Sounds like one of those cheesy internet marketing ads doesn’t it?

I’m happy to say that this is real though. It’s happened to 3 of my lenses on Squidoo. Oh, and I now have a few PR3 lenses too, so it’s not just a one-off. You can check them all out via my Squidoo lensmaster page

OK. Enough bragging. Why is this good and why should you care about it and how can you do the same?

If you’ve never heard of Squidoo here’s the five second introduction: you get to build a lens (= a page) on any subject you like. Free. You tag it and promote it within Squidoo and it gets rated with a LensRank score. Successful lenses get the benefits of lots of focused traffic and high Google PageRank.

There’s also a Top 100 list. My CSS Background lens is #74 today, so it gets lots of exposure and traffic (another reason to brag by the way. Sorry. I’ll stop now. )

So you should care about this because it can get you a lot of targeted traffic. Targeted traffic equals focused visitors which you stand a great chance of converting to real customers.

You also get a share of Squidoo’s high Google PageRank. The ‘link juice’ flows from the Squidoo site (it has PR8 today) and down into the successful lenses. A high PageRank gets you a high position in Google’s search results and therefore a greater number of organic search visitors.

Things have definitely improved since my first attempts on Squidoo

In short, it’s all good. Now how can you do it?

1. Choose a good niche with decent traffic and low competition. Define some keywords.
2. Try to choose a subject that’s interesting to people who hang around Squidoo
3. Create a high quality lens, full of interesting content, good layout and some nice pictures
4. Choose your Squidoo tags carefully to match your chosen keywords
5. Get promoting!!

Sound easy? I reckon you can do it too. The real trick here is to build something that’s useful, interesting and the highest quality you can make it. Why not have a go?

• Your car dealer says she will call you back at the weekend. She doesn’t.
• You promise to get back to a prospect on Tuesday. You leave it til Thursday
• The spam email promises a discount on your favorite drugs but when you open it it’s just garbage
• Your latest blog comment promises useful feedback but it turns out to be just a bunch of link spam

Are you getting wound up? It’s probably because this seems very familiar. Promises get broken every day.

It’s the promises that people keep that you remember. If you break your promises people will forget you. Very quickly. Don’t forget that a promise could be a number of things:

• A Google AdWords Ad for your website
• A Google hit returned for a keyword from one of your pages
• Your book cover
• Your URL
• Your autoresponder delivery schedule

These all promise something to the visitors who clicks on your ad, or opens your book, or types in your URL, etc.

The words in an AdWords ad promise to show something relevant when your visitors arrive at your site. Your URL (include any file/pathnames here) promises some content related to the words that it includes.

If you promise to do something via any of these paths and then don’t do it, you will disappoint your customers and they may not come back.

No one likes a broken promise.

If you have a business with a guestbook (vacation rental, restaurant, tourist attraction) then this can be a great source for customer feedback. Other customers will read the guestbook and hopefully see all the positive comments from your satisfied previous customers.

If your guestbook is, well, a book, then the problem is that the only people who can read this are those who are already physically there. Those people are probably already your customers (or are likely to be very soon).

You can improve on this by putting a guestbook on your website. This makes those positive comments visible by anyone in the world who has an internet connection.

The problem with this is that your guestbook is probably written by you. Your customers might provide the original comments but you’ve probably entered them yourself. Did you make any changes? Maybe you left out some of the less positive ones. Even if you didn’t, there’s always a slight suspicion that this can take place.

If you have a blog then you can open it up and allow your readers to add comments to your posts. Why not create a post called “Guestbook” and invite your customers to start commenting. It’s a great way to get real feedback and your website visitors will appreciate your honesty and openness.

Does this make you feel slightly nervous? Are you worried that negative comments might appear in your guestbook?

Well, if your customers are complaining, why is this? Is there a problem with your product or your service? If so, you’d better get this fixed anyway. Stop reading this right now and go fix it!!

Assuming you don’t have a defective product, the best way here is to respond positively to the complaint. If your customer stayed in your vacation rental and there were no saucepans, tell them how you supplied some new ones immediately. If your restaurant customer’s food was served cold, apologize and say you reheated it immediately (joke). In general, customers understand that problems occur occasionally, and they will like you if they know that you correct problems for them.

So what do you think? Why don’t you throw away the old book and start connecting to your customers via the blogosphere? Positive comments only please!

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