The process is:  (1) Build a Lens  (2) Write Articles to drive traffic to your lens   (3) Start blogging and send traffic to your articles or lenses.   The best part is  – all these methods are FREE!.

Now, you may be saying, “what the heck is a lens?”  I had never heard of one either.  A lens is a one-page website that is part of Squidoo.  Squidoo is a website community that is highly favored by Google.  Any friend of Google should be a friend of yours.  Squidoo has lenses on just about anything you can imagine from fairies to coffee to making money on the internet.  Go check it out…..I’ll wait.   Go to Squidoo here.

See what I mean?  It’s full of one page websites about nearly everything that you can imagine.  This makes it a great place for affiliate and Internet marketers to promote their products.  You can sell and promote affiliate products, e-bay products, amazon products, or your own products.

My first lens, I’m embarrassed to say, took me nearly a week.  There was no Free Squidoo Guide at that time and I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.  I also got stuck using the Squidoo Magic Builder  – don’t use it unless you want to! Now, I can make 2-3 lenses in one day.

Before you make a lens you need to decide what to promote.  There are 4 basic “green hungry markets” to sell to – health, wealth, love & transitions.  By green, I mean these markets will always be around.   By hungry, I mean that these markets have people looking and wanting to buy.  Your job is to give them places to buy what they want.  People won’t always buy what they need, but they will buy what they want.   A hungry “niche” market has people ready to buy.  A transitional market is something like weddings, divorces, having a baby, losing and finding a job etc.  Transitional markets are big and will always be around.

If “health” is your market then a “health niche market” would be weight loss, fitness, or nutrition etc.  Then you go deeper and more specific in your niche market such as  health – weight loss – fat loss diets – fat loss diets for kids etc.  The more words you have in your niche market phrase will keep you in a tighter niche market where the customers are ready to buy.

As a beginner marketer, the first thing you should do is make a list of all the things that you are interested in.  Stick with what you know and are interested in since you will be spending a lot of time working in this niche market.

Finding a market first and then finding a product second or vice versa is totally up to you.  It works either way.  Go to Clickbank sign up to be an affiliate then click on marketplace and find a product to promote within your niche.  You can sort the products by popularity or commission.  If this is your first lens – don’t sweat this.  Just pick something you are interested in and learn how to make a lens.  They are really fun to make and you can dress them up with videos or whatever to make them interesting.

Grab the Free Squidoo Guide by PotPieGirl.  This is a fantastic step by step guide to creating a Squidoo lens.  If you are interested in learning her complete step by step affiliate marketing system be sure and check out One Week Marketing Guide.  This is the complete system she used to make six figures after just 12 months.  She’s also very good about sending her OWM’s free bonus guides from time to time.  Her system comes with weekly checklists and action plans; all very good to keep you motivated and on track.

It doesn’t cost much and it’s well worth every penny as it will save you much time, trouble, and frustration.  It’s the system I bought to get started and I highly recommend it.  Check out One Week Marketing here.

Whatever you decide to do go ahead and grab the Free Squidoo Guide and get started making lenses.