Should You Kick Squidoo To The Curb?
Posted June 23, 2009 – 9:36 pm in: Affiliate Marketing, Amazon, Clickbank, Ebay Tips, SquidooYour first inclination might be to do just that given all of the hoopla surrounding Squidoo’s new terms of service. Squidoo has given clues no make that a huge plug for who they’ve given a big kick in the pants to and who will get a generous heapin’ of love.
The loser in this shakeup appears to be Clickbank. I know, I know Clickbank themselves hasn’t been given the cold shoulder but their product marketplace sure has.
Need to get rid of belly fat anyone? I just couln’t resist. I know I do but that is not the point here.
Oh yeah sure, many are up in arms about all the traffic they’ve brought to Squidoo and believe they’re being plan out dissed right now.
At first, I was a little miffed about it too. Squidoo new terms of service initially reminded me of the Soup Nazi episode from Seinfeld back in the day.
After the dust has settled over the pass several days however I got to thinking and just kept
coming back to this…
If it’s not obvious to you by now, Clickbank products don’t butter Squidoo’s bread.
Adsense, Amazon and Ebay layers it on quite richly.
Let’s take a small example I’ve seen unfold many times in my neck of the woods.
What if you owned a grocery store for example, what products would you push the most. If you answered your own store brand, you’d be right.
At least that’s how my local Publix grocery store does it. They haven’t done it by actually promoting their store brand but over time blantantly skyrocketing the price of national brands. And they’ve gotten quite stealth at studying products that are hot sellers and after 2 to 3 months creating their own store brand of it.
Publix is able to carry this out superbly because they have all of the data in-house which they study meticulously.
Squidoo seem to have done a very similar thing in studying their data and the fallout has very little
to do with the world not needing another “get rid of belly fat” lense or whatever else they’re saying right now.
Since Squidoo released their new terms of service it’s become very uncomfortable even thinking of Clickbank and Squidoo at the same time hasn’t it? Over time people will just stop promoting most of Clickbank stuff out of fear of whether a topic will get their lenses locked.
Just look at the profit modules, are any of them Clickbank?
They simply have chosen to not have their resources all tied up with a gazillion lensmasters
making Clickbank a hefty coin day in and day out. Instead they’ve decided to keep the focus
on those buying transactions that will benefit their advertising partners Google, Amazon and Ebay.
It’s just good business people. No more, no less.
So should you give Squidoo a swift kick out of your affiliate marketing promotion?
The Clickbank products that will get the most future monitoring I believe from Squidoo
are those who are white hot in the gravity category and have a gazillion ezinearticles
dedicated to them.
If you have your heart locked and set only on those high gravity Clickbank product
commissions and nothing else, I’d have to say… Yes you should get out before you’re
completely kicked out the door. Don’t forget to export your content before you go.
However, if you’re willing to tweak and steer your current pages to let’s say a comparable Amazon
or Ebay product you might be safe from the axe. Look again at the TOS, Amazon and Ebay
platters are perched on one big ole’ buffet…Go ahead, have all you want.