Web Marketing Strategy Update

Squidoo is the brain child of popular and latterly philanthropic marketer Seth Godin, who’s also the author of a small pile of marketing books containing some pretty revolutionary thinking.

The idea is that anyone can set up a “Lens” on any topic they choose, sharing information for the purposes of building reputation, drawing traffic to other websites, making money or just for fun.

Simply a web page with a hip new name, besides giving you space to write on your subject of choice, a lens has modules to optionally add stuff like RSS feeds, items from Amazon, polls, photos from Flickr, etc.

A lot of time has now passed, but if I remember correctly, the basic premise in setting up Squidoo was that search engines would never be able to deliver what people want, and that the people themselves would make a better job of it by voting with their feet as it were, from amongst Lenses created by others knowledgeable on a subject.

Here’s the Oct 2005 post on Seth’s blog with the free ebook download introducing Squidoo and explaining the concept of “everyone’s an expert.”

Did you know that many ClickBank merchants are blatantly stealing your commissions from right under your nose?

It’s true. And the modus operandi of these thieves?

Simple … the float in subscription form.

Imagine the scene: You have just been charged $0.25 by Google Adwords for a click that has sent someone through your ClickBank affiliate link to the product sales page. When they arrive there however, a form slides into view asking for their email address in return for a free download on the same topic, such as a sample chapter, a related ebook by the same author, or a demo version of the software.

As potential buyers, many visitors will want to look at this before making a purchase decision. So they surrender their email address and are forwarded away from the sales page to one asking them to check their email now for the download.

Moments later, “your” customer is reading an email they have received directly from the ClickBank merchant and are are clicking back to the website with the vendors own link, and in so doing, overwriting your ClickBank cookie with their own. Bye bye commission!