger Blogs

Creating a BlogSpot blog is free and takes up only a few minutes of your time, and even less if you already have a Googe account. The procedure of creating a blog with one of the default templates (also known as layouts) could not be much simpler. The benefits of a Blogger blog are, in addition to the ease of use, its relative flexibility and straightforward integration of Google AdSense.

By choosing the right layout, you can make your blog look like a website less than a blog. This can sometimes make the blog look more authoritative, and can so sell affiliate products readily to visitors. You also have access to the HTML code, which allows you to use almost any advertisement option available.

Adding AdSense to a Blogger blog is as simple as creating a new widget and selecting the ad size. Blogger even customizes the colors to match your blog automatically. You only need to have an AdSense account, but I’m pretty sure you already have one. In case AdSense is not an option to you, almost all other ad networks are available to you, though adding them requires a bit more work.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, when beginning blogging you should consider buying a domain name. Even if you are on a free platform, and mainly create the blog to promote another website. The reasons are tackled in the earlier posts, but put short having a domain name allows you to move the blog when it grows out of Blogger and gives you the option of making money on domaining.

Squidoo Lenses

Though Squidoo is also a free publishing platform, there are some profound differences to Blogger, and you should use it differently in your Internet marketing strategy. A Squidoo lens is possibly even easier to set up than a Blogger blog, but nowhere nearly as flexible. They should be used as small tools to promote a website, and earn a trickle of revenue while at it.

The benefit of a lens, in comparison to a blog, is that you need to do almost no promotion. The fact that the page is a part of Squidoo.com and gets internal links makes it sure to get PageRank sooner or later. Adding tags are groups to the lens gets you some traffic from other lenses, and makes it more likely for you to get search engine traffic.

I recommend some minor advertising in social media (eg. StumbleUpon), after which you can pretty much forget the lens. Depending on your niche it will either earn you revenue or not, but there’s not much you should do to influence it. Just move forward and create another.

In Conclusion

If you need a landing page to sell an affiliate product, I recommend you create a Blogger blog, and buy a cheap domain for it. This way you can promote the product without using an affiliate link. The blog will need promotion, but so would a traditional single-page website.

On the other hand, if you need to promote a website, Squidoo lenses may be a better option. They are almost guaranteed to get PageRank, so link from them will pass some SERP value. They are easy to put together, and can be left on their own afterwards.

by Sutocu | October 22, 2007