Squidoo is a great tool for affiliate marketers. So what exactly is Squidoo? It is a social networking platform which allows anyone with a Squidoo account to create pages (also known as lens), and talk about any topic that they like. Google loves Squidoo lens. If you have a well written lens, it may rank high on Google, driving tons of targeted traffic to your website.

Now that you know what Squidoo is, you may ask how to start using Squidoo in affiliate marketing? The trick here is to create lens with content about the topic of your affiliate product, and making sure it ranks on first page of Google for important phrases and keywords related to the affiliate product that you are promoting.

For example, if you are promoting an e-book on losing weight, you may wish to create lens and share some tips on losing weight effectively. You will insert keywords such as "how to lose weight" and "how to lose love handles" in your lens so that your lens will be relevant to Google when someone types in "how to lose weight" in the search box. This will make Google returning your lens as a relevant result on the first page of the search result page. With this, you will be able to drive tons of targeted traffic to your lens. Then with your lens, you can entice them to click on your affiliate links and bring them to your merchant's sales page.

So in order to start using Squidoo to promote affiliate products, you need to register a free account with them. During registration, you will be asked to name your lens. It is very important for you to include the keyword in your lens's URL so as to get a good ranking on search engines. Then, you will need to create content for your lens. At this point, be sure to have your content ready. Also, it will be good if you can add in some pictures in your lens as readers love to see pictures.

Once you have your content ready, it is time to place affiliate links within the content of your lens. It is important to note that you need to entice your lens reader to click on your links. So, adding call-to-action statement such as "Click here to find out more" will help to improve your click-through-rate from your lens to your merchant's sales page.

Once you think that your lens is ready, click on the Publish button at the top right hand corner and your lens will be live on the Internet. You can type in the unique URL of your lens in your browser to view it.

Now that your lens is live on the Internet, you can now start to drive traffic to your lens. Do take note that organic search engine traffic will take time to come in. So, use other methods such as article marketing, pay-per-click, social book marking and forum marketing to drive traffic to it first.

Squidoo is definitely a great tool for affiliate marketers, especially if you wish to test a particular product or market. With Squidoo, you do not need to have any website to promote an affiliate product. This makes it ideal for you to test out products, and only create websites and set up auto-respondents once you see that the product starts to sell.