As usual, Seth is simple and short, whereas my own 3-part Squidoo tips tutorial on how to build web traffic is in-depth and too long.

One of Seth’s points jumped out at me:

You have no right to traffic. If you’re lucky, and GOOD, you earn some.

You’ll earn it when you do something daring, interesting, useful, provocative, free, compelling, emotional or urgent.

Hurry.

I’ve said this in other ways, but never quite so bluntly: YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO [WEB] TRAFFIC.

There are millions of fascinating, useful, incredible, wonderful, exactly-what-people-want web pages out there. A web user will never see more than a tiny fraction of them. So why should anyone pick your page, out of all those pages, to visit? Why stay there? Why read it?

It’s up to you to make it worth their time.

I just noticed on my “Is Squidoo a Scam?” lens that someone said he’d made four lenses and hadn’t earned any money in six months, and he was giving up.

On the one hand, it IS hard to get web traffic.

On the other hand, he hadn’t filled in his profile, he only had ONE lens left in his profile, and it was on a very popular topic for which there are over 970,000 webpages, according to Google.

Newbies write on popular topics, thinking they’ll get lots of traffic. They don’t realize that popular topics have thousands if not millions of pages already written on them, and they’re competiting with all those pages.

Okay, I’m preaching to the choir. The point is, you can’t assume a page will get traffic. It really is work to make useful, unique, readable, entertaining, grab-the-visitor-by-the-throat-and-make-them-stay webpages.

What can you do to boost the odds?

• Write on what you LOVE and KNOW. Passion, humor, and real in-depth knowledge shines through.
• Write on things that aren’t the most popular topic. Think of things you’ve looked up online or wondered about. Think about things you know which are off the beaten track. Lionel trains? Your town’s traditions or landmarks? A particular product, book, author, body part or animal? Seek topics that haven’t been done to death.
• Research, research, research. Not only do you want to cover the most important things about your topic, but you should find and link to the best websites and videos on your topic.
• Organization. Make it clear what your page is about, where you’re going to take your reader, and what they’ll get out of your lens right in the introduction.
• See my top ten Squidoo tips for some other ideas about how to make your lens stand out.
• Once in a while, make a list of ten webpages you’ve visited. Then write down the following. What brought you there? Did you read the webpage all the way through? What on the page held your attention?  If you clicked on any links, why did you click them? If you did NOT read the whole page, why? What did you skip? What did NOT hold your attention? Your tastes aren’t everybody’s, but the more you understand what keeps people on a page — and what doesn’t — the more you’ll be able to write successful webpages.

The bottom line: your lens has to be useful, entertaining and/or informative, NOT generic. You have to “earn” your traffic, as Seth puts it.

And then use as much SEO as you can to get your content found.

First up:  CLONE YOUR VISITOR.

This is an idea I’m trying, not yet proven, but it makes sense to me.

Situation: A series of lenses, a sequence of lenses that are all linked up, like different pages of an article.

Query: Which of them should you give the best keyword phrase to for the URL/title?

In the past, I’ve given it to the first page, the gateway lens, so to speak. But that’s linear thinking.

What if I use the keyword with the highest traffic potential on one of the secondary lens, with a link in the introduction module saying, “Welcome to part 2 of my 3-part series on X. If you’re just tuning in, here’s [link]part 1[/link]”

Why?

Squidoo lensrank is boosted by clicks. If you can entice the visitor to click, you’ve guaranteed yourself a click. Also, you’ve just turned one hit into two, one for each lens. [EDIT: Apparently passing traffic between lenses doesn't count. Squidoo is wise to the tricks we do. But the "double hit" theory holds true.]

Drawbacks:

1. It’s all well and good to use the best-optimized keyword in the URL of lens #2 … who types those anymore? But to optimize it, you also have to include the keyword in the lens title. It may make more sense to have the primary/gateway lens have that title.

On the other hand, it may make more sense to have the popular keyword in the primary/gateway title. You know, the keyword you couldn’t use because too many other pages have optimized for it? Well, this way you can use it, too.

2. Bigger risk: as soon as you are asking visitors to do something— click a link, navigate to a new page, read an advertisement before getting to the content they were really looking for— you test visitor patience. It’s hard enough keeping them on your page. If they don’t see what they want in a hurry, they’ll hit the back button and look elsewhere. So that link to Page 1 needs to look shiny and enticing. The introduction for page 2 needs to be clear, well-written, compelling — to demonstrate you know what you’re doing — and show that yes, what they want really is only a click away.

So I’m not 100% about this method. I have created two pages linked together in this fashion and will be watching to see how many people landing on page 2 click the link for page 1.

My “How to Get Your Lens Found” tutorial includes some tips I learned from PotPieGirl and Spirituality and Fluffanutta, and I used to cite Mr Lewissmile, before I decided I disagreed with some of his tricks and changed my recommendations. My CSS Codes Tutorial includes something I call CSS Kung Fu, which I learned from Glen. On baseball lenses, I’ve got links to forum discussions on MLB boards.

And ya know what? I thank these people for their help, and pay them by sending them traffic. It’s only fair!

On a pragmatic level, those links represent a large part of the clickthroughs for my lens. Repeat after me, squids: clickthroughs boost lensrank; lensrank determines payout tier.

There are several other ways that being honest about your sources can actually benefit your bottom line.

If you’re sending traffic off to Amazon buy that book you used as a reference source, you and Squidoo are getting a commission. If you’re sending traffic to another Squidoo lens, you’re giving Squidoo another chance to collect ad revenue and/or royalties from that visitor. That supports Squidoo — and all of us.

I’ve been pondering lately how Squidoo’s business model promotes helping other lensmasters, because we all profit when one profits. That’s true more abstractly on other sites, where success breeds success. But think of CafePress for a moment (if you can without steam coming out of your ears). For the most part, each shopkeeper works in isolation and is competing with all the rest.

What about citing your sources on pages not hosted by Squidoo? Yes, it still helps! Linking to content closely related to your topic — preferably using your keywords — can boost SEO. Other sites often have ways to monitor where their traffic is coming from, and may follow the links back to your webpage or lens. Other sites may even list “Trackbacks” at the bottom of their pages, posting links to pages talking about their page. Then, woo hah, you’ve got a free backlink.

Finally, citing your sources helps establish you as trustworthy.

Visitor trust and respect is one of those intangibles that can be your longterm key to online success or obscurity.

Earn that trust.

Links are the currency of the World Wide Web.

Obviously, links are no substitute for money. Yet links perform several vital functions, and are in effect a virtual commodity. They promote, recommend, and connect all parts of the World Wide Web. While most people think of links as a way to navigate the web or as a tool for promoting their websites, links can be used as a simple form of payment or exchange for services.

Links: The Threads of the World Wide Web

The idea of links existed before the web. In the eighties, the concept of “hyperlinks,” textual links between files and documents, was revolutionizing computing. In 1989, Dr Tim Berners-Lee of CERN came up with a system for connecting documents uploaded to the internet, and the World Wide Web was born.

Links are the threads of the World Wide Web. They continue to serve as the fundamental means of all web navigation. Like a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it, a webpage with no links to it exists in limbo. No one can find it unless they already know its exact web address. (That’s what the internet was like before the web.)

Links not only help people find webpages. They help search engines find webpages, by sending out “bots,” “spiders,” or mini-programs, to follow the web of links and make road maps of the web. Millions of these searchbots are crawling the network of links all the time, since new links between webpages are constantly being forged.

Links As a Form of Recommendation

At the dawn of the web, users began building index pages of their bookmarks, keeping track of websites they liked to visit. For example, here’s an index of Egypt-related websites I maintained from 1994-1998. Yahoo began this way; I actually remember when it was a page of links. These index pages were the forerunners of modern social bookmarking sites.

At first, these links were personal recommendations. They could not be bought — for one thing, profit-making and commercial enterprise were originally barred from the internet!

A few years into the web, early search engines began counting the number of links to a website as a sign of its authority and worth. They used that to decide which webpages to list first in searches.

Once this was known, people began exploiting the promotional power of links. Link exchanges and webrings blossomed. Once the internet was opened to commercial development, paid link directories became big business.

The Death and Rebirth of Links As Recommendation

Linkbuilding caused a problem which continues to plague the web this day: how to distinguish between “natural” links (links to connect to relevant information, links which are purely personal recommendations) and “artificial” links (links to promote one’s own websites or that of a paying customer).

The idea of a link as a vote, a form of recommendation, belongs to the web of the 1990s. Yet the versatility of Web 2.0, dynamic pages allowing visitors to submit content and interact with other web users, makes new forms of link-building and recommendation (rating, voting, social bookmarking, sharing) possible.

How do search engines tell “natural” from “artificial” links? How do social networking sites distinguish personal recommendation from self-promotion? How do web users sift through all the “click here!” links to find what they really want to find? In short, how can links still serve their original function as pathways for navigating the web?

Judging and Using Links

Search engines now measure many other factors, including the vocabulary of webpages in key areas like titles and image names, to decide a website’s relevance and value. Search engines keep their algorithms private to discourage gaming the system, and penalize websites that use “black hat” methods. Even a big corporation like BMW gets blacklisted and dropped from search results if it engages in these activities.

There’s some controversy about the control Google has over the web, since its dominance of the search market largely determines website usage, and since its Adsense program is a form of paid links. But that’s a topic for another article.

Social media sites use several strategies to handle the artificial versus natural links problem. Some have a paid advertising program, and block members found to be self-promoting. Some allow linkbuilding for self-promotion but make it transparent, leaving it to users to judge which linkbuilders are promoting pages with genuine content. Most social media sites invite users to vote on submitted links, allowing members to penalize or reward sites depending on their quality.

Black hat practices have sprung up to buy votes, but the size of large social media sites tends to minimize the impact of virtual ballot stuffing.Individual users are also more aware of the promotional use of links. Aggressive linking practices are rejected with the same vehemence and disgust as telemarketing (though some gullible victims fall prey to both).

Therefore, savvy linkbuilders provide content, resources and quality in order to “earn” clicks, search engine placement, and social recommendations. They employ techniques like keyword optimization, slick web design and graphics, just as book publishers pay attention to cover art, but content is still king. Wise linkbuilders also realize that link placement matters: a genuine recommendation or review helps, whereas spamming link directories, guestbooks, forums and social sites often results in search engine penalties and user rejection.

Copyright and the Web

When the printing press made mass distribution of writing and images feasible, copyright was invented to give authors and artists’ control over the use of their work, credit for their work, and a way to earn money for their work.

The web’s enormous potential stems from how it fosters instant worldwide communication and distribution of content. This has quickly led to new forms of collaboration, creativity, research, learning, news reporting, commentary, understanding and discovery that were simply impossible before. Many of these activities are limited by traditional copyright laws, which dictate where and how a picture or piece of writing may be published. Unless we expand the copyright laws governing satire and fair use, the incredible renaissance we’re seeing will leave copyright law behind.

There are many examples of how these copyright violations actually benefit the copyright holders.

For example, a common practice on YouTube is to upload “fan videos” or “remixes,” music videos splicing favorite scenes from TV shows, movies or video games synchronized to a popular song or soundtrack. On the one hand, this activity clearly violates copyright. On the other hand, it’s free advertising of the most effective kind: an unsolicited endorsement. I can vouch for its effectiveness: most of the music I’ve bought in the last few years comes from hearing a piece of music on a YouTube video and immediately going to iTunes to purchase the song, or sometimes an entire album.

YouTube has discovered how remixes can be turned from piracy to profit for license holders. They now have a library of music which may be added to videos, and any video using one features a link to purchase the song from a legal music downloading site. That doesn’t help the copyright holders of the video track, but similar arrangements should be possible.

Another example is the onset of fan-produced original works in partial collaboration with authors, artists, or members of an original production team. The New York Times reported last year on several fan-made Star Trek movies being released online, some of them in collaboration with series actors or team members. Fansites like these promote a franchise and often have a shop or Amazon links selling items for the original publisher or franchise, for which they earn a small commission.

Copyright 2.0: Links As Copyright For the 21st Century

These examples suggest a model for solving copyright problems on the web: through links. If we cede one of the three rights that copyright was designed to protect — control over usage — we can use links to gain through the other two rights — credit for our work, and profit from our work.

Links give credit the author or source. This solves the issue of plagiarism (unattributed use of work) but not profit for the copyright holder.

Links can provide profit in three ways: by promoting/marketing a work, by direct sales of that work (assuming the online shop passes part of the profits back to the copyright holder), and by sending traffic to a copyright holder’s website, which can either sell work or earn money through paid ads, the webpage equivalent advertisements in newspapers and magazines.

It’s important to make sure the copyright holder retains the benefits of “direct sales”. The web like the printing press steals from authors and copyright holders when it’s used to sell copies of the original product without giving money to the original maker or copyright holder. I think this can be solved as follows. Derivative works (remixes, mashups) should require credit and a link back to the original product and (if possible) links to the website where the original may be purchased. Ditto for webpages that reuse graphics or other embedded content as a portion of an original article or mashup. But it should remain illegal to produce and sell the original product without permission; the publisher, producer, or license holder is the only one who may do that.

The one thing that linking does not solve is usage rights. You don’t want people using your material to promote things you hate. This could be solved by making illegal to reuse material for pornographic purposes, to promote hate speech, or to make it appear that the original copyright holder is actively endorsing a product or political view, unless one has written permission.

These ideas are the half-assed opinions of someone who’s been watching the internet and web grow and evolve for twenty years. This proposal would need refinement by legal experts before it is workable. But I think it might actually work. Whereas if copyright laws are not redefined in the next ten years, I think the web may leave them behind as obsolete and unworkable, like Prohibition (the Constitutional Amendment banning sale of liquor) in 1920s America.

— E. Brundige