Blue Oasis, Online Marketing Greenery

Three U’s and the Haystack

After you build a page on Squidoo (or a blog, or anywhere else on the web, for that matter) there’s an almost irrestible urge to panic. Panic, because you’ve put in all this work and then you feel sort of powerless. “No one is looking at my page!”

It’s human nature. We want to be noticed, we want our effort to pay off and we hate to fail.

So, the question: How do I get more traffic? It’s not just you. EVERYONE wants to know the answer to this question. They want to know how to get more traffic to their blog, their corporate website, their Squidoo lens. More.

There are plenty of tactics about how to get more traffic to your pages online. Dozens of blog posts and great advice, easy to find. WARNING: None of these tactics work without the three U’s that are covered in this book.

The three U’s? Yes, it’s simple:
Useful
Updated
Unique

The reason you don’t have enough traffic is pretty obvious but still hard for most people to embrace. The web is a haystack, the biggest haystack the world has ever known. The reason that Yahoo and Google are so important is that they help us find what we want in the stack.

And your lens or blog or page or store is just a tiny little needle.

Of course you don’t show up first in Google. I’d be stunned if you did. With a million matches on a typical term, the odds of showing up first are, ready for this… a million to one.

That means that the search engines can be really picky. Sure, there are ways to trick them (for a while) but pretty soon, the average stuff just ends up somewhere in the middle. If you can settle for this, you should, because the alternative requires some effort. This is a really short ebook about three requirements to avoid the middle, three ways to stand out, three ways to make all those other tactics actually work for you.

You can skip these three and spend all your time and your money trying to beat the system. Or, you can embrace the system and put it to work for you. It’s worked for me so far, and I’ve managed to rank highly for dozens of terms for my blog and my Squidoo lenses.

If you spend any time at Google, what you’ll discover is that the people there are universally committed to making the web better. I can’t remember ever talking to anyone at Google (or Yahoo for that matter) who said, “hey, that’s a pretty lousy page, but we make a lot of money on it.”

Superstition

What people do:

When we see a system we don’t understand, we make up stories. Humans used to think that space was filled with ether, that supernatural beings rode chariots through the sky to make the sun rise and that stomach ulcers were caused by pastrami sandwiches. We saw phenomena that we didn’t understand and made up stories around them.

There’s a lot of stories about search. Certain kinds of content, we hear, gets you banned. Other kinds of link structures always work. There are gnomes at Yahoo with a blacklist. Certain political parties are favored… the list goes on and on. We find a few data points to support a theory and suddenly it becomes a religion. We follow habits slavishly, all hoping to please the search gods.

It turns out that it’s a lot simpler than that. The search engines have been really up front about what they seek and what they link to. I thought I’d give my best shot at explaining it.

A few words about Squidoo

If you’re already a Squidoo lensmaster, feel free to skip this little section. If, on the other hand, you found this ebook some other way, a quick explanation:

Squidoo is a platform that lets anyone build a page about anything. Online. For free. In just a few minutes.

Just to be difficult, we call the pages “lenses.” A lens is your viewpoint on a topic. There are lenses on the Cuban Missile Crisis, the best way to get a dragontattoo and a wide ranging page about digital photography. In fact, there are about 300,000 lenses on just about every topic imaginable. Each hand-built by an individual, like you, for free.

Lenses focus attention, drive clicks and even earn royalties. None of that happens, though, if people don’t notice your lens. Hence this ebook… a way to build pages that get noticed and clicked on. It works for blogs and commercial sites too, of course, but I’ll be using Squidoo lenses as my examples. (Hey, it’s my company and my ebook, so there you go.)

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