If you haven’t seen the video, you need to– it’ll make you smile. VERY effective. So far it’s gotten nearly 13 million hits, and that’s not counting all the duplicate copies floating around on YouTube plus a few million more on various European YouTube sites.

It’s a great case study in “linkbait,” content that’s so good people start linking to it. (Also known as “viral,” since linkbait this good can spread by word-of-mouth to millions of web users within days, even hours).

It also illustrates an SEO blunder.

I discovered that this video was, naturally, not a total accident, but a way to market something — an upcoming production of The Sound of Music in Antwerp.

As a promo, it succeeded brilliantly. Apparently it and the reality TV show used to choose the “new Maria” had everybody in Belgium in a frenzy to see the new show, which opened to sold out crowds just 5 months later.

One itsy bitsy problem. Google “Antwerp Sound of Music.” Say you want tickets or info about the production. You can’t find it! The viral video went global, took the blogging world by storm, and hogged the top keywords that probably should’ve gone to the musical production. I’m sure the website for the show wasn’t up yet — giving the promo months to attract thousands of SEO-boosting backlinks. So all the search results for those keywords are about the viral video.

Usually methods of self-promotion aren’t this wildly successful. However, users of lensroll.com may have noticed that posts there tend to get indexed a day or so before Squidoo itself, which may mean the lensroll.com entry about your lens gets a head start in search engine results for your keywords. I’ve had the same problem when I put a video on YouTube attached to a lens. Probably, YouTube gets crawled by search engines a few times a day.

In most cases, this is fine. Just make sure that wherever you talk about your site on the web, you leave a bright shiny link TO your site as close to the top of the webpage as possible. Be sure to use your lens’ keywords in the anchor text to help it in its quest for search engine domination. Also, be aware that if you ever stumble on the holy grail of SEO, content that goes viral, it’ll eat all the search engine results for its keywords as thousands of people blog about it.

She doesn’t give earnings, just her lens tier breakdown. 40 lenses in the top 2000 out of 120. FORTY. That’s
one out of every three of her lenses earning top dollar. AND they’ll be earning lots of Amazon commisisons, on top of ad revenue!

I have been aware of and lensrolled or featured some of Pastiche’s lenses on clipart, but that figure still knocked my socks off.

It’s worth taking the time to stop and admire Pastiche, and observe her secrets to Squidoo success:

1) Cover a niche very well, with lots of lenses devoted to seasonal and specific topics within that niche.
2) Make well-organized, attractive, easy-to-use and easy-to-read lenses.
3) Target keywords like crazy so you get a lot of traffic for specific searches. Don’t just have a lens on clipart. Have a lens on clipart for vintage hearts, or John Deere Tractor clipart, or squirrels.
4) Clickthroughs. Oh my gosh the clickthroughs. Nearly everyone coming to her lens is LOOKING for something, and almost certainly will be clicking on some of her links because she gives EXACTLY what she promise to give with the lens title and opening blurb.
5) Amazon modules that target her reader’s wishes and needs exactly. It’s one thing to promote items related to your lens topic. It’s another thing altogether to target a particular audience that is desperately wanting the thing you offer, and will be quite likely to buy it.

She’s identified a corner of the web for which there is a steady and unrelenting command, and provides a service so that lots and lots of people looking for it will come to her. I know from my own lens on where to get free graphics that there’s a bottomless demand here, but I haven’t really done much to monetize or follow up on that. Pastiche has!

Of course, since she’s cornered the market on clipart so well, the answer is not to try and target the same niche, but to apply Pastiche’s winning Squidoo strategy to another niche– one that’s wide open.

Hats off to you, Pastiche!