I first started to really take notice of Squidoo when my Squidoo lens displaced my blog from the number one position on Google for its keyword. The blog was 2 years old and had held the number one position for at least twelve months; the Squidoo lens was about six weeks old.

However, I very quickly discovered that it is not a case of "Squidoo or blogging" but rather "Squidoo and blogging and..."

My affiliate marketing strategy now is to use Squidoo as the hub of a marketing wheel with the spokes being other marketing strategies such as blogging, article marketing, Twitter, social bookmarking and Facebook.

Why use Squidoo as your marketing hub? There are seven (7) good reasons:

1. You can incorporate the RSS feed from your blog into your Squidoo lenses so that when you update your blog, your relevant lenses get updated.

2. Squidoo lenses can accommodate the RSS feed from your articles in article directories or the feed from other writers' articles.

3. The new Twitter widget will automatically update the Twitter feed (tweets) in your Squidoo lens whenever you create a Twitter post.

4. You can set up your Squidoo profile to automatically generate a post in Twitter whenever you update any of your lenses.

5. You can embed your own YouTube videos in your Squidoo lenses to attract traffic to your blog or website (you can also use the the YouTube module on Squidoo to incorporate other videos of your choice).

6. Squidoo provides a Flickr module that enables you to incorporate your Flickr photos into relevant lenses.

7. You can automatically update your Facebook page with your Twitter posts about your new or updated Squidoo lens.

It is no longer effective or efficient to adopt a single affiliate marketing strategy. You can get a better return for your efforts if you think in terms of integrating different approaches so that they work together to provide a consistent and widespread message about your affiliate products and services.

Squidoo provides the perfect platform to create the marketing hub that will integrate your other approaches to affiliate marketing. Much of this integration is done automatically for you.

In this era of social marketing it is critical that you develop an affiliate marketing strategy that builds on, and contributes to, the connectivity and interactivity that are the hallmarks of Web 2.0 technologies. Squidoo was designed by an internet marketer, Seth Godin, as the social networking platform to facilitate this connection and interaction.

Through Squidoo, you can leverage your writing and marketing efforts and create a marketing synergy that will boost your affiliate marketing income.