When you’re an affiliate who is just starting out, you might not have the funds to start with your own domain and hosting – even if it’s just $10 for a domain per year and under $10 a month for hosting.

Or, maybe you have a domain and you’re looking for ways to build good backlinks to your site to help it grow in authority in the eyes of Google and other search engines – but you don’t want to do anything shady.

Squidoo Benefits

Squidoo offers you some great benefits for using their site for affiliate marketing purposes. It’s especially helpful to people who want to be Amazon affiliates, but have found that they no longer can because the program isn’t offered in their state because they can use Squidoo’s Amazon account to get paid for their efforts!

You can create a free account on Squidoo – or more than one account if you want each account to reflect a different niche topic. Then you can create unlimited pages on the site called lenses – each one promoting items in your niche.

Squidoo does have some rules and niche topics they don’t allow that are prone to attract spammers, so make sure you read the rules. But assuming your niche passes the test, you can go forward and promote digital and tangible products using both text hyperlinks and modules that help showcase items on Amazon or eBay for a commission.

When you register your lens, make sure you get a URL that has keywords for your niche in it. Longtail keywords do really well in ranking on Google if they’re set up properly. You want to have lots of good content on each lens – a mix of modules so that it doesn’t bore the visitor.

You can alternate between text modules where you place articles with text hyperlinks to products you want to promote, and Amazon modules where you get a share in the commission that Squidoo earns if someone buys through it.

There’s also an RSS feed module that you can add so that it pulls in the most recent links to your blog on the niche topic. That way, the visitor can click through and go to your blog, sign up for your subscriber list, and allow you to cater to their needs over time.

There are a few people making a full-time living on Squidoo. It takes dedication and research into picking the right products to promote. When you create a lens, you want to promote it the same way you would your own website. Tweet the lens, post it on Google Plus, share it on Facebook, and more.

Smart affiliate marketers will be using Squidoo to boost their search engine rankings on a regular basis. Just one of the things that affiliate friends pass along to each other... How are you improving your affiliate marketing efforts.