You may have heard the buzz about Web 2.0 and wondered if it could help you and your business, after all, if you’ve been online for any length of time you’re bound to already have your own website up advertising your product – so what use is there in having and maintaining another one? Well, let me tell you…

Due to the technology behind Web 2.0 sites they’re one of the quickest ways you’ll get ranked on the internet. Now, you may already have your own website up and running, but, did you know, the more links you have coming into your site the better it will be ranked in the search engines? If you can get another site up and running quickly, and linking back to your main site, it will give your main site a rankings boost – especially as most of the major Web 2.0 sites are classed as authority sites, meaning the search engines take particular notice of who they’re linking to.

So, how do you get started with your new marketing strategy? The first thing you’ll want to do is to register with one the biggest, and most respected Web 2.0 platforms – and Squidoo takes a lot of beating. As well as the tendency for lenses created on Squidoo to rank highly in Google, they’re also pretty straight forward to create and have published, and it could just be a matter of a few days before they’re receiving organic traffic from the search engines.

Once you’ve learned the best way to setup and optimise your lens, and I really recommend visiting Social Marketing 101 if you want to save yourself a lot of time and money doing it, then you’ll need to have some content that’s going to be relevant to the readers you’re looking to attract.

The best types of reader to attract are the people looking to solve a problem of some type, and you’re the person who’s going to be able to do it for them – or rather the product you sell from your main site is going to do it. Now, seeing as you’ll know your market, because you’ve chosen a market you already know something about, what would be the key one or two things that they may be looking to solve in there life, where your product will be able to help them out that is?

Once you’ve made a list of what they could be looking to solve, decide which problems your product will be able to help them out with the most. The idea is to have at least two, solvable only by your product, problems and then write a short article on each of the problems. What you should be doing in the article is outlining the problem, how bad it can be for the person with the problem and the devastating knock on it can have on their family, and then mention a few of the key benefits that your product will have on their lives - when they buy it, or course.

Bear in mind that you aren’t trying to sell them anything from your Squidoo lens, that’s what you spent a large amount of money on your sales letter to do, you’re offering them some free and valuable information about the problem they have, always give them some small useful bits of advice that they can use without them having to spend any money that way they’ll then value the advice they have to pay for even more. Then pointing them, subtly, in the direction of a solution – the product you’re selling on your website.

Done properly this technique can generate a lot of traffic for your main site, via your Squidoo lens, in a surprisingly short period of time - you could even pick up a residual income from Squidoo at the same time.

For anyone reading this who doesn’t know the idea behind ‘Bum Marketing’ let me take a couple of minutes out to explain – it’s well worth knowing about.

Bum marketing is all about being able to get the most amounts of visitors to any site you’re promoting, while spending the least amount of possible cash doing it. In essence it’s a simple and foolproof version of article marketing and the name, popularized by Travis Sago the creator of the technique, refers to the fact that even a ‘bum’ off of the street could get started and make serious amounts of money from it!

The approach you take for the next bit will all depend on what it is you want to promote, but the key thing is to find something that’s ‘hot’. You may decide that you want to take a long term approach and get a continuous flow of buyers, or, you may decide to make as much of a current news item as possible i.e. while energy price rises are constantly featuring in the news why not capitalize on it and show people how they can build their own solar panels for creating hot water?

The best plan is to use a combination of short term ‘media hyped’ subjects, and longer term profitable niche markets.

Next you want to find some keywords that relate to the subject you’re targeting, making sure you won’t have much in the way of competition in the search engines (the best idea is to try your keywords out in Google and look at the results figures to see how many people are competing for the term) and make a list of your keywords and the number of people competing for the keywords i.e. ‘how to build a cheap solar panel for heating water’ may have 2,370,000 web pages listed whereas ‘how to build a cheap solar panel’ may only have 989,000, making it easier to get ranked with.

Once you have a list of ten or more good keywords, or keyword phrases, that don’t have much in the way of competition, you’ll need to find a product to promote that’s relevant to your keywords – the best place to find one of those would be at clickbank.com.

Now, you have your keywords, have your product, and need to get something put together so as to attract the readers and get them racing to the affiliate product to buy. What you’ll need to do here is to take the keywords you have and write an article around them. The articles don’t have to be long, or a Pulitzer Prize winning piece of literature, they just need to contain the keywords and be tied in with the subject and product you’re promoting.

If you’re not too sure how to get started then try doing a bit of research on the internet to get some ideas on the subject. Try reading the sales letter of the product to see what they’re saying and then reword it in such a way that it includes the keywords. Remember you’re not trying to sell the product, you’re giving them information that will be of use to them and it’ll help to presell the product your promoting – then you’ll need to get your articles published.

The way most people get them published is to send them off to article directories, which is fine if you’re happy to wait for the owners to check them and list them in their directories, but we don’t want to wait, our subject may be in the news today and gone again in a week or two, so we want to be listed as quickly as possible.

The main idea behind bum marketing is how free, or low cost, it is to do, so we don’t want to be paying the search engines to send use traffic, not to start with anyway, so let’s get this done for free! We’re going to go to our favorite Web 2.0 platform, Squidoo, and set our articles up on there. It’s free to join and there’s always a good chance of getting a domain name that includes your article’s keywords.

Next, put up the articles, with the affiliate links embedded in the content, and publish the squidoo lens. Then do the same thing with each keyword based article you’ve written for the subject.

Because each article is different, and targeting a different set of keywords in an area of relatively low competition, you should start picking up traffic from the search engines in a matter of a couple of days – and if you’ve written your articles in a way that informs the reader and points them to a product that can solve their problems – you should start picking up some commissions from sales very soon after that!

If you need to know a bit more about how to create and monetize a Squidoo lens, then visit Social Marketing 101, it might inspire you to add one or two other revenue streams to your Squidoo bum marketing strategies.